by John Brooker | Jan 30, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Facilitate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla # 30 Organisations are in danger of becoming more insular and as creative leaders, you need to start breaking down these barriers… “We are becoming strangers to each other, leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream…communities of different ethnicity and religion eyeing each other over the fences of our differences” Trevor Phillips ~ Head of the Commission for Racial Equality (UK) What are you doing to “break down the silos” in your organisation? In August, I travelled long haul on BA Business Class to run a course. As the flight was quite empty and there was no food to serve (due to a strike), I chatted to the stewardess. We had an interesting chat for about half an hour. Afterwards, it struck me that apart from a few pleasantries, I hadn’t spoken much to a member of the flight crew in a long time. It’s also been a while since I have spoken to another passenger on a long haul flight. The reason for this is that BA Business Class has seats that sit at 180 degrees to each other. To provide privacy, they have dividers between the seats – you could sit next to your mother and never know. In some circumstances that might save you from the crashing bore, but meeting others can create the germ of a new idea. So Could this be a metaphor for organisations? Despite open plan offices and matrix management I can think of three workshops I have run in the last year in which one of the issues was people working in silos or...
by John Brooker | Jan 6, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 6 How might you overcome personal obstacles to move your ideas to fruition? “There are plenty of great ideas out there… but so few people actually do anything about them” Speaker on “Woman’s Hour” BBC Radio 4 Have you ever had a really great idea for work or personal life but not taken it to fruition? The quote above came from a lady speaking on the radio. She sought to sponsor a mature woman writer by offering an idyllic place for them to live and write rent free. She believes that by giving them the chance to get away from their frenetic home environment they can be more creative and productive, that they can produce a book that gets published. Sadly I was half asleep at the time and didn’t catch her name, but she did set me thinking about the variety of obstacles to creativity that exist within organisations but particularly within us. I have devised the acronym PIGS to categorise these obstacles: Process, Individual, Group, and Structure. [If anyone would like to fatten up the idea, your thoughts are welcome!] For this article, I will focus on individual obstacles to being creative. These include: Premature judgement ~ writing off your ideas before they have a chance to flourish. Step back from judgement, allow the ideas to flow and sleep on them Lack of belief ~ giving yourself “ten reasons why my idea won’t work”. When you find yourself doing this, sit down and list ten reasons why it will work Lack of curiosity ~ accepting the first idea that comes in...
