How to increase creativity

I think creativity is natural in many people but what happens is you find systems that seem almost deliberately designed to stifle creativity and innovation.

Here’s a common one and how to avoid it.

Consistency

You often hear people saying that they want everything to be consistent. This is very often the case when you are talking about training courses and workshops.

I’ve even had clients draft out objectives like:
Ensure all the modules that are run are consistent.

The trouble is – which you will immediately know if you have been reading any of my material on objectives – you could achieve this by running consistently bad workshops.

As long as they were all as bad as each other, you would have achieved this objective.

Making everyone do everything in the same way means that no one has any room to be creative.  There is a place for this. We don’t want people doing ‘creative accountancy’ or being creative when they are supposed to be running procedures in nuclear power plants.

But there are many situations where we do want people to be creative and to innovate.

Standards of achievement

The way to do this is to have an objective around the standards. What you usually want in these situations is for everyone to at least meet a certain set of standards.

Having an objective about standards means that people are then free to exceed the standards and come up with innovative ways to improve.

When that happens you can find out what they are doing and repeat it in other areas. Then you raise your standards.

Creativity and innovation

In this way you will ensure that you get constant improvement from creativity and innovation and your minimum standards are met, which is probably what people wanted in the first place when they were talking about “consistency”.