Nissley spoke about how current practice around strategy and ideation development revolves around the organization hiring an outside consultant/facilitator and taking their team away for a retreat in order to comeback with fresh thinking. He used “thinking outside the box” as the metaphor to describe this phenomenon.
However Nissley believes this ignores the fact that people inside organizations are working organically creatively every day and that this is not being recognized by management.
I would concur with Nick’s observation although I think management is beginning to see the value of creativity from within as the Creative Leadership Forum is beginning to see the emergence of organisations creating their internal Creativity Zones.
Two major Australian organisations in the financial services industry have recently created internal physical environments for this very purpose. The Creative Leadership Forum has also created recently an on-line Creativity Zone for Australia’s major public broadcasting for the same purpose. In this instance, it is not always possible to have their people meet face to face so a virtual Creativity Zone was created.
The idea of working at the intersection within organisations is not new. Committees are endlessly set up in organisations for many and varied purposes with cross-departmental representatives to explore operational and procedural improvements. What is new though is management is starting to recognise the value of generating and applying creativity using its own internal resources.
This trend offers employees new opportunities to think about how they might express themselves in the work place, how they can bring more to bear of themselves in their work. In return the organization will be able to think inside its box where great repositories of knowledge and knowing exist already. Where there are real seams of gold!!!