6 Creative Management Strategies

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According to Robert E. Franken, creativity is a tendency to generate ideas, alternatives, or possibilities. They may solve problems, communicate with others, and entertain ourselves and others. Following that, there is an increasing need for new ways of thinking. Enhancing creativity is a challenge for many modern industries.

 🚀Read The Ultimate Guide to Productivity🚀

But how to determine someone’s creativity? And when we have – how to enhance it? We’ll give you a couple of ideas, but first let’s take a look what creative management actually is.

What is Creative Management?

Creative managements (or creativity management) refers to the principles, methods, techniques and practices which enable us to measure and manage employee creativity. Enhanced creativity results in great benefits for the company, as well as the employee and therefore it’s a much researched topic in the last couple of decades. 

Strategies to Enhance Creativity

Creativity techniques

Creativity techniques can enhance the creative potential of a task. Their use depends on the type and characteristics of a pocket of creativity. Examples for types of pockets of creativity are a generation, evaluation, and selection.  

Creativity techniques find large numbers of incomplete ideas rather than get complete information. They encourage stakeholder participation rather than individual analysis.

When it comes to creativity techniques, we need to mention three groups of them. There are exploratory, combinational and transformational. Exploratory creative techniques have found a role in requirements processes.

Examples of them are free association and story writing.

Both of them can reveal stakeholder motives, anxieties, and frailties. Combinational creativity techniques take different pairs of existing ideas and combine them, while transformational discover opposite poles of the represented thought.

Picture 1. Have you ever made a mistake while doing something creative?

Creativity technologies

Since 1990s number of creativity support tools available to use grows. There are many similar support tools what help creative thinking by individuals and teams. They support exploration and experimentation, search classification and extraction. Some are available. For example, MindView allows a user to explore visual mind maps. Also, Thought Office supports research creativity through on-line brainstorming, a stream of awareness and lateral thinking tools.

More advanced exploratory-based tools are also available. One of them is combinFormation, a tool that integrates searching, browsing and exploring information. Software agents take pieces of documents and make them into a visual image. The visual composition is generated over time and the related parts are grouped. The user takes part in a search, browsing, collecting, and authoring media. The author media serves to communicate between a man and an agent, to think and share information sources.

Related: Customer Service Agent Guide

Knowledge management

Creative problems need previous knowledge. There is a close relationship between a person’s knowledge and a person’s ability to be creative. Thus, a particular type of knowledge can be useful for a particular pocket of creativity. For example, we know how to use a tool because of previous experiences. A challenge for knowledge management is increasing convergent and divergent thinking to make people more creative. Finally, the last goal of improving knowledge and thinking is to improve productivity.

Picture 2. Every person is motivated by different things

Resource Allocation

Pockets of creativity are important to an organization’s success. So, the allocation of resources should base on the analysis of the impact of different pockets of creativity. Identifying task characteristics is the prerequisite for resource allocation. It includes time and budget as well as the appropriate equipment. Resource allocation makes job assignments, team building, and time allocation.

Allowing Freedom

Enabling freedom for certain tasks reduces the predictability of the solution. This results increase creativity, but also increase risk. According to Amabile, autonomy in the process gives people freedom in the way they approach their business. Such autonomy increases their motivation and sense of ownership. It also allows people access to problems in a way that shows their skills of creative thinking. Possible limitations include deadlines, defined results, and review processes.

When it comes to allowing freedom, flexible and agile working sure does it. Giving employees an opportunity to decide how they would like to work makes them feel more comfortable. However, if you decide for remote work, you should read some tips and tricks. 

Incentives

Motivation is one of the main factors that impact a person’s creativity. People with their own sense of creativity are different from established incentives. For example, there is a close relationship between creative freedom and motivation. As we have mentioned, motivation could grow by allowing freedom or by putting under time pressure. Another important source to enhance intrinsic motivation is information sharing and collaboration.

Impact of Creativity on Business

Since being creative means to be original, creative tasks relate to the high variance of possible outcomes. They may cause losing control of the process, but also new ways of producing and business. Recognizing their attributes is implementing risk management strategies.