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I recently gave a presentation at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on a topic entitled "Is creativity management an oxymoron?"

The essential confusion to people resistant to the idea of "creativity management" was the word "management." Replace it with the word "optimization" and the resistance disappears; all we're really trying to do is optimize the quality of the idea pool and optimize the implementation process.

Then you can suggest that most people already implicitly accept the idea of creativity management: if you ask them to solve a problem or engage in a particular endeavour, one of the things they're likely to do is herd people into a room with a flip chart and conduct some sort of brainstorming session and implicit in that action is the acceptance that certain methods, processes and procedures enhance creative output.

Then you can begin discussing how to improve the enormous amount of creative output people generate, from problem solving in everyday business life right up to the level or art.

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TIP OF THE DAY: Creativity, Innovation and Hierarchies

Convention has it that hierarchies hinder creativity and innovation. But why?

Also, organizational structure is resultant of many factors (logistics, history etc...) and not easy to change, so what do we do if we have a hierarchical organizational structure and want to increase creative output?

Well, hierarchies tend not to foster creativity because of factors such as multiple layers to decision makers, slow feedback systems and decision makers' lack of intimacy with local problems due to distortion of filtered information.

So one way to counter the above is to enable teams with direct links to decision makers. This simple step speeds up decision making, improves feedback systems and decision makers' familiarity with local issues.

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