Fast forward to today!  Businesses struggling with 21st century reality are finding that without the ability to be creative, they are up the creek without a paddle.  And the reason is simple.  The world is changing so fast that traditional ways of managing are increasingly out-of-step in a world where flexibility and adaptability are the drivers in creating and sustaining a competitive advantage.

Put simply; the ability to innovate is now a premium business skill, Corporate Creativity not something that can necessarily be taught, despite the many claims to the contrary, but rather a state-of-business-mind that relies heavily on the ‘will’ to be creative … and that means shifting creativity out of the shadows and into the mainstream of business functioning … and for many management teams this is a scary thought.

Yet it doesn’t have to be seeing Corporate Creativity is the difference between teams that can compete and those that can’t.  In fact in every business team  there is a great deal of creative potential that can be readily tapped once the team gives itself permission to be creative, rather than worrying about stepping out-of-line from the accepted way of doing things.

Corporate Creativity nothing more than the ability to successfully shape the future through innovation, strategy and forward thinking so that smart ideas can positively impact on business performance.

And when you start thinking about it this way, you don’t need a guru, all you need is the same thinking tools you use in any other business situation.  Discipline, hard work, logic and the willingness to push the boundaries beyond best practice.  The only difference being you are working in an experiential as opposed to an academic mindscape.

Any management team prepared to use its collective life experience (see earlier Blog) quickly turns creativity from something to be feared into something that becomes the basis for meeting and beating the competition.  State sector, private sector, the challenge is the same.  The courage to step outside the boundaries of your known mindset in order to create something that truly defines your business.

The impact of economic reality and political will resulting in a melting pot of structural adjustment that in the short term will change the face of the public service as we have traditionally known it.

A phase that when it draws to a close will create a vacuum as to how the state sector will evolve into the future.  A challenge certainly; but also a one-off opportunity for senior executives to not only define the public service model of tomorrow, but how ministries will interconnect in a way that produces dynamic results.

The misleading caricature of public servants as a grey army of faceless bureaucrats, giving way to a new understanding that the state sector is at the cutting edge of a change that demands circuit breaker thinking in building the efficiency model that governments are seeking.

The blueprint of flexibility, evolution, innovation and organization, resulting in teams that are faster, sharper and smarter in the way they do business.  The ability to blend technology, people and politics into a service that works, fully taking into account the demographics and demands of what can be achieved within budgetary limits.

The opportunity is extraordinary i.e. to not establish an ersatz future that papers over the cracks, but rather a 21st century model that is purpose-suited to the needs of government because it has been developed by forward thinkers who understand the unique pressures present in a dynamically evolving public service.

What can the individual business team do to position their company in a permanently  unstable business environment.

State sector, public sector, the challenge is the same.  How can we manage our organization when there is nothing firm on which to base our thinking and strategy?

A  fair question seeing how traditional thinking is becoming increasingly irrelevant in a global economy travelling at the speed of light, and which demands another set of thought processes that will allow your organization to gain the flexibility it needs in today’s liquid environment.

Fortunately there is a system I call Future Solutions Management that has the right mix of creativity, strategy and forward thinking to position your business in dynamically difficult markets, but first it requires you to unhook your mind from the past.

It doesn’t matter what other businesses are doing; what’s important is what your business wants to do and then putting in place the building blocks of creativity, strategy and forward thinking to achieve it.  Think about it this way.

Instead of focusing on best practice, Future Solutions Management challenges business teams to use their life experience (the combination of academic and personal knowledge) to build solutions that are specific to their business alone.

Following a disciplined process it identifies what is needed to be faster, sharper and smarter than the competition.  You would be amazed, when you remove traditional thinking inhibitors, how a management team can turn from ‘I don’t know how to do this’ to ‘I know we can make this company insanely great and this is the way to do it.’

When you think smart, you start thinking smarter, the aim to manage a business that is lightning quick in its decision-making processes and capable of turning on a dime as the situation changes, and believe me today, no business can survive unless it can adjust and readjust in quick time.

So let your competitors worry about the Greek economy, or whether the Germans and French will bail out the rest of the EU, because while everyone’s fretting about the past, you and your team will be creating the future.

This is a challenge facing every management team in every part of the world, but also a challenge that has faced every management team for the past two millennium.  Nothing changes except today time is becoming so compressed that the pressure of managing is sucking away the ability to forward think.  So what do you do?

The answer beguilingly simple.  Encourage each member of your team to think as an individual, then encourage your whole team to accept each individual’s thinking as a crucial part of being in the team.  There is no longer time for the politics of yesterday.  In today’s overheated market every second counts, so each ‘moment of awareness’ (see earlier post) is as precious as gold.

A team that can ‘think-on-the-fly’ has a tremendous advantage over competitors whose teams are buried in fear; fear of change, fear of looking silly, fear of being unable to cope.  The ability of a team to trust in the other members of the team an absolute necessity in fast-moving environments.

It’s not rocket science.  All it takes is an understanding that the weakest link is not the weakest team member, but rather the person most determined to ensure any change only benefits them.  Once your team moves past this the steps are relatively simple in building an entirely different dynamic.  How is this done?

1.  Draft a creativity protocol.  2.  Lead your team in accepting the protocol.  3.  Resolve misunderstandings within the team (rather than with the individual), and finally build the protocol to the stage it becomes irrelevant, because you have a team that is fluid and flexible because everyone thinks.

The futile efforts to return to the days when profit was not the goal, but rather the consequence of a money-go-round of commercial sleight-of-hand that placed impossible pressures on managers to perform.

But in every storm cloud there is a silver lining for those who see what their competitors are doing and then doing exactly the opposite, meaning instead of trying to re-establish the impossible, quietly salvaging the best of what exists, while adding creative possibilities that will maximize their flexibility in a melt down market.

Today flexibility rules; the ability of a company to adjust and readjust to the pressures the key to creative adaptation.  Compare this with competitors that slavishly rely on a twelve monthly planning cycle and the advantages become clear.  If your company can turn on a dime in reacting to the unexpected, then it has a distinct advantage in an unstable environment.

But you need to be competitively creative.  Not just in the how you motivate your people or engage with your customers, but in managing a business that is highly original in such seemingly familiar things as structure, communication, teamwork, responsiveness, service, technology in other words rather than doing what is expected; think about what is not expected.

In broken economies where the customer is king there is the opportunity to redefine performance by thinking beyond best practice.  The capacity for management to question its own thinking, the key to building an organization that stands out from the crowd, not because it has the best advertisements, but because it does what is says it can do.

The point being creativity runs along a continuum at one end of which we find the unfathomable depths of genius and at the other the small creative acts that each of us engage in as part of our daily lives.  Extrapolate this across a business and what you have is something very powerful indeed.

No matter what your business; once your mind roves past the qualifications, what is present is a melting pot of raw potential that few managers actively engage with.  Meaning they don’t do a stock take of the mind talent up and down the organizational chain and as a result fail to ignite creative potential that is there for the taking.

Relate this to the incredible shrinking business and the picture becomes clear.  The more a business downsizes the greater the pressure on managers to compensate for the lack of minds available.  Smart businesses don’t do this.  Rather than subjecting executives to an impossible creative load; they actively seek to spread the responsibility for thinking across the organization.

Redefining what it means to manage; they engage the entire working mind up and down the organizational chain so that in large and small ways staff are actively contributing to the future; managing the creative continuum a sure way of growing a business that is faster, sharper and smarter than the competition.

Think of it this way.  Every time a meeting takes place two things are present; technical experience i.e. the career the individual has chosen to follow, and life experience, the insights he or she has soaked up as his or her career has unfolded.

To put this in perspective; as we trawl through life each of us establishes a unique world view that then has to be shoehorned into the organisational model to make it work.  Which is not a problem so long as the business is not so tightly managed that life experience becomes a pale background noise in the workings of the machine.

Interesting point: take two people out of our meeting and replace them with two others and you have tumbled the creative potential present meaning you now have a different mix of life experience.  The fact we don’t stop to think about this largely because life experience often exists as a subterranean factor until such time as it openly speaks its mind.  Think about it!

Creativity feeds off life experience; the ability to tap deep into the experiential emotion a key factor in unlocking the power that lies in every company.  The choice whether to work within a safe business model that lacks the spontaneity of combustion or to inject the life experience that leads to serious competitive advantage.  So pedal to the metal and gun your business.

So what we do is reverse the logic by throwing all the politics, pressures and passions outside the circle, so they orbit harmlessly, while we use our creative mind to innovate in a mind space no longer contaminated by business as usual.

And when we have the right combination of creativity what do we do?  We bring back into the circle only those existing elements that make sense, in other words, those things that will help connect the building blocks of creativity into patterns that show what your business can truly be once the mind chains are shattered.

What about all those discarded elements still orbiting outside our circle?  You mean the things that have been hobbling your business to an unacceptable level of mediocrity!  Well have fun; go on a turkey shoot and blast them from the sky.  Sound crazy?  Well my suggestion is try it … because it really works.  Thinking inside the circle is a powerful management discipline that can do wonders for your organization.

All organizations have extraordinary levels of life experience flowing through them yet few take the time to recognise and manage this potential owing to the twin pressures of time and willpower, both of which are needed in order to tap into what is there for the taking.  Putting it more simply; you are paying for this life experience so why not use it?

Whether your business is an airline, a government department, a courier company, a hospital, a retail company, no matter what your company does; life experience is what silently impacts on success or failure, excellence or mediocrity.

As organizations become leaner, it is the way you encourage your people to respond to their moments-of-awareness that becomes the critical difference between a thinking organism and a mindless machine.  It takes little effort to establish and manage the principle.  When people know their company wants them to think; you will be inspired when they start to perform.

Moments of Awareness is now available as an e-book from my ‘Ten Minute Master Manager Reads’ on Amazon at this link  Moments of Awareness  Price $US2.99

The late Steve Jobs used to talk about something being ‘Insanely great’ and he certainly knew a thing or to about developing products and services that were integrated in a way that influenced the consumer to want to be part of the Apple dream, to want to be part of the future.

Is that how your company thinks?  To want to provide a product or service of such high quality that it stands out from a market saturated with clones?  It’s not magic.  What it takes is a creative competitiveness that understand the linkages between the key components of your business and then sets about polishing those linkages so wherever the customer touches in they find enthusiasm, class, and a product and/or service that does what it says.

It doesn’t matter whether you a government department, a corporate, or a start-up company the principle runs true.  First know your business.  Second understand the components that drive your business.  Third immerse those components in the process of creative competitiveness.  And fourth bring those building blocks together in a way that makes your strategy ‘Insanely great.’

Competitive Creativity is now available as an e-book from my ‘Ten Minute Master Manager Reads’ on Amazon at this link   Competitive Creativity  Price $US2.99