Innovation is essential for organisations wanting to remain relevant and competitive in a highly competitive, increasingly demanding world. As the management expert, Peter Drucker, is once alleged to have said, “Innovate or die!”
Get the workplace environment right and great things can happen. A truly innovative organisational environment encourages more creative behaviour, knowledge-sharing, proactive risk-taking, faster decision making, and better customer satisfaction.
Research led by Professor Teresa Amabile suggests that support a creative and innovative work environment include sufficient freedom and autonomy, challenging work, and a supportive team and line manager. Things that hinder include an unrealistic workload, unreasonable time pressure, and organisational barriers such as red tape.
Download the KEYS Creative Climate sketchnote | © 2024 HALO Psychology. All rights reserved.
Here are 15 research-based ideas to help you boost creativity and innovation in your team:
ADAPT YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE
- A servant leadership style supports creative behaviour
In a study involving nearly 600 employees and 48 supervisors across 26 organisations in India, the researchers found that those who exhibited servant leadership tended to create a work environment which enabled high levels of creativity.
Check out the four competencies of servant leadership in the sketchnote below and think about how you can develop each of these.
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2. A transformational leadership style supports innovative behaviour
A recent systematic review of 211 studies found that a transformational leadership style was the leadership approach typically positively associated with innovative behaviour. Perhaps this is because transformational leadership is a values-driven leadership style which motivates and inspires employees to strive for and achieve a vision and goals.
Check out the four I’s of transformational leadership in the sketchnote and reflect on how you perform against each of these. Are there any you need to work on?
Download the transformational leader sketchnote | © 2024 HALO Psychology Ltd. All rights reserved.
3. A different leadership approach for each stage of innovation
Professors Nigel King and Neil Anderson suggest that leaders need to adapt their leadership style at each stage of the innovation journey. For example, in the early stage – where ideas are being put forward – a nurturing style of leadership, which encourages people and creates a psychologically safe environment might be best.
Check out the different leadership styles in the sketchnote. Are there some styles you’re more comfortable with than others? What support do you need to develop the leadership style you’re less comfortable with?
ALLOW ENOUGH TIME FOR IDEAS
4. Spend enough time evaluating ideas at the start
One study found that when people had more time to flesh out their ideas, the idea they originally thought was second-best often ended up being seen as the most creative. This finding was reiterated by independent raters of the ideas.
If you don’t have a lot of time, going with the initial idea that is more defined may be the best course of action. However, if you have enough time to spend in the ideas stage, get team members and outside evaluators to rate the different ideas. Then develop the top two ideas.
5. Give enough time for unconstrained creativity
In a study of 76 teams, researchers found that creativity was a critical factor for team innovation from the beginning to end of the innovation lifecycle. The teams that performed the best were those who held off focusing on implementing an idea too early. Instead, they allowed time for unconstrained creativity. The findings suggest that the most innovative teams pay attention to the timing of implementation of ideas, only focusing on implementation around the mid-point of a project.
The sketchnote below shows each stage of innovative work behaviour. Use this to designate time and plan activities and skills development for each stage.
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THINK ABOUT DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
6. Build on others’ ideas
If your team struggles to solve problems creativity, provide them with examples of what others have done elsewhere. A study involving newly qualified engineers found that those in the group attempting to develop a solution with no prior examples tended to stick to their original ideas – even if they weren’t workable. Those in the group who were given examples of solutions still defended their ideas but were not as fixated on them as the other group.
7. Imagine a different world
Researchers trialled a new method based on an approach that helps children and artists to be creative. The method is based on Narrative Theory which is about making up stories that imagine different worlds, perspectives and can generate unexpected ideas. This method is helpful as it taps into the notion that creativity isn’t about guessing the future correctly. Rather, it’s about opening ourselves up to different possibilities. Examples of how this could work in organisations includes:
- Employees being asked to think about their most unusual customer, and then think about a world where all their customers were like that. How would they change how they do things?
- Managers are presented with a problem and asked to solve it by thinking like a member of their team.
USE DIFFERENT SPACES
8. Work in a different building
According to one study, changing where people work when doing creative tasks can push them out of their comfort zone and lead to more innovative ideas being discussed and generated. With growing numbers of organisations insisting on people working in the office on certain days, why not designate some of those days as creative time? Alternatively, book a different space in a different type of organisation when facilitating team meetings geared towards ideas generation. For example, one team I worked with – who did a lot of work supporting schools in the local area – had an innovation day in a local school, where they booked and paid for a large school room during the school holidays.
9. Go for a walk
In a series of experiments, researchers tested the impact of four conditions on creativity. Participants in the walking group either walked inside on a treadmill or walked outside. And the sitting group either sat inside or outside. Walking inside or outside was better for creative thinking than sitting inside or outside. But it was walking outside that had the biggest boost for creativity.
Next time you have creative brainstorming session with your team, see if you can do it outside in a local park (assuming the weather’s nice, of course!)
FOCUS ON MOOD AND EMOTION
10. Create the right mood
In a study examining the impact of mood on creativity, researchers used a mood induction process. This involved people spending three minutes thinking on a recent past event that either put them in a good mood, a bad mood, or had no effect. Those in the good-mood group consistently outperformed those in the neutral- or bad mood groups in a task testing creative thinking. The good mood group had higher levels of engagement and were more open to each other’s ideas.
Next time you have a team meeting where you want people to collaborate and come up with ideas, get them to think about and share something positive that happened to them that week or month.
11. Reframe emotions
A technique known as emotional reappraisal may be a useful way to help more conventional thinkers be more creative. One study got people to view a situation through a different emotional lens. For example, seeing an anger-inducing event as one that was neutral or where there was hope and opportunity, instead. The researchers found that people more open to new ideas, already seemed to naturally use emotional reappraisal. In a follow-up experiment, the researchers put conventional thinkers into different groups – suppressing their emotion, distracting from their emotion, no emotional regulation at all, or emotional reappraisal. Those in the reappraisal group produced more creative ideas than the conventional thinkers in the other groups.
If you want to develop creative thinking skills in your team, try out emotional reappraisal. Check out the sketchnote below which shows the A,B,C Technique as a way to reframe our emotional responses to situations.
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12. Review the kind of days your team has
A recent study explored the impact of different types of working days on people’s creativity. The researchers looked at things that stimulate people’s creativity, and obstacles that get in the way. The ideal working day, that has the highest levels of creativity from employees, is one where people have enough freedom and autonomy, where the work is challenging, where they have sufficient resources to get things done, where there is sufficient support from colleagues and manager, and where there is not a lot of organisational politics or bureaucracy.
See my sketchnote for a summary of this research. Discuss it with your team – how often would they say they experience an ideal day? What gets in the way, and what can you do to remove obstacles?
Download working day and creativity sketchnote | © 2024 HALO Psychology Ltd. All rights reserved.
13. Schedule in downtime from innovation
A study from 2017 looked at conditions around innovation which can lead to helplessness, fatigue and burnout. The researchers found that too much innovation in organisations with little to no downtime between one new idea being implemented and the next, led to increasing levels of fatigue, helplessness and burnout in employees. Where employees felt tired and burnt out from the amount of innovation, they were less likely to help with the implementation of the next innovation.
Regularly review the innovation cycle and plans in your organisation and how they affect your team. Avoid too much overlap between the implementation of each new idea, and schedule in downtime to allow people to recover before starting the next cycle of innovation.
REVIEW HOW YOUR TEAM IS CONFIGURED
14. Small versus large teams
In an analysis of more than 65 million papers, patents and software projects, researchers found that smaller teams tended to produce much more innovative ideas and products than large teams. That’s not to say there wasn’t a role for large teams. These tended to develop and build on existing knowledge to improve things. The study suggests that small AND large teams are important when it comes to innovation. The smaller teams produce lots of new ideas, and the larger team develops, refines and implements the ideas.
If you lead a large team, when you’re at the ideas generating stage, why not split the team into smaller sub-sections. Maybe even make it competitive? Then when the best ideas have been identified and selected, set up a larger team bringing together relevant people from within and outside your team to refine, develop and implement the idea.
15. Think about incorporating AI into your team
A new study from the University of Montana (yet to be published) compared the creativity of AI and humans. The researchers used the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, one of the most widely used tools for testing human creativity. The scores suggest that AI matches the top 1% of humans on the Torrance Tests. The AI was in the top percentile for:
- Fluency – the ability to generate a lot of ideas; and
- Originality – the ability to produce new ideas.
- The AI was in the 97th percentile for Flexibility – the ability to produce different types and varieties of ideas.
Could AI – such as ChatGPT – be useful in helping you and your team generate new ideas, or with the development of new products or services? How could you incorporate it so that it supports your team in coming up with new ideas?
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