9 Creativity boosts for your culture

9 creativity boosts for your culture

Structures

Resources

Perspectives

1. Champion it from the top

4. Build hybrid teams

7. Nurture insight creation and sharing

2. Promote experimentation

5. Arrange agile environments

8. Cultivate candid openness

3. Drive accountability

6. Construct an iteration infrastructure

9. Assess progress

Structures

1. Champion it from the top Work with company leaders to link creativity to the organisation’s vision

CEO champion Alastair Curtis, CDO, and Bracken Darrell, CEO, have formed a joint vision around Logitech becoming a design-driven company – one which Darrell is eloquent at articulating.

– Provide leaders with compelling stories to bring the links to life – Reinforce the relationship with data and case studies

Alastair Curtis, Chief Design Officer

Bracken Darrell, CEO

Structures

2. Promote experimentation Give people the permission and space to experiment, then encourage learning from successes – and failures – Champion iterative problem solving, nurture curiosity and value surprises – Plan experimentation time into project schedules and accept most will fail – Accelerate performance by systematically distilling, sharing and embodying learnings

Testing at scale Booking.com run more than 25,000 test a year

Structures

3. Drive accountability Foster ownership, support with lean structures, and reward collaboration and results – Organise into nimble teams – Empower team decision making – Track meaningful performance data

Start-up factory CEO Zhang Ruimin split Haier into 4,000 micro-enterprises of 10-15 employees.

It’s digital platform provides real-world usage and performance data.

Resources

4. Build hybrid teams Compose teams with a breadth of backgrounds and perspectives – and shared goals – Viewpoint, not demographic, diversity drives creativity – Establish common creative values – Foster open, civil and frank debate

Diverse cognition Cognitively diverse teams generate 1,000% more ideas than ‘echo chamber’ teams

Resources

5. Arrange agile environments Orchestrate workspaces to support workflow from individual tasks to group collaboration.

– P ure open plan offices have been dubbed ‘collaboration killers’ – Workers want to socialise and avoid distraction – Provide choices for different work modes and personal preferences

Steelcase

Resources

6. Construct an iteration infrastructure Enable the rapid realisation and testing of ideas – Provide integrated data rapidly – Train teams in a range of prototyping techniques – Establish customer testing panels and labs

Data aware design Nike recently moved its data teams to sit alongside the creative teams

Perspectives

7. Nurture insight creation and sharing Seek-out and share insight – internally and externally

Create

Share

Internal

– Job swaps – Stakeholder interviews – R&D projects

– White papers – Knowledge sharing platforms – Communities of practice

External

– Customer safaris – User research – Industry collaboration projects

– Industry meet-ups – External speaker programmes – Conferences

Perspectives

8. Cultivate candid openness Encourage trusting debate and frank feedback in the pursuit of excellence

Pixar’s Braintrust ‘ put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.’

Ed Catmull, Pixar

Perspectives

9. Assess progress Track, reflect on and learn from your culture’s creative strides – and plot how to make new ones

We help design and innovation teams raise their game

Our expertise

Market foresight

Opportunity discovery

Proposition development

Experience strategy

Capability building – Team strategy – Training – Tools and processes

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