YOUR ORGANIZATION & CREATIVITY - 3 JUNE 2012

Slot Canyon Wall - Lower Antelope Canyon, AZ, File #1230125

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This is the third article in my series about creativity and the challenges ahead. I think I need to clarify something kind of basic in this whole series. While my articles have been focus’d on work, don’t think they’re only applicable to work environments. The concepts and ideals I’m promoting here are applicable to anything with human beings involved. That’s quite a large group of things this can be applicable to.

What’s today’s article about. Well, at first I was going to post something about how organizations are structured and why they are the way they are. The focus was less about creativity and more about structure. I guess after I finished writing the thing--all two thousand words of it--I was less than enamored about it because I think it missed the point. The point is “Your organization is killing creativity”. Which is way more important than simply a discussion about the structure. We’ll get to structure one of these days. For now, I assume you know how your organization is structured. What you might not know is it’s not helping the efforts to be innovative, agile, and effective.

STRUCTURE AND CREATIVITY

As an initial stance, constraining structure does not support creativity. This is not saying structure is not a part of creativity. Some structure is quite applicable in the sense that tremendously beautiful arts of work were produced with very defined structural constraints. Some poetry forms such as Haiku are very insightful and beautiful yet developed in a very structured form. I’m not saying structure is foriegn to creativity. I’m only saying structure for its own sake without creativity in the balance is very constraining.

Why do I think that? Well, first and foremost let’s get back to structure. Back in the day, the industrial revolutionary day, organizations were designed on themes similar to the intricate machines they were making. The themes included a hierarchal design with high specialization required out of its work force. The theoretical advantage of this structure was high efficiency was gained by every element in the organization conducting it’s duties precisely as intended within the context of the entire organization--doing no more and no less. Thinking of the inner workings of a watch, you see this as a perfect metaphor for highly efficient organizations built during the industrial revolution.

This organizational construct was perfect in the 20th century leading to the default structures we see to day. This is especially true in the governmental setting, which is where I do my day job.

One of the primary tenants of this structure is conformity. To maximize benefits throughout the organization, conformity is required to ensure one division conducts its operations precisely as the next. The purpose being no wasted effort adjusting from one set of procedures to the other. Of course, the rules or procedures are given by a central authority that’s an expert in the field. The concept here is your highly specialized leadership at the central authority establishes the best advice simply because they’re the most qualified in your organization.

Let’s take a stretch here. How welcoming is a centrally controlled, hierarchal, organization populated with highly specialized individuals to creativity? How about this, how agile is this structure? What I mean is when the organization that’s honed to a fine edge to conduct a specific task, how adjustable is that organization when the purpose or requirements change?

That’s the core problem for these types of organizational structures and creativity. They’re practically incompatible. While the structure is perfect for a well established task requiring many people, it’s not very effective when your challenge is changing every day.

Here’s the other problem. Unless you’re looking outside, your organization will likely not see solutions because it’s not inventive enough to see beyond its own self. That’s a huge problem because your organization likely aware there’s a problem but the process for improvement is to keep doing what's always been done before, just better.

Slot Canyon

Great Horned Owl Family - Milnesand, NM, File #1216036

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COMPLIANCE IS NOT MANDATORY

One of the core tenants of a hierarchal organization is conformity. The idea here is one part of the structure depends on the other part doing its job just as its supposed to do day in and day out. Otherwise, they’re be chaos with tasks being on willy-nilly. As a result, your central authority will issue dictates stating compliance with specific direction is mandatory. There’d probably be a process instituted to ensure such compliance. To an extreme, the compliance process would be populated by specialist in the “compliance field” to ensure the compliance process is completed successfully. To a degree, the compliance process and it’s result becomes its own product, the product being reports on status of compliance.

Compliance makes a lot of sense for basic, traditional, simple things. These things might be precisely what your mom taught you growing up--i.e. wash your hands before eating, don’t stand outside in the rain without a coat on, look both ways before crossing the street. You get my drift.

The problem comes down to this perspective. “If every rule is ultimately important then none of the rules have inherent importance.” Clearly some rules are more important than others. But, if you remove all opportunity for judgement on the application of the rules, you remove the opportunity for the most important rules to be complied with when you need it most, at the most critical point.

BTW, I’m using compliance as a demonstration of the inadequacies of the greater iceberg that represents organizational structures designed for the industrial revolution. You can apply the same concept to any other hierarchal benefit--i.e. centralized detailed policy distribution, personal technical specialization, centralized control, and so many more.

NOT ALL IS BAD

After saying all this and perhaps getting your attention, let me make a statement, “Not everything you learned or depend on since the beginning is bad”. Oh, far from it. I am not making a case of “either, or”. I am not saying hierarchal structures, conformity, specialization, and the like are bad in every case. I am saying they’re bad as the central theme of your organization. As a supporting theme, you betcha. As a central theme, nope.

Here’s the other thing. Let’s think for a moment like a musician or an artist. We’ve all been there hoping to be creative at something. We try to get at it yet the skills don’t allow us. The drawing doesn’t work. The painting doesn’t look right. The sounds aren’t what we think. What’s up with that? For the regular arts we intuitively know the answer. We think basic skills. We need the basic skills to even begin to be creative in the discipline we desire. That all makes sense, doesn’t it. Well, why would we not think that for everything we do vs just the traditional arts? Why would we think the traditional arts are the only venue to explore our creativity? We shouldn’t.

What we think about for the traditional arts are exactly what we need to be thinking about everything else--over structure is bad, under structure is bad. Structure is a start, from that creativity can flourish. This is simply saying “creativity is the whole point while structure needs to be in the supporting role”.

CREATIVITY NEEDS TO FLOURISH

As I noted in the last two articles, the world is an incredibly changing and dynamic place. Arguments can be made that the rate of change in culture, finances, technology, agriculture, in anything is greater now than at anytime in human history. The question is how do we deal with these effectively. I am taking the tact our best hope is not to keep doing what we’ve always been doing. Obviously, if our previous best tactics have not been up to the challenge then something else, truly innovative needs to be embraced. That is pointing ourselves to embracing creativity.

The opportunity here is building a system that embraces creativity as a central theme yet has support structure that’s truly supportive of imagination, creativity, and innovation, you’ll begin to position yourself to be agile, effective, and efficient.

Cheers

Tom

Great Horned Owl