Bringing creative thinking to your organization provides you with a focused thinking framework to generate solutions. An investment in creative thinking allows your company to reduce costs, increase your team’s productivity, and increase revenue.

Creative thinking requires a mind shift on your part. First, you must understand the nature of creativity. Creativity means maximizing the potential of your brain. By deliberately using structured creative thinking systems, processes, and techniques, you can learn to generate many, many ideas in just a few minutes and hundreds of ideas in a few hours.

Our focus is on business creativity for the corporation. You must come up with a new idea before you can innovate. Innovation then is the implementation of a good idea that is successfully brought to the market and creates economic value.

Reverse Your Thinking – Reduce Costs by Spending More

How can you reduce costs and still justify your investment in creativity development for your organization? Perhaps we should listen to a creating thinking champion who has real world corporate experience.

David Tanner, former Director of the DuPont Center for Creativity and Innovation, gives examples in his book, Igniting Innovation, Through the Power of Creative Thinking, of how to reduce costs through the use of creative thinking techniques.

An information technology team posed the question, “How can we reduce costs in the information systems function?” They used a lateral creativity thinking technique and specifically applied “reversal.” This required thinking differently with a resulting provocation. “Reduce costs by spending more money.” Spending more money on fewer vendors allowed them to obtain larger discounts with each supplier. They were also able to negotiate better prices on their high volume orders.

They saved over $300,000 annually. This concept saved a similar amount when it was applied to maintenance. Now think about this accomplishment. They spent money but at the same time they reduced their corporate costs significantly. By their investment in a two-hour lateral creative thinking session, they positioned themselves to save more than $5,000,000 over a ten-year period.

For most corporations the entire focus seems to be on cost cutting. We have already demonstrated you can cut costs and still make money by investing in creativity development for your organization.

Increase Revenue Stimulation by Increasing Team Productivity

However, imagine shifting your focus to revenue stimulation. How does creativity development support increasing your revenue?

One way to increase revenue is to increase your team’s productivity by identifying your employee’s thinking styles. By a better understanding of how our brain works, you can align teams to enhance their collaboration and therefore increase their productivity. By taking specific and deliberate steps to increase productivity through the diversity of thinking preferences, it has been scientifically proven that a team’s productivity can increase from 20% to 80%. (Source: The Whole Brain Business Book, Unlocking the Power of Whole Brain Thinking in Organizations and Individuals by Ned Hermann)

You can also increase revenue by developing a focused thinking framework for your sales department. As your sale’s team draws up their strategic account plans and strategies for the coming year, do they wait and hope a good idea will come to them on how they will reach their sales objectives? If you use deliberate creative thinking techniques to generate ideas, you will discover that the ideas come quickly and much more easily. You now have a creative process to generate ideas when you need them.

Creating New Markets and Business Models

Perhaps you want to develop new markets for existing products. Have you considered developing new markets where there is currently no competition? How about new processes or new applications? Creativity development can help your company discover these new markets and new sources of revenue.

Invest in Developing Your Organization’s Creative Thinking

It is now time to bring creative thinking into the corporation to maximize your organization’s ability to thrive. It is a time to design new business models, to develop new markets, and enhance your competitive advantage.

You are currently faced with important business and functional problems with no easy or obvious solutions. The solution is to invest in creativity development. Creative thinking generates the ideas for strategic corporate success by developing the thinking infrastructure needed to spark bottom-line innovations for thriving in today’s new environment.

Are you planning on investing in developing your organization’s creative competence this year?

I listened to a webinar sponsored by Harvard Business Review.  IBM’s Saul Berman and Peter J. Korsten shared some insights on standout companies in today’s ambiguous environment. 

As we come out of the worst recession in 50 years, the new economic environment is viewed as structurally different, with more complexity, more uncertainty, and more volatility.  However, standout companies (the top 25% ) are turning complexity to their advantage with creative leadership.

There are three different ways that standout companies achieve success and capitalize on complexity.  They embody creative leadership, they reinvent customer relationships, and they build operating dexterity. 

A speedy decision is valued over a correct decision.   There is a philosophy of correcting things as they move forward.

Creativity is the leading indicator of leadership quality.  Creative leadership drives the change needed in the organization to stay ahead of the market.  Creative leaders use different communication styles and tools.  

They are more open to experimentation with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media.  Standout companies break with the status quo of industry, enterprise, and revenue models.

Chief executives believe that to navigate an increasingly complex world will require creativity.  They will co-create with their clients.  They will globalize what is possible due to standardization and localize what is necessary and whatever needs local tuning.  Think “glocal.”

When creativity is implemented within an organization, then it is better prepared to deal with some of the massive shifts taking place such as new government regulations, changes in global economic power centers, accelerated industry transformation, growing volumes of data, and rapidly evolving customer preferences.

Clearly creativity is the new leadership differentiator for standout companies.   You must ask yourself, what tools are you providing to your organization to unleash the creativity of your employees?

Permission to use graphic granted by IBM.

Susan T. Blake, U.S. Country Facilitator

Imagine a world where organization development practitioners can access a global platform and find the tools they need to be effective and to maximize an organization’s performance. Imagine a place where you could develop your own creativity and leverage this new found knowledge with clients in your OD consulting practice. Imagine an innovative virtual community built exclusively for those in OD.

I recently spoke with the CEO of Susan T. Blake Consulting, who is also the United States Country Facilitator with Sedaa’s Global Brain Trust. I asked Susan about the value she has obtained working across borders with other country facilitators in a virtual environment. I was also curious about how she came to be selected as the U.S. Country Facilitator.

Susan responded, “I found Sedaa’s Global Brain Trust through two different friends, who each recommended that I join the group. I was pleased to be invited to join this exclusive community for senior practitioners of OD. I was selected to be the U.S. Country Facilitator because I was fully engaged within the community. It was a good fit because I had a background in OD, I had a little bit of a sales background, and a variety of skills – all of which I call upon in this role.”

When I asked her to outline some of the highlights of being a U.S. Country Facilitator, she mentioned several, “I have learned about OD in other countries and I am expanding my global network exponentially. This experience has given me the opportunity to use and develop a variety of skills including OD, team management, dealing with change, as well as sales and marketing. Being a country facilitator has given me an opportunity to use and develop every skill I possess.

I am learning to be creative while I build global relationships and put together the appropriate tools for each individual situation. We have a terrific bunch of creative people who are solving the challenges of building a new virtual organization specifically for those in OD.”

I wondered, “How can someone become a country facilitator?” Susan responded, “As we build our OD community, we are going to be adding country facilitators from every country. It is a tremendous opportunity!”

Susan then issued an invitation, “Just come visit our web site and let us know if you have an interest in becoming part of Sedaa’s Global Brain Trust.”

When you think about it, OD has the potential to be a hot-bed of creativity. OD practitioners are in a position to help their clients by developing their creativity and innovation. They also use their own creativity every day while selecting the right tools and taking the best approaches to finding solutions for their clients. Creativity is all about putting yourself in a place of maximum potential and then maximizing the potential of the organization.