Creating a Culture of Innovation
Greetings!

Where are you when you get your best ideas? In the shower? Working out? Walking in nature? Sleeping? The likelihood is that you are not in front of your desk.

So how do we expect ourselves and our employees to think innovatively and creatively when we spend our time clicking back and forth between browser windows, furiously answering emails, and sitting in meeting after meeting? We often view the processes around innovation and creativity as mystifying or magical. In reality, the capacity to think more creatively is something that can be trained systematically, and improved dramatically through practice.

By understanding better how our brains work, and what environment serves creative thinking best, we create a whole new path to thinking outside of the box. Find some great tips and ideas below for nurturing a culture of innovation in your workplace.

The Energy Project Team

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Tony Schwartz

Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation

When IBM recently polled 1500 CEOs across 60 countries, they rated creativity as the most important leadership competency.

Eighty percent of the CEOs said the business environment is growing so complex that it literally demands new ways of thinking. Less than 50 percent said they believed their organizations were equipped to deal effectively with this rising complexity.

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Top Tips for Creating a Culture of Innovation

  1. Meet people's needs. Recognize that questioning orthodoxy and convention — the key to creativity — begins with questioning the way people are expected to work. How well are their core needs — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual — being met in the workplace?

  2. Nurture passion. The quickest way to kill creativity is to put people in roles that don't excite their imagination. Look for small ways to give employees, at every level, the opportunity and encouragement to follow their interests and unique talents.

  3. Provide the time. Creative thinking requires relatively open-ended, uninterrupted time, free of pressure for immediate answers and instant solutions.

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"I've learned that I definitely don't do my most creative thinking at the office. I need to be  on my own, in a quiet place, undistracted. I can only make that happen when I give myself the time and space I need."

Hannah Minghella,
President, Sony Pictures Animation

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The Stages of Creativity
First Insight:
Big-Picture Zone
Deep and intuitive thinking
Saturation:
Tactical Zone
Immersing yourself in the known
Incubation:
Big Picture Zone
Idea germinates and expands
Illumination:
Big Picture Zone
The "Aha!" moment
Verification:
Tactical Zone
Ideas accepted and supported scientifically