Category: Culture

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Chronic Problems in Organisations

  • No shared vision and values
  • No strategic path
  • Poor alignment: bad alignment between structure and shared values, between mission and systems; the structure and systems of the organisation poorly serve and reinforce the strategic paths.
  • Wrong style: the management philosophy is either incongruent with shared vision and values or the style inconsistently embodies the vision and values of the mission statement.
  • Poor skills
  • Low trust: staff has low trust, a depleted emotional bank account, and that low trust results in closed communication, little problem – solving or poor cooperation and teamwork.
  • No self-integrity: values do not equal habits; there is no correlation between what I value and believe and what I do.

Source:  SR COVEY (1990)  Principle – Centred Leadership, London: Simon and Schuster.  Pp.165-171

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Promoting Creativity

Creativity is recognised as a cornerstone to ongoing, successful innovation. It doesn’t just happen.

How can a manager foster creativity?

Gleeson et.al. (1999) propose five principles for promoting creativity in R&D.  As they point out, these “are simple principles, indeed stunningly so, given the complexity of the creative process and of the institutional cultures within which R&D operates”.  The five principles are:

  • Goals:  Creativity is fostered by setting both creativity and productivity goals but not by prescribing R&D processes to attain them.
  • Bounded Freedom:  Creativity is affected by the psychic balance experienced by the researcher or field participant between what she/he seeks to achieve and what the organisation or group desires her/him to achieve.
  • Recognition:  Creativity is enhanced by reward and recognition, as long as it is experienced as an appreciative and/or informational event and not as a means to control or manipulate.
  • Social Interaction:  Appropriate peer and social interaction is an essential prerequisite to creativity.
  • Leadership:  The development and communication of insightful organisational visions and leadership help foster creativity.

Gleeson, T., Russell, G. and Woods, E. (1999), Creative Research Environments.  Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation: Canberra, Australia Report No. 99/128

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How to promote creativity in a research organisation

Five simple principles apply

Gleeson et.al. (1999) propose five principles for promoting creativity in R&D.  As they point out, these “are simple principles, indeed stunningly so, given the complexity of the creative process and of the institutional cultures within which R&D operates”.  The five principles are:

  • Goals:  Creativity is fostered by setting both creativity and productivity goals but not by prescribing R&D processes to attain them.
  • Bounded Freedom:  Creativity is affected by the psychic balance experienced by the researcher or field participant between what she/he seeks to achieve and what the organisation or group desires her/him to achieve.
  • Recognition:  Creativity is enhanced by reward and recognition, as long as it is experienced as an appreciative and/or informational event and not as a means to control or manipulate.
  • Social Interaction:  Appropriate peer and social interaction is an essential prerequisite to creativity.
  • Leadership:  The development and communication of insightful organisational visions and leadership help foster creativity.
Continue reading “How to promote creativity in a research organisation”
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Ten ways to kill innovation

Do you want change in your organisation, but it is not happening? You could be the problem. Here are some sure ways to stop innovation.

  1. Regard any new idea from below with suspicion – because it’s new, and because it’s from below
  2. Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other levels of management of get their signatures.
  3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticize each other’s proposals.  (That saves you the job of deciding: you just pick the survivor).
  4. Express your criticisms freely, and withhold your praise.  (That keeps people on their toes).  Let them know they can be fired at any time.
  5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area isn’t working.
  6. Control everything carefully.  Make sure people count anything that can be counted, frequently .
  7. Make decisions to reorganize or change policies in secret and spring them on people unexpectedly.  (That also keeps people on their toes).
  8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given out to managers freely.  (You don’t want data to fall into the wrong hands).
  9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move people around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made.   And get them to do it quickly.
  10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

From:  R. Moss Kanter, The Change Masters, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.