Innovation & Creative Thinking

Today more than ever, businesses hunger for innovation and creative thinking. Functional leaders often bemoan the absence of such skills within their teams and claim at least that they would like to inject these capabilities into the organization.

My experience leads me to question how sincere many managers are when they say they want more innovators. Creative thinking involves challenging the status-quo and in fact many managers are not comfortable with such challenges. One pre-requisite of innovation and creativity is an environment that welcomes such thinking and encourages its discussion.

I don’t know whether the lack of innovation and creative thinking is because most people have limited capability for it, or whether they lack the environment to encourage it. But whichever is the case, I was interested to discover an article by Evan Woodhead entitled “The Root of Active Learning: Boosting Creative Thinking and Innovative Capacity“. In it, he highlights the four big enemies of innovation and creativity and I repeat them here:

As I look at the contracts, procurement and commercial community, I see these characteristics far too frequently. The reluctance to challenge assumptions and to change habits is endemic. For example, the majority do not want to hear the results of research that suggests they are doing the wrong things. They continue to apply the old, familiar solutions and achieve the old, familiar results. It is a community that exhibits blind confidence in its strengths (for example in managing risks or delivering savings) and uses these to dismiss and ignore its fears (for example that someone will challenge these strengths and prove them to be largely illusory).

So much around us has changed. Global markets and networked teechnologies have thrust the quality and contribution of trading relationships to the forefront of any successful business. It is an area screaming out for innovation and creative thinking. Examples abound. For instance, just yesterday I interviewed Peter Brudenall, a partner at law firm Hunton & Williams, on the subject of agile development and the need for new contract models. IACCM is working with a wide array of companies on the question of ‘contracting excellence’ – what is it, how do you measure it? The Obama administration has initiated work on contract reform in the public sector. A growing number of companies worldwide are focusing on areas such as post-award contract and relationship management.

The list of desired or potential innovations goes on and on. Yet in truth, we find that only a small minority are actually interested in discovering answers that do not fit their existing assumptions, strengths, fears and habits. Creative thinking is frequently suppressed because of the challenge that it might represent.