By David Creelman

It is common to find articles on how to be more creative. We all know organizations should innovate. We all like the idea of being more creative. However the failing of these articles is that they presume the shortfall in innovation is because individuals do not think outside the box. The real problem is not the people, it is that organizations are designed to supress creativity.

You probably already had a gut feeling that something was wrong with the advice on how to be creative. One expert suggests that to be creative you should get out of your comfort zone. For example, do something unusual like asking to read a poem over the loudspeaker at the grocery store. Another suggests trying to design a 27th letter for the English alphabet. While we can understand the motivation for these exercises, it is hard to imagine them changing what you do at work. They are out of place in the corporate world.

Why Organizations Do Not Want Creativity
Organizations strive to act in a machine-like way. They want to efficiently do the same thing over and over. They want all the parts to work smoothly together. For machine-like predictability, you generally do not want individuals running around being creative. Organizations are quite right to, in many parts of the operation, encourage people to be predictable, follow the rules, and not innovate.

The other reason not to innovate is that it can be risky. If you are preparing a marketing brochure you can do something reasonably standard and know that it will be ‘good enough’. You might try to be creative and come up with a very different kind of brochure. It might be great, but it also might be a disaster that loses customers. Often the possible upside of a great brochure does not compensate for the risky downside of a lousy brochure. Many times, safe is good.

If the organization is designed to be uncreative and then we should be careful about encouraging individual creativity.

Where Creative Solutions Come From
Of course, organizations do need to innovate. However, I would shift the tone away from “individuals having creative ideas” to “teams finding excellent solutions to business problems”. The original Swiss Army Knife was a creative product; however, its creation was driven by an attempt to solve the problem of sometimes needing a small set of tools and not wanting to walk around the forest carrying a tool box. It did not take creativity exercises to shake an employee out of the rut so that he or she could invent the Swiss Army Knife. It took applied intelligence and a lot of tinkering.

Sometimes innovation is not so much creating as noticing. For example, IKEA’s big creative idea was having customers assemble furniture themselves. This got started when an IKEA worker had to take the legs off a table to get it into his car and realized that it made no sense to put them on in the first place. It was not a particularly creative thought: he had to get the table in the car and had to take the legs off. Obviously many customers faced a similar situation. The big challenge is not the idea, it is having an organization that can notice good ideas and act on them.

Creativity is normal, it is all about problem solving, and as the IKEA case shows, important innovations can come from relatively straightforward solutions. We will not find the solution to creativity by shaking up individual thinking. We will find the solution in creating organizations that pursue new solutions without disrupting their machine-like efficiency.

Creating innovative organizations
The first requirement for innovation is for employees to have enough time in their work lives to solve problems. Imagine that you know it would be more efficient to use Word’s mail merge function than doing the letters one by one but you are in a mad rush. Rather than learn mail merge you will do the expedient thing and print the letters one by one. Employees who are pressured this way do not have time to find fresh solutions. Most of your employees can be rushed most of the time; however, if you want creative solutions you need to create space for them to relax, think and try things.

The second requirement for innovation is that managers have to create space for experiments. A radically different kind of brochure may or may not be a good marketing tool. The organizational issue is to find a way to come up with new ideas and try them out on a small scale. A marketing department may spend 95 per cent of its time cranking out standard ‘good enough’ work, but it needs that 5 per cent to take creative new approaches and test them out; treating them as experiments to be learned from, not tests of success or failure.

The third requirement comes at the level of budgeting and resource allocation. For a business as a whole, the established lines of business always have more weight than new products and so innovative new areas of business can be starved for cash and talent. IBM realized that in their resource allocation processes they needed to look at new areas not as “small parts of the business” but “the next billion dollar business”. In effect they were making space in the corporation’s time to relax, think and try things.

The last requirement is a culture that values improvement along with efficiency. The amazing thing at IKEA is not that someone had the idea of taking the legs off a table; it is that the organization noticed and was willing to invest resources to build on the idea. Clearly they had the mindset to appreciate innovation and enough “space” to invest in figuring out how to build on a fresh idea.

The recurrent theme is that individuals, departments and organizations need to create protected spaces where problem solving can occur. There are many people in any organization who already have the skills to be creative. What they do not have is the time or the protected environment that can build on their tinkering. The solution to innovation is in how the company organizes itself, not it training people to think outside the box.

David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research, providing writing, research and speaking on human-capital management. He also leads a club of practitioners implementing evidence-based management. He works with a variety of academics, think tanks, consultancies and HR vendors in Canada, the U.S., Japan, Europe and China. Mr. Creelman can be reached at dcreelman@creelmanresearch.com.