Laying the Groundwork for a Creative Environment • 109
Creativity can result in people doing activities that fail to further the
goals and objectives of the parent organization. To ensure alignment,
creative activities should further the goals and objectives of the parent
organization. Otherwise, creative talents and energies will be dissipated
and creative activities will not likely add value.
20
A systems perspective
works best to understand how everything relates in an organization
because the world, according to Dietrich Dorner, consists of many
systems with interrelationships.
21
Here are some ways to align individual and organizational goals and
objectives to further creativity:
• Allow individuals to select activities on which to work.
• Have team members participate in planning.
• Hold one-on-one sessions with team members to ascertain whether
their motivational needs are being met jointly with that of the project.
Allow for Risk Taking
Creativity requires taking calculated chances against the status quo. e
odds oen favor the status quo, not creativity. Nothing changes unless an
allowance for risk taking exists. If everyone is expected to follow orders,
comply with rules, and maintain routine behavior, then creativity will
likely have a low priority. Leadership needs to permit risk taking in the
hope that the organization adapts and survives changing circumstances.
Risk taking, in other words, creates new products and services that allow
organizations to continue to survive.
22
But taking a risk requires setting
the environment to enable creativity to happen; otherwise, people may
be reluctant to take a risk simply because of the ramications. As men-
tioned earlier, the warmth of creative risk can result in an unintended
consequence—getting burned.
23
Risk taking must not only be allowed;
it must also be rewarded. Rewards should exist for success and failure to
communicate to everyone that risk taking is an important value in any
organization. ese rewards, of course, are positive, not negative, such
as punishment. By rewarding risk taking, leadership is communicating
to everyone that it embraces taking calculated chances. Otherwise, peo-
ple will avoid it.
24
e consequence can cool the re in the belly with-
out the same assurance of protection. In other words, it may mean losing
our protective cover when being creative.
25
e potential for failure can
be real or imagined, which can cause people to become conservative to
110 • Creative, Ecient, and Eective Project Management
the point of doing nothing risky and creativity stagnating. Our sense of
mastery becomes shattered because of our limited knowledge, which in
turn makes us fearful of our limitations. Failure can result due to our
limitations in understanding circumstances, in turn causing us to pro-
ceed cautiously.
26
Here are some ways to allow for and reward risk taking to further
creativity:
• Demonstrate support for failure; for example, congratulate people
for tackling a tough activity and failing.
• Give visibility to any risk-taking eorts on the project, such as giving
presentations on progress at team meetings.
• Perform a lessons-learned session aer each high-risk activity is
completed.
• Protect risk takers using positive incentives on the project, for
example, presentations on progress before team members and senior
management.
• Recognize risk taking, whether successful or unsuccessful.
• Remove any administrative obstacles impeding risk taking.
Allow Time for Problem or Issue Definition
According to Western tradition, say scholars, the emphasis is on providing
a solution as quickly as possible. While it may x a problem in the short
term, such a solution is oen not well thought out and may actually worsen
the problem in the long run. Whether called a patch, a x, or band-aid, a
short-term approach is reactive and may appear creative, when in reality
it is not.
It makes greater sense, from a creativity perspective, to spend more time
up front to dene a problem and to really understand its causes. Most
problems and issues do not present an immediate threat unless they deal
with life safety. Goal setting enables reducing complexity by focusing on
what we hope to achieve.
27
en the opportunity arises to allow devel-
oping truly creative solutions that address the source of a problem or
issue rather than its symptoms. e challenge, of course, is for people to
patiently work to dene a problem or issue when creating because of the
fun and tangible feedback when developing the solution. Considerable
willpower is required, whether by one person or an entire team, to spend
time up front to perform good problem denition.
Laying the Groundwork for a Creative Environment • 111
Here are some ways to allow time for problem or issue denition to
further creativity:
• Involve more than one person in dening a problem or issue to
ensure a wider perspective.
• Provide time for dening a problem or issue.
• Revisit the denition frequently to avoid having it be the focus of
activities occurring on the project.
• Seek consensus over the denition of a problem or issue before
determining any solution.
Provide Opportunities to Create
Opportunities to create are small and incremental in scope. e big-bang
type of creative opportunities are the most challenging and rewarding
experiences. Such opportunities are usually lled with high drama. Most
creative people will naturally gravitate to such opportunities. Unfortunately,
many organizations do not screen people to assign them to such endeav-
ors. Many creative people, even with the requisite skills, are le to sit on
the sidelines because management has its own pet problems or issues. e
result is that creative people take ight, leaving behind others whose skills
are more aligned with trouble xing and other maintenance orientations.
Organizations must identify the truly creative people and provide them
with opportunities to tackle highly creative projects.
28
Here are some ways
to provide opportunities to create that will further additional creativity:
• Allow team members to broaden their knowledge and experience to
discover more creative ways to perform project work.
• Encourage people to look for opportunities to be creative rather than
wait.
• Identify and highlight problems or issues to address and ask for
volunteers.
• Provide some downtime to allow the subconscious to work.
Broaden People’s Knowledge and Experience
Studies have demonstrated that one of the most prevalent characteristics
of creative people is their broad knowledge base and wide range of many
dierent experiences. ese people use that background to come up with
112 • Creative, Ecient, and Eective Project Management
truly creative solutions. A major reason is that they do not have what some
people refer to as hardening of the synapses. ese people keep their mind
open to dierent stimulations and recognize that one size does not t
all. e best way to encourage open-mindedness is to encourage
people
to expand their knowledge and experiences in a way that encourages
developing creative solutions to problems and issues.
29
David Whyte
quotes William Blake in a way that demonstrates the importance of
overcoming a narrow perspective:
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man
as it is, innite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ chinks of his
narrow cavern.
30
Dietrich Dorner warns against the danger of nervously reducing the
operations of a system to what he refers to as “reductive hypothesis.” He
observes that such a hypothesis may result in incomplete assessments
that could be proven incorrect.
31
He also notes that many people do what
they can to further support a reductive hypothesis by disregarding infor-
mation not in line with its assumptions, thereby giving a false sense of
superiority.
32
Here are some ways to broaden people’s knowledge and experience to
further creativity:
• Conduct cross-training.
• Encourage people to look at other projects that have handled similar
problems or issues.
• Encourage people to share knowledge and experiences on the exist-
ing and other projects.
• Have two or more people who have a diversied background work
jointly on a task.
• Provide broad-based training.
Counter Groupthink
One of the biggest challenges to creativity is groupthink. People are as
much social animals as they are individualists; sometimes the former
can smother the latter, causing them to subordinate their thoughts and
opinions to get along with others. People then begin to think alike, even
Laying the Groundwork for a Creative Environment • 113
to deny reality. While it is important for everyone to get along, creativity
can suer as people suspend their critical judgment and subordinate their
ideas to avoid punishment. Every eort should be made to diversify peo-
ple on the team based upon knowledge and experiences, and counter the
dominance of certain personalities. Not an easy task, as Dietrich Dorner
observes, because experts tend to reinforce each other’s thinking, which
can result in conformance in thought and suppression of criticism, also
known as groupthink.
33
Here are some ways to counter groupthink to
further creativity:
• Bring in consultants from outside the project team.
• Have every decision identify potential pitfalls that accompany it.
• Hire people with diversied backgrounds, including personality
types.
• Select someone at team meetings to play the devil’s advocate.
Encourage Transformational Leadership
Everyone on a team has the potential to be a leader. Under most cir-
cumstances, certain individuals will emerge as leaders while previous
ones become followers for the good of the group. Truly creative groups
allow everyone the opportunity to lead their members. is leadership
can be either transactional or transformational. Transactional leadership
is doing the routine tasks that keep the group performing; their tasks
are managerial in nature. Transformational leadership is taking risks
that involve change; these tasks deal more with chance and are oen
associated with creativity simply because they challenge the status quo.
Creative teams, however, need both types of leadership. Transactional
leadership keeps the team functioning; transformational leadership does
the creative work. e challenge is ensuring that transactional and trans-
formational leadership work together, not operating at cross-purposes.
34
Here are some ways to encourage transformational leadership to further
creativity:
• Acknowledge that every project requires both types of leadership.
• Make the distinction between transformational and transactional
activities.
• Recognize publicly that transformational leadership has an inherent
risk that transactional leadership does not.
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