More creative company

How to increase creativity in a

company?

Download full version from:

http://liveblend.com/ebook/

Editor: Divante, 2008/11/20

Idea management: www.liveblend.com

Creative Commons: Copyright 3.0 Unported .

Contents

Introduction......................................................................................... ...................4
Creativity myths................................................................................ .....................5
Creativity is not for a few special people!........................................................5
High intelligence does not determine creativity..............................................5
Age doesn’t matter..........................................................................................5
It is possible to increase creativity...................................................................5
Time pressure can kill creativity, but... not always...........................................6
Money does not force you to think creatively...................................................6
Creativity comes from optimism......................................................................6
It’s worth being crazy!.....................................................................................6
Clear structure foster creativity.......................................................................7
Team cooperation is better than competition...................................................7
You can manage creativity...............................................................................7
Creativity blockades...............................................................................................8
It’s impossible..................................................................................................8
I won’t manage it.............................................................................................8
Lack of inner balance.......................................................................................8
It’s silly. ............................................................................. .............................8
Fear of failure................................................................................ ...................8
Fear of problem............................................................................... .................8
Prejudice. ........................................................................................................8
Functional fixation. .............................................................................. ............8
Acquired helplessness. ....................................................................................8
Psychological blockades. .................................................................................9
How to copy with creativity blockades................................................................9
Turn off critical thinking. ..................................................................................9
Conception of perceptive positions. ................................................................9
Synektic. .........................................................................................................9
Reframing. .................................................................................................... ...9
How do creative companies work?.......................................................................10
IDEO........................................................................................... .......................10
BrainStore.........................................................................................................10
Wild Planet........................................................................................................10

2
 BrightHouse..................................................................................................... ..10
PARC..................................................................................................... .............10
Edge Innovations...................................................................................... .........11
Knowledge management............................................................................. .........11
IT tools............................................................................................................. .....12
Why don’t IT system work?...............................................................................12
Presence of others......................................................................................... .12
Anonymity......................................................................................... .............12
Data reliability....................................................................................... .........13
Sense of ownership........................................................................................13
Wiki to knowledge management.......................................................................13
Download full version from: http://liveblend.com/ebook/.....................................16
Development of the eBook...................................................................................16

3
Introduction
We created this ebook to share proven methods for increasing company
creativity. In the ebook we show specific examples, techniques and ideas for
working more effective with knowledge and innovations.

This ebook is free. We encourage you to share it with friends. If you have any
questions, ideas for development or if you want to help us improving this
publication in any way, write an email to info@divante.pl.

The editor of this ebook is Divante company. Divante specialises in creating

software to knowledge management in a spirit of Enterprise 2.0.

Our products are:

LiveBlend – software for knowledge BusinessWiki – wiki for business

management www.liveblend.com www.businesswiki.eu

The authors of the eBook are

Tomek Karwatka is an operational director in Divante. Before that

he worked in an advertising agency, an international interactive
agency. He has written many publications about utility, marketing
and Enterprise 2.0. He has graduated Wroclaw University of
Technology, is a member of Usability Professional Association,
Internet PR Foundation and Internet Academy.
tkarwatka@divante.pl

Michal Semczyszyn - business trainer, specialist of creative

thinking and idea and innovation management. He has graduated
medicine, psychology and Business Trainers School TROP. In free
time he is a musician and designs web pages. He uses his broad
interests on art and science to inspire, motivate people to
development and to increase effectiveness at work.
msemczyszyn@divante.pl

4
Creativity myths
The shape and the character of an iceberg is made by this part of it which is
hidden and stays under the water. Just like creativity.

The majority of misunderstandings comes from wrong opinions about creativity.

That is why it is worthy to rethink the believes about it and check if our method of
supporting, developing and stimulating creativity is really proper.

Creativity is not for a few special people!

Connecting creativity with outstandingly talented and extraordinary people is a
myth. Creativity is not only for a few chosen ones. It is because creativity consists
of three components: knowledge, motivation and ability to think creatively.
Knowledge means knowing our field of work. Motivation is willingness to act
creatively. The ability to think creatively concerns flexibility while solving a
problem and ability to fully use our creative potential.

Creativity is a purposeful process of generating and developing ideas in the

context of solving a particular problem. That is why it is so important for us to do
a job that we really like. In this situation learning new things will be a pleasure
itself and creative thinking will appear more often.

High intelligence does not determine creativity

Intelligence does not correlate with creativity completely. At some point, above a
moderate value of IQ (120), the growth of intelligence does not have an influence
on the level of creativity. So checking someone's creativity by using intelligence
tests is completely useless.

Considering the components of creativity mentioned above it is better to get to

know what motivates a person to work on given issue, what is their knowledge
and willingness to learn new things.

Age doesn’t matter

Both expert knowledge, which enables to notice and understand important
aspects of a problem, and unconventional thinking and ability to leaving reality
for a moment are important for creative thinking.

That is why in creative teams you should take care of a balance between the
veterans and novices or even people from outside the company. It is particularly
important when members of the team lack ability of looking at a problem from
different points of view and there is a tendency to make conventional decisions.

It is possible to increase creativity

Have you ever thought that you are creative enough and that you do not need
any techniques? If yes, carry out an experiment. Think of solving a problem, for
example “How to convince city dwellers to use public transport more often?”.
Write your ideas on paper.

As a next step, use a technique of trying to think as a different person and to

solve a problem from their point of view. Imagine, that you are a scientist from

5
problem. What would be important and what would not? Write your new ideas.
Then, do the same imaging that you are a priest, a blind man.

Finally, compare your results while generating ideas spontaneously and with
using the simple technique and think when you were more creative.

Time pressure can kill creativity, but... not always

Generally, people are less creative when they work under the time pressure. The
research of Teresa Ambile, Harvard Business School professor, revealed that
during the days of the biggest workload employees’ creativity decreased at least
45%.

But if you need to make a task in a very short time, remember to communicate to
your employees why the time is so important to you. When people know that
they do something important and when they feel that they realize a mission,
creative thinking is more possible.

Money does not force you to think creatively

Obviously, people want to get a fair payment for their activities. However, in
most cases more valuable for them than money is a creative working
environment, where creative ideas are supported, respected and noticed.

One of the components of creativity is a motivation. We can distinguish inner

motivation and motivation from outside. Motivation form outside are for example
bonuses, prizes and promotions. Inner motivation is a need to realize oneself and
to receive recognition of own ideas or activities. That is why you will motivate
your employees better with praising them than with money, especially if you hire
people who realize their passions at work what means such people who usually
are more creative.

Creativity comes from optimism

Depression and fear are the enemies of creativity. The myth of a romanticism
artist who creates in pain and suffering lost its meaning long ago. Observations of
creative teams at work show that only positive emotions stimulate creative
thinking and atmosphere that enables free exchange of ideas as well as each
other inspiration. Taking care of a good mood of your employees you create a
background for innovation.

It’s worth being crazy!

It is important for employees not to feel embarrassed and restricted while giving
new ideas. It is also important to give them possibility to look through others’
ideas using among others software to idea management.

Crazy and unpractical ideas are a great source of inspiration. Modified in a good
way they often lead to create new ideas, ready to be realized. That is why one of
the rules of a brainstorm is generating numerous ideas without concerning their
quality. The more ideas, even if some of them would never be used, the bigger
chance that among them we can find some really innovative solutions.

6
Clear structure foster creativity
Raymond Queneau, a poet, a prose-writer and a French essayist, said: “A
classicist who writes a tragedy according to some rules has more freedom than a
poet who writes everything what comes to his or her mind, being a slave of not-
known rules”. It is similar with creativity.

Thanks to the rules, that we impose one ourselves, paradoxically we have more
freedom than in a situation when we work in chaos without knowing how and
where we are going. A clear structure of a creative session enables to focus on an
aim, to control a creative process and not to let it become chats or quarrels.

Team cooperation is better than competition

People think more creatively when they cooperate than when they compete.
Competition is when after finishing a process (solving a problem, recruitment) it
is easy to find the winners and the losers.

It often stops the tendencies to share important information. But the most
creative teams are these who can discuss frankly and fully share information.

You can manage creativity

In many companies there is still no working environment that helps creativity,
innovation and constant development. Among others it comes from wrong
believes about creativity, believes that we want to verify in this ebook.

Forming a team from people of different styles of thinking, different knowledge

and experience, using effective prize and motivation systems, creating an
atmosphere of cooperation, implementing new systems of knowledge and idea
management are only part of duties which burden company managers, directors
and leaders.

It is only a top of an iceberg which should be well examined by diving once again
deep under the surface.

7
Creativity blockades
It’s impossible.
“It’s impossible” attitude from the very beginning . There are two main
problems: waiting until a problem will be bigger, breaking away from solving a
problem. More and more often companies eliminate the phrase “It’s impossible”
from their language and give a stipulated penalty to employees when they show
this attitude.

I won’t manage it.

We may think very often that our problem can be solved only by a mythical
expert but not by us. It is worthy checking the history of inventions to see who
were their authors. Do you know that colour film was invented by a group of
musicians?

Lack of inner balance.

Inner balance enables us to focus on a considered problem.

It’s silly.
Creative techniques of solving a problem may seem silly for someone from
outside. But no one said that you have to be serious. Google has been known for
a great number of toys and gadgets in its office, they stimulate creativity.

Fear of failure
Failure is a natural consequence of experimenting. Thomas Edison used to say: “I
gathered huge knowledge, I know thousands of things that does not work”.
Everyone makes mistakes.

Fear of problem
Most problems can be treated as a challenge, a difference between what is
present and what is expected.

Each problem has only one solution.

It is not true. Each solution which works can be accepted as a correct one. Look
how many tools can you use nowadays to make notes.

Prejudice.
The more experienced we are, the more prejudice towards untypical solutions we
have. Joining some inexperienced people to our team may give excellent effects.

Functional fixation.
Functional fixation means seeing a thing only in its most common context. When
a telephone was invented most of companies claimed that their domain is
telegraph. AT&T defined its domain as providing companies with communication
equipment and thanks to this change it became a leading telecommunications
company.

Acquired helplessness.
We learn relying on others. But in emergency situation it turns out that we,
ourselves, are able to do more than we used to think.
8
Psychological blockades.
Sometimes it is enough for us to stop analysing an idea when it sounds strange.
It is a big mistake. Do you know that in Vietnam soldiers were wearing tights?
Sounds strange, isn’t it? It helped them with getting rid of leeches, which are
living in the jungle.

How to copy with creativity blockades

Turn off critical thinking.
There is time for critical thinking but only when you generate many different
problem solutions. Before that think creatively. Creative thinking is: diffuse,
possible most wide, searching for possibilities (without assessing their
probability).

Conception of perceptive positions.

Look on the problem from different perspectives. The first perspective - your own,
second - of a client, opposite side of the conflict, the third one - of an
independent observer.

Synektic.
It is changing a point of view using analogies and metaphors.

Reframing.
It is changing the frames that we put situations and problems in. For example a
frame is “we are dating” or “this is a business meeting”. The changing of a frame
means changing a context of a situation, even temporarily. Will our effort right
now give profit in the future? If yes, it is getting a new context. Another example -
a boring way to work can be an opportunity to learn new things or to relax by
using an mp3 player. Because of reframing the problem disappeared.

Imagine, that your two children want to eat the last piece of cake. It has to be
divided. How to do it to make both of them feel satisfied? Most of us focus only
on thinking how to cut it precisely. But maybe the children would solve the
problem instead of us? How? The one cuts the cake into two the same pieces, the
other one choose as a first. In this way the child which cuts wants to cut it into
two the same pieces and the other child, who does not cut, can choose which
piece of cake she or he wants to eat, what closes the child’s mouth literally and
figuratively.

9
How do creative companies work?
IDEO
IDEO (ideo.com) is one of the most innovative companies. They are engaged in
designing. They created a first computer mouse, gave the idea of a cart in
Internet shopping, were part of the team which designed the first pocket
computer which gained success (Palm). In the book Weird Idea That Work Robert
Sutton described how they work on new toys in Skyline. The company registers
all ideas that come during brainstorms and chats. In 1998 in Skyline (only 10
people were working there) 4000 ideas for new toys were created. 230 of them
were accepted and used to design a toy and build a prototype. Finally, 12 projects
were sold to companies such as Fisher-Price or Mattel. The final result is 0,3% of
all ideas. Robert Sutton quotes Brendan Boyle - the director of Skyline: “It is
impossible to create good and new ideas without creating some stupid, poor and
crazy ones at the same time. No one in my branch can guess which of them is
just a waste of time and which one will become the next Furby toy”.

BrainStore
BrainStore (brainstore.com) engages teenagers to create new ideas. Young
people often create ideas that are completely crazy and unconventional. Then
they are analysed and shaped by experts what enables the company to propose
its clients effective but unconventional ideas for solving their problems.

Wild Planet
Also the toy factory Wild Planet (wildplanet.com) uses children’s invention to
create crazy ideas which become an inspiration to their products (among others
they produce Water Talkies – a walkie-talkie to talk under the water).

BrightHouse
For BrightHouse (thinkbrighthouse.com) it is also extremely important to create a
huge amount of ideas. Moreover, the company directors have decided that the
organization would work on only one problem at the same time. Usually 20
employees of BrightHouse spend a few moths to get to know the client’s needs
and propose some original solutions. One of the achievements was creating a
perfume line – “Ghost Myst” for Coty Inc. It was the first time when perfumes
were positioned as a thing giving spiritual values and were chosen as top of the
year perfumes in 1995.

PARC
PARC (before Xerox PARC, parc.com) is famous for inventing many revolutionary
technologies - from the unfold menu to the laser printer. The company gathers
unconventional ideas and original people who are given a permission to work on
their projects after hours even if their projects were officially said as not
successful. As you see, their organizational culture includes the respect towards
ideas as well.
All these creative companies have one common feature - they consistently gather
ideas. They register all of them precisely, because they know that in this ocean of
ideas they catch these few that will succeed. Thomas Edison used similar
strategy and in his warehouse he collected thousands of things and materials
which became inspiration for his engineers.

10
Edge Innovations
Edge Innovations (edgefx.com) got famous for hyperrealistic mechanic creatures
for film industry. They created an orca, 1:1 dimensions, for the movie Free Willy.
The model was so realistic that no one was able to recognize when there was a
real orca on the screen and when its mechanical double. Edge was able to create
a brand new quality in the movie special effects thanks to the new technology
they experienced working for IDEO. EDGE was playing a role of an information
broker between movie industry and new technologies creators.

Knowledge management
All the observation mentioned above can be treated as a direction for everyone
who gathers teams that based their work mainly on creativity. Working for an
advertisement agency, an IT company and an interactive agency I very often met
with necessity of generating innovative solutions. But very rarely we built
something more than one time solution of the client’s problem. Most of the ideas
that appeared were lost at the time went by and as the employees were
changed. To prevent from this process I have interested in knowledge
management.
This discipline was created by consulting companies, because for them
knowledge is a product. The companies started to support knowledge
management by IT systems creating the knowledge management processes and
knowledge databases. In next few years knowledge management expanded and
became a separate discipline. Complex systems have been created - from the
management level and motivation to technical level - to being used to improve
the knowledge exchange in a company. These systems have been implemented,
among others, in such companies as: the World Bank, Motorola, Lockheed Martin,
Siemens, Nokia, British Telecom, Vodafone.
In the last few years the conception of knowledge management, at least its
definition and describing its competences, has become more fuzzy instead of
getting sharper and crystallized when we take a look at increasing number of
publications about it. Anyway we definitely must admit that knowledge
management has been accepted as connected in any way to data and
information flow in a company - from database administration, email box client to
workflow tools and ERP systems. However, not longer than five years ago it
seemed that the domain of knowledge management was clearly shaped and its
backgrounds were models such as a German team model of G. Probst, S. Raub
and K. Romhardt and a Japanese conception of knowledge creating and
converting (known as the SECI model).

There is a question - why did the early wave of enthusiasm for knowledge
management go by? Probably the answer would not be so difficult - maybe
knowledge management has not given (as some expected) such incredible
results as tools that would provide the companies with a constant, almost free
inflow of knowledge from the outside (the Internet?) or with extraction of
knowledge from the employees who seemed to be resistant to suck out their tacit
knowledge. Probably that many entrepreneurs has become discouraged to the
idea of knowledge management by implementing one of the dedicated systems
in their company, system which brought new duties of strenuous everyday filling
in its forms, saving the correspondence, etc., instead of improving their work by
giving a possibility to share knowledge. But instead of it it did not give the
employees anything.

11
However, we should not think that knowledge management will go by like many
temporary conceptions. Knowledge management is a must now when there is an
excess of information and really valuable knowledge guarantee an advantage
over the competition. However, we have to see realistically the task which are
given by knowledge management. We can quote here well-known and very
unpleasant for Polish people sentence said by the tsar Alexander II: “No dreams,
gentlemen, no dreams”. Knowledge management is mainly hard manager’s work
and IT tools gradually adapted to the real needs.

IT tools
Why don’t IT system work?
The implementation of an IT system very often does not succeed as much as it
was expected. Many companies that I know are not satisfied with their IT
systems. It seems to me that there are more unsatisfied companies in the areas
connected to information and knowledge. I have seen many big corporation
portals used by no one where the news in the main page had a date from last
year. What can we do to implement the system which would work? I will try to
show you the practical methods of building users' commitment into creating
information and knowledge in their company.

Presence of others
No one is surprised by the fact that people want to be in places where are other
people. We do not feel good when we are alone. The presence of others in a place
confirms our reason of being there. A poor club is a club where there are only few
people, a good club is very often overcrowded and it attracts more and more
people. Long time ago nomads used to put a stone figure on the furthest end of
their migration. It was for other travellers to feel better seeing that someone else
got there before them. This need can be seen also in the IT systems. If other
people use the system, that means that they have found there something for
them. It encourages us to explore the system. In spite of appearance the
information about how many users are logged in can be a helpful tool for building
the user’s commitment. In wiki systems there is a publication on the start pages
of the recent positions from change register and from the list of new created
pages to show how much the system is used and how the content is extended.

Anonymity
Anonymity may encourage people to show their emotions (as at Internet forums)
but certainly it would not make them to work harder (who will reward us when we
are anonymous?)and to share their ideas. In the knowledge sharing systems, that
I created, encouraging the users to register on their name was one of the most
important tasks. I have to say that it was not compulsory and the registration In
the system was user’s personal decision. After registration the user starts
working on their own account. The system shows the link to the author of each
extension of the knowledge database - it enables to discuss about the changes
with their author and reward for good ideas and valuable opinions. The users
tend to show a strong attachment to their profile after crossing particular critical
mass gathered on it. If you want to involve a user you can make the import of
data from other sources to his profile easier. If the user is an author of few
articles in MS Office format, enabling him or her to import them quickly will make
the commitment building faster. At the same time when the imported articles
have started to be discussed, the user will become a more motivated, active
member of the knowledge exchange society. We use here some behaviours which

12
are used by more private systems, like blog services. My friends who were
creating one of the biggest blog services told me that checking the comments
under own entries became for some of their users the first thing they did after
waking up. Building a high self-esteem and letting it being assessed is one of the
best method of building commitment.

Data reliability
Data reliability is one of the aspects of loyalty. Once at a conference Aleksander
Sala told how they encouraged the employees of a big company to load their real
photos. Only a few people were interested on loading their real photo until the
lack of photo on the user’s profile was marked by a grey figure. Loading the photo
was very important to authenticate the authors and to realize better the
integration between the employees. So Aleksander’s idea was to put instead all
the grey figures the figure of Shrek. People felt uncomfortable with an image of
creature they were not identify with and loaded their photos. The moral is that
generally we do not want to give the unreal information, especially when they
damage their image.

Sense of ownership
“Mine, miner, the minest” it is a title of a group of links at Marcin Jagodzinski’s
blog. This title shows very well how communities treat software. First discovery is
that the engaged users treat the system as their own. As a matter of fact they
are right - they are creating the most important part of it which is the content.
But we have to remember that if the system belongs to the users and not to us,
all changes should be started by them and should be discussed with them. At the
forum.gazeta.pl the users sometimes rebel only because some decisions were
made only by the editor. However, it should be pointed out that this is the
biggest forums community in Poland and it was created thanks to deep users’
understanding and cooperating with them. Gazeta.pl has volunteer moderators
who take care of the forum.

What can be more “ours” than that what we created ourselves? It is worthy giving
a community a possibility of active cooperation by creating the tool. Wiki
software is so popular, because it does not give a fixed structure to the users .

Wiki to knowledge management

Do you know Wikipedia? It is the biggest encyclopaedia in the world created by
millions of Internet users from all over the world. Wiki is a page designed with a
view to cooperate with groups. Traditional web pages are created to be looked,
but Wiki can be actualized, edited and given new information by anyone. And the
user does not necessarily has to know HTML.

13
 Illustration 1: Wikipedia, the biggest Internet
encyclopedia is based on the idea of wiki.
Thanks to the
wiki mechanism you can get not only high quality knowledge but what is more
important employees’ engagement into knowledge sharing that cannot be built
using other methods. Wiki builds a lasting value in each member of a team which
becomes a part of company community sharing knowledge.

Unfortunately, wiki flexibility appears also, as the users say, as a “big empty
space” - implemented wiki software does not give you much tips how it can be
used in creating a company knowledge database. Because of it there were
designed such software as Confluence and SocialText. Starting working on
BusinessWiki our aim was to adapting wiki to business needs.

During the pilot implementation we observed how real users use BusinessWiki.
We noticed that many users have problems with understanding the not-fixed
structure of wiki pages. So we built a categorization to group the pages. We also
created a start page enabling quick orientation in last changes, we prepared
patterns and plugins for users to make creating New pages easier. We built
documentation and help system, added visual page edition. All these changes
cause that an ordinary user could enter without any efforts and start using wiki.
In smaller companies and departments wiki sometimes works as an intranet
system. There are published ideas for development as well as leave record there.
In bigger companies our clients use wiki to product documentation, creating
maps of product development, gathering requirements and ideas. In service
companies the team creates procedures (including service procedures) using
wiki. Some companies use it also to communicate and gather knowledge where a
company touches business surroundings (for example, NetPR company make in
this way accessible its knowledge and system documentation to its business
partners).

I think that using wiki to knowledge management can significantly increase

chances of project success - giving some power to users at the same time we
gain bigger engagement and organic development of software which is
individually adopted by users to their needs.

• Do you have a perfect idea but there is no time and conditions to realize it?
Write it down in the wiki section Ideas. Maybe one day you or someone
else from your team will use it.
• You have a new person in your team? This person does not know anything

14
 about your previous projects? Invite him or her to your wiki where she or
he will read about the team’s ideas, notices from the meetings.
• An employee is leaving your company? Would anything remain after this
employee? Or maybe their knowledge would go them? If you have a
system where all employees’ ideas and knowledge are written, this
knowledge will stay in the company even when they leave.
• You have to propose an original idea to your client. It is not always easy to
create a conception when the situation is stressful. But everything seems
to be easier if you have gathered hundreds and thousands written before
ideas. Sometimes just a glance at the brainstorm notes even from last year
would be enough to inspire you to interesting solutions.
Wiki mechanism is accepted at once where ideas and knowledge are a key factor
of success. The team immediately will see benefits from using such a knowledge
store that can be used by everyone.
The classical wiki mechanism (known from wiki) is unfortunately quite difficult to
use and does not meet the companies needs. That is why many commercial
solutions are created. In the product, that I am improving, we have concentrated
on integration with office packets, creating facilities in everyday use and data
security.
The first implementation of wiki mechanism that we have realized, are very
optimistic. Teams use them not only to gather the data and ideas but also to
improve their products (road maps, documentation), publication, dictionaries and
user-help as well as to group cooperation. One of our clients uses wiki instead of
noticeboard in marketing department. The other one uses it to document the
Internet service development. Another one uses it creating a guidebook for new
employees. Wiki is also used as a background for knowledge databases for
knowledge sharing between the company and its business surroundings. It is a
next step in company development. The organization does not only gather and
manage its knowledge but it creates a new quality with its clients because of
knowledge sharing.
Some people are interested on less common knowledge documentation. They
want to document especially their own ideas. Such person we will recommend
Microsoft OneNote (you use it to make creative notes) or an excellent free
programme to mind maps (a very good way to document brainstorms) -
FreeMind.

15
Download full version from:
http://liveblend.com/ebook/

Development of the eBook

You can find new versions of the ebook at www.liveblend.com. Each person
interested in developing the Course and its using are welcome to contact us
(info@divante.pl).

16