Creative Leadership For Tough Times

Surely we just need good strong Leadership in tough times not 'airy fairy' Creative Leadership? If you share this view then I think we have our wires crossed already. Let me explain.

In the current economic climate we do need strong (or should I say bold) Leaders but traditional Leaders (and I include those who are up to date with such concepts as transformational and situational leadership here) often have a Leadership toolbox that is comprehensive but perhaps identical to those carried around by other Leaders. So if we all have the same tools and we all operate in the same marketplace then we still have a stalemate.

And now for the Creativity bit. I am not suggesting that our bold Leaders walk around with an armful of creative techniques and nothing else, just that they should supplement their Leadership toolbox with a selection of techniques that provide alternative ways of analysing and solving problems, decision making, planning and communicating. Leaders then have a larger repertoire of business tools at their disposal from which they can select the most appropriate and most effective.

But why are Creative techniques particularly good for the tough economic climate that we are now faced with? In short they can:

• Provide competitive advantage as their usage often relies on tacit knowledge
• Are more likely to unearth solutions that no one else has thought of or tried
• Allow Leaders more time to focus on real business issues - these techniques can save time
• Permit greater buy in from colleagues and employees and thus less resistance to change
• Build intrinsic motivation amongst the workforce

Even in highly regulated industries such as Financial Services, Leaders can enhance their capability in this way. Remember it is only the outputs of your processes that may be regulated. Internally there are usually alternative ways of doing things!

Making Good Use Of Institutional Failings

Normally we tend to diagnose failings within our organisations and then combat them with remedial programmes that often dismantle and then rebuild certain aspects of the organisation. Note that these characteristics are independent of the individuals that work within the organisation.

A well publicised example of such a failing was the accusation of institutionalised racism that was leveled at the Metropolitan Police here in the UK. No one individual was accused of being racist but the structure, processes, distribution of power, expressions of vision and beliefs was deemed to be supportive of racism.

So what might some of the characteristics of an institutional failing be and how can they be used to help us? I have alluded to one or two already but here is a short list:

• Strong beliefs and a mechanism for communicating them
• Well or clearly defined structures and processes
• Power centred on a few individuals
• An active 'grapevine' for informal communications
• Well aligned communications, trust and advice networks
• High degree of focus (not necessarily concern for) on people

This is not an exhaustive list but is representative of many undesirable institutional failings. Our natural tendency is to remove such characteristics through one or more change programmes and possibly staff development of some sort. For a large organisation the changes must be far reaching, difficult to plan (and control) and of course expensive. Had we been looking at undesirable furniture or waste paper then we would automatically think of recycling. Why not recycle these unwanted organisational characteristics and use them for a positive purpose?

One possible idea might be to create 'institutionalised creativity', a type of creativity that is inbuilt and pervades every part of the organisation in such a way that employees do not consciously think about it. Lets make use of a strong beliefs system (but change the beliefs), take advantage of clearly defined structures (but turn them into looser frameworks), use the company grapevine (as part of this process), be focused (but change this slightly) and make use of the centres of power (but make these sponsors of creative or innovative behaviour).

Such a programme may not be easy, but is it better than turning a whole organisation upside down?

The future's bright - how do we get there?

In a previous article some of the benefits of using Futures were outlined. But you would like to know how to benefit from Futures wouldn’t you?

The first stage is a huge information gathering exercise (remember the analogy of a ship’s wake, we need all of this information). At the same time there needs to be some degree of focus. We cannot just generate the answer to the question ‘What does the future look like?’ A more reasonable question might be ‘What does the market for personal computers look like in 2020?’ or ‘What will the requirements for transport infrastructure in Wales be in 2025?’

Once these areas have been identified we then begin to look at the drivers that affect these areas and existing trends that are already apparent. We also look a little further afield and scan the time horizon as far ahead as we can. All the time we gather information, taking care not to filter it too much as the ‘signals’ that we are looking for easily get lost in the ‘noise’ and we never know at the start how much weight (or credibility) to attribute to the information we are gathering.

At this point we have an idea of what we wish to look at and the various factors that might affect it. Now we add the questions, what if oil prices trebled or the population halved, working through a number of scenarios and seeing how this changes the future. Then we throw in the wildcards, who predicted 9/11 in the USA or the bombings in London? Who foresaw the so called credit crunch?

And how can we make this tangible at the end of the exercise? There are two main ways of examining strategy, observing the future from the present and working out how to get there and the most powerful version which is to look back towards the present from the future and describing how we got here. This is where our storytelling skills come into their own and we generate buy in.

We can predict the future up to 30 years ahead in order to inform strategy making and investment decisions for public and private sector bodies by using:

• Information from expert groups
• Widely available information
• A number of carefully chosen scenarios
• Both existing knowledge and by introducing wildcards
• Storytelling and other creative techniques to facilitate information gathering and generating buy in

For further information on how Futures can be used to help your organisation please get in touch now.

Where is your Giraffe?

You may remember a previous article 'The Creative Management Challenge' which posed some simple questions such as 'How do you get a giraffe into a refrigerator?' There were some novel answers to that particular question, note that there is no correct answer for two reasons. First of all the problem situation was not fully specified, leaving many questions un answered. What size is the refrigerator, where is it, does it have to get in unaided or can force be used? Secondly there was a deliberate intention to introduce ambiguity. There was no mention of the size of the giraffe, whether it was real/stuffed/inflatable or could it be folded/squashed in any way.

In our businesses we tend to have many giraffes, situations that we have not properly understood with solutions that do not take into account all of the relevant factors or which have been constructed as a result of poor decision making. Curiously, unlike the tall animals, these giraffes seem to exist unnoticed. Why is this, how can all of these poor decisions be swept under the carpet. The answer is of course ego. We do not like to admit that we do not have all of the answers, that we are not in control of our business. The irony is that by ignoring or hiding these 'giraffes' we are actually admitting that we are not in control.

So how can we help ourselves?

• Examine all of the boundaries to any problem, test them and do not introduce any that do not have to be there.
• Ask questions, why do things have to be the way they are?
• Look at things in as many different ways as possible, inside out, upside down or from a customer or competitor viewpoint.

And finally, just to stop you wasting time chasing your tail, ask yourself the question, 'What would happen if I ignored this situation altogether?' If the answer is nothing then you have one less thing to worry about and a greater feeling of being in control. You are beginning to understand your giraffe!