Creative Thinking For Effective Management

March 19, 2009 | By | In Management

For years I have always written a short note in my management diary. It reads: Effective Management Depends On Creative Thinking.

When a bunch of university students interviewed me for a project they were doing, I had the opportunity to touch on my ideas for creative thinking in the management process. Creative thinking is not to be confused with creative management, which to me means little or nothing. Creative thinking is a means to breakthrough the barriers to your performance levels, it is how you motivate your people, and it is a tenet of leadership.

Recently, I came across this, written by Edward de Bono, in The Thinking Manager. “Everyone should seek to be creative, even though creativity is full of risks and uncertainties”. Edward de Bono is a leading creative thinker in management today, highly critical of many management practices.

Creative think can work for us. He goes on to point four points of ignorance holding back the creative effort:

Why should anyone seek to be creative? There is the risk of failure. There is the need to persuade others. There is a need for political skills. It is much better to sit quietly and do what you are supposed to do.
If things are going well, who needs creativity? If things are going badly, then there is no time for the uncertainties of creativity.
If you set out to be creative - and even if you use the powerful tools of lateral thinking - you cannot be sure of a result.
There is a further problem. Every valuable creative idea we examine must always be logical in hindsight - otherwise it would have no value. So it is assumed, erroneously, that logic could have reached the idea in the first place. Not so.

Here is how to make creative thinking work. Confidence is a key factor in creative effort. Those who have succeeded in having creative ideas in the past are much more willing to make a creative effort. They know from experience that new ideas are possible. They have experienced the joy and achievement of having a new idea.

The problem is schools does not encourage creative thinking, and workplace does not expect it. Most people do what is expected of them. Creativity then is associated with mavericks, and yet all leading CEOs can be consider mavericks one way or the other. It is how they achieve new breakthroughs and how they continue to deliver performances in the face of adverse economic environment.

To get creativity into an organization you must make it an expectation. The effort to have ideas is key. If new ideas are an expectation, then people will make an effort to have new ideas. Their confidence will grow and eventually there will be a creative organization.

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