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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