(These are the opening remarks I made at the first meeting of AGSM Executive Programmes Roundtable on Leadership, Creativity and Innovation)
The word innovation, still in these very hard and disturbing times appears almost daily in the media. There are 360 million references to innovation on Google and on my Google Daily RSS feed I receive notice of new books and articles released daily globally on the topic. And now I get emails daily suggesting that innovation will be the saviour of the current economic times. Every job advertisement talks about the applicant having the need to be creative and innovative.
It appears this thing called innovation is a common everyday occurrence. The reality is one might be able to talk about it as if it is. In practice, the reality is very different.
Innovation is an outcome. Nothing more.
Creativity and invention with their fellow travellers risk, experimentation and the until more recently undiscussable “f” word “failure” are the drivers of innovation.
These concepts are unpredictable, very elusive and differ from individual to individual, organisation to organisation in practice as much as we differ ourselves. Every example is different.
So the purpose of the Creative Leadership Forum research project “Is Australian management creative and innovative?” was to see if there were discernible patterns of practices, understandings, attitudes, perceptions and needs around creativity and its resultant innovation amongst Australian managers that could allow us to design and deliver meaningful and transformative peer to peer executive education and training programmes to enhance their practice in this area of vital interest to the Australian economy.
The research questionnaire was deliberately designed to be generic, not to target industry or market segments, rather to reflect the existing opinions and practices surrounding creativity and innovation in the Australian work force as a whole.
The on-line survey was framed around three main areas of interest
- Leadership, creativity and innovation
- Perceptions of creativity & innovation as practice, individually and organisationally
- Creative leadership, creativity and innovation development needs
I would like to thank at the outset The Australian Services Roundtable, the Australian Institute of Commercialisation, The Society for Knowledge Economics, The Australian Facilitators Network, ETN Communications through their magazine and on-line journal Fast Thinking, The Creative Skills Training Council, The Leadership Consortium, Innovation and Business Skills Australia (IBSA), Creativity Exchange Network and IXC Australia who agreed to partner with us in this project by providing links on their web sites and direct email newsletters to their membership databases to the on-line survey. We estimate to have reached over 30,000 in the Australian workforce at all levels and finalised the research using 331 complete responses . In addition, I carried out additional indepth interviews with 25 C plus executives after the compilation of the survey questionnaires.
I would also like to thank Dean Harris, Group Managing Director of Synnovate Australia whose advice was very helpful in the design of the survey.
Here is a quick snapshot of the more interesting results
How do Australians Perceive Creative Leadership, Creativity and Innovation.
When asked are you a creative leader? 81% of Australians said YES. So if you are a creative leader (as the majority of Australian managers say they are) what does a creative leader do?
97.08% say a creative leader is one who leads people and processes creatively. 45.9% say a creative leader is one who creates.
A very important distinction here is that Australian managers say a creative leader is NOT ONE WHO CREATES but one who leads people and processes creatively. Very revealing, is that managers do NOT see creative leadership, creativity and innovation in the basics of business - area such as revenue generation (50.8%), cost reduction (25%) or the development of new products.
The main theme to emerge from this topic is that whilst Australians feel they are creative leaders they foster creativity through empowerment rather than actually practicing or applying creativity in the work place and because of the disconnect between the role of a creative leader and the role of a business leader, the workforce is conflicted on how to apply creativity to produce innovation at work.
These responses suggest the need for leadership training focused on building a better work environment that ties functional creative skills training to the practice of creativity in everyday management.
Personal Perceptions of Creativity
So where does creativity come from? 91% disagreed creativity is mainly practised by artists. 72% disagreed creativity came from artists
If creativity is not necessarily artistic, then what is it? 46% say it is mainly problem solving. 44% say it is NOT problem solving but can’t say what it is
So there is substantial confusion and a lack of knowledge about how to describe and use the word “creativity”
Is there a difference between personal creativity and work creativity? 52% No 48% Yes.
We asked managers to list three attributes they perceived as their creative attributes in order of importance..
- 56 % responded with attributes that could be called a functional, objective rational or problem solving view of creativity
- 20% responded with attributes that could be defined as an aesthetic or a softer form of creativity
- 21% attributes that could be categorised as both such as courage, empowerment, risk
- 2% as neither, using terms such as tenacity, endurance
In summary, we can say the majority of Australian managers hold a broad definition of creativity and in the main feel they are creative and believe that creativity can be used by anyone anywhere. They are accepting that creativity has many manifestations and uses.
My personal view though is that Australian managers are forced to view creativity and innovation from an operational, functional and process outcome driven perspective rather than from the perspective of a creative process and because of this it is impossible to tell if a manager who identifies him or herself as creative is able to manifest that creativity in the workplace.
How do Australian Managers perceive Organisational Creativity.
82% could not describe the difference between the terms creativity and innovation when it is applied to the workplace, yet they seemed to be able to do so intuitively when asked to describe their experiences of creativity and innovation organisationally.
When describing experiences of creativity, managers described what they did
Designed, created, wrote, performed were words they used to say things like - “created a nation wide ad campaign” “designed a Christmas party theme”
When describing experiences of innovation, managers used words that described outcomes - "Reduced costs, enhanced quality, created value, streamlined process “saved $55million in recurrent expenditure” “developed a new more efficient filing system”
From this we can see that Australian managers regard creativity in a very narrow view as mainly idea generation; innovation as implementation "Turning ideas into implementation” was how one respondent described organisational creativity.
Importantly, the overall perception of individual creativity and innovation in the workplace is positive.
However and this is a vital statistic.. Whilst 81% of Australians believe they are innovative and are able to apply creative thinking at work, only 55% believe their organisation is creative and a slightly larger number 64% say their organisation is innovative.
In other words, Australian managers have a more positive view of their ability to be creative themselves versa their organisations ability to apply this creativity.
On the specifics of Leadership, Creativity and Innovation Skills Development in The Workplace, only 18% of organisations surveyed had a creative leadership programme, 95% of those programmes driven by the CE0. On Creativity and Innovation Skills Development, 49% organisations have offered some form of creativity and innovation training, mainly in Senior to Middle Management. A very telling stat was that less than a quarter of the respondents felt their organisations creativity and innovation skills programmes were successful and just over 50% were unsure whether they were successful or not.
So, can we say Australian managers are creative and innovative?
Yes we can. However there is room for huge improvement and a strong need for organisational and business leaders to embrace and drive the development of creative leadership capabilities within organisations. The type of capabilities needed are those developed through practice and reflection on those practices and rather than theory or research and in my view the Federal Government needs to be very mindful of supporting academic institutions who confuse the value of theory and research over practice. In my view, practice is born through work in the field, not through academic institutions alone.
What executive education in Australia needs are places for management experimentation, a social laboratory - "a change lab" if you like, in which a facilitated safe container is created for peers to come together to exchange insights, learnings and understandings about their work practices and through these exchanges explore new ways of thinking that can be applied to create "value" in all its connotations across industries and organisations.
With the global economies in crisis, never has there been a more important time for listening, thinking, conversing on the new world we are in the process of creating NOW!!
Ralph Kerle