Creative Leadership – From Joining the Dots to Creating a Masterpiece
Creativity, innovation, collaboration. Three essential ingredients for most businesses that have come to mean almost nothing. Buzzwords at best.
If you took everything written about creativity, innovation and collaboration and stacked it all up you could climb the pile of paper to the moon, maybe. Yet if you took all the real work, the real action around creativity, innovation and collaboration and stacked all that up, you could slide it under your average CEO’s office door, possibly.
A key challenge for modern organisations is this: we desire these attributes of creativity, innovation and collaboration to help us create new opportunities, solve problems, and deliver better service, yet we leapfrog most of the basic skills needed to accomplish these purposeful behaviours. Basic skills like conversation, experimentation, practice and persistence. In business we tend to punish mistakes and in so doing, we blunt our creative potential. We are reluctant to acknowledge that time is needed to develop the art of leadership, so we try and rush toward a finished product, and we miss so much as things blur past us.
So how do we get to a more creative, collaborative place? For years we have admired work produced by artists from all across the world. Whether it is your favourite grand masterpiece, an ancient cave painting, or that wonderfully impossible daubed finger painting your child just made for you. And what about the simple poetry of a powerful conversation? Some of the best work we do emanates from something as simple as the right conversation at the right time, with the right people. I think we are missing out on some simple and powerful methods that can help us achieve much better results at work.
You can gain huge value from practicing creative leadership, and What Goes Around launches a new service on February 28th designed to help you do just that. We’ll provide a safe environment for you to take risks, try new things, and make mistakes. It will be experimental, artistic, practical, conversational and powerful. Perhaps more importantly, it will be bold, fun and useful.
More to follow.
Doug, can we also start a campaign (though I am sure there is one) to stop Michael Gove removing ‘creativity’ from the school curriculum. Horrific.
The initiative sounds really great and looking forward to it.