Go On – Break The Rules – If You Dare!

Can you mandate innovation? Seriously, can you?

This seems to be the weak case for managers who believe (and poorly defend) that they can determine the extent of their staff’s creative efforts. They think they can place vice-like grips on the quality and quantity of creative ideas and interventions from staff.

One truism is ‘You can be clever, but don’t be too clever!’ Now, how empowering is that for your staff and you? I wonder who utters this and what is it about their confidence. Fearful people feel threatened. They look at everyone else as hurdles, obstacles and hindrances. If managers manage with these emotions, they are no better than jailers. You can imprison people’s imaginations, passions, and desires.

The contemporary manifesto of revolutionaries is to go out and just do it! Ignore those annoying pleas to restrain your creative efforts [‘We don’t do it this way, here!’]. Isn’t it a wonder we don’t solve very well, or at all, our day-to-day fire-fighting issues? I thought that we were more skillful and experienced than that?

Excuses ad nauseum…there seems to be one in every situation. For far too long, our system of education has, albeit successfully, promoted a sense of fear and disparity for anything resembling creativity. Non-compliance, blind allegiance, never defying authority (a.k.a. ‘Do as you are told!’) – that was the order of the day. So much for engaging the entrepreneurial spirit!

Creativity breeds creativity. Stifle this sense of openness, connectivity, relaxation, freedom, and absence of stress and pressure and you are headed for silence, dread, frustration, and mediocrity.

I recall that in most organisations, within the hidden confines of the performance appraisal form is that area called Key Result Areas (KRAs). One of these, non-empirical (non-scoring) dimensions, is [creative] problem solving. How can you solve problems without being creative? Can you mandate creativity? Do you enlist creative efforts by fear or fervour?

Leaders promote free expression of abilities, relationships, talent and potential. Creativity and personalities are expressions. How do you express yourself? How do you reduce stasis, reluctance, denial, hesitation and ignorance? Leaders – let your people bring themselves out. If they exceed you in some areas, so be it. Be open enough to allow this release of expression, i.e. innovation and creativity.

Read: Seth Godin’s Linchpins, and Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Rules for Revolutionaries’.