Creativity, Innovation and Leadership Skills Development

Creativity, Innovation and Leadership Skills Development

This time thoughtful sharing of my featured article - #Innovation in Leadership as Associate Contribution in #Peoplepal Initiative - Fortnightly Leadership Newspaper http://peoplepal.in 
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Weird is Good:  Why Dissonance Fosters Innovation?? Embrace the absurd to innovate.

Innovation requires leadership to go beyond the tried and tested to attempt something new.

I recently overheard about a cutting-edge leadership in one of the workshop that had just attended with one of my friend.

"It was weird," he said.

"Weird good or weird bad?" I asked. The question caused my erstwhile friend to pause mid-sentence.

"Weird good...I think..."

He then admitted that the "weirdness" caused him to veer from his usual approach to leadership.

Innovation and creative problem-solving are quickly becoming the most powerful competitive weapons a company can employ.

But, creativity hates sameness, routine and the comfort of normality. It despises predictability and stability. Creativity resides at the outer edges of the bell curve.

Dissonance and discord may be less pleasant to experience and more difficult to manage than harmony and consonance, but they are far more likely to provide fertile ground for creative breakthroughs.

So, what does this mean for leaders?

If you want to foster an environment that cultivates creativity, you need to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. In fact, you need to do more than that. You need to seek it out. It is about growing a culture of innovation, not just hiring a few creative outliers.

Here are the ways for leaders to embrace discord and foster innovation:

 Use the Creative Whack Pack by world expert on creativity, as often as you can. This creative tool is like your own little pocket book of weirdness. It’s brilliant for looking at things differently and engaging your right brain.

 Learn to manage and cultivate conflicting opinions. Detest group think. Encourage people to come up with the “idea that will get you fired”.

 Put weird on your radar. If you notice words like 'bizarre', 'strange' or 'odd' flying around the office, this is your cue to perk up and follow the trail.

Embrace deviants and rebels in your team. It applies to the misfits in your organization; those people who regularly upset the apple cart.

Unlocking creative potential is key to economic growth. Creativity is not the mystical attribute reserved for the lucky few. Creativity is a process that can be developed and managed. Develop the mindset, skill sets, and tool sets of highly creative people in business, arts and science, and apply these to your everyday work for the influence and persuasion as leading strategies for getting the results.

Design-Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation

How do you create a strategy for guaranteeing that innovation and creativity flourish in your organization? When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. 

Arts-Based Learning for Business

Arts-based learning is an interdisciplinary approach to learning, using the arts as a pathway to explore non-art topics such as leadership and management in business. The goal of arts-based learning is not to teach people to be artists, but to create immersive learning experiences using artistic processes to help people gain new insights and perspectives about business challenges.

 “Lead to Innovation is the key to the company’s future success and the global race for innovation is getting intense that guides us through different skills to explore the potential power of our minds and shows us how to lead the product innovation to business success.” To fuel innovation a need to encourage more collaborative ways of working and increase learning and knowledge sharing.”