According to Teresa M. Amabile, a leading creativity researcher, creativity in the workplace can be defined as "the production of novel and useful ideas by individuals or teams working together in complex social systems."
While OECD defines innovation as "the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), process, marketing method, or organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation, or external relations."
Organisational freshness implies that there is innovative thinking, creative problem-solving, originality in operations, inventive processes, imaginative collaboration, entrepreneurial spirit, dynamic innovation culture, creative synthesis, adaptive creativity or design thinking.
It is the introduction of new perspectives, insights and methodologies so that the organisation is aligned with the dynamic world of doing things.
How then should the organisation engender that culture of freshness to avoid being obsolete? Remember obsolescence is the kiss of death of most organisations.
The most obvious way of encouraging the culture of creative destruction is to make sure that there is a climate of risk-taking. This is the experimentation with new ideas from leadership initiatives, employee ideas, market trends, competitive pressures, research results, customer feedback, industry partnerships and technological advances.
There should be an allowance for making well-calculated risks to reap certain benefits and learnings.
Organisational risk-taking can lead to innovation and creativity, growth and expansion, competitive advantage, learning and development, grit, audacity, enhanced decision-making skills, breakthrough discoveries, increased motivation and engagement and personal and professional growth.
Fruitful risk-taking cannot flourish without furnishing the players with adequate resources like time, budgets, policies and learning. Some organisations have deliberately created time for freshness. Google has a “20 percent time" policy and Amazon has “Day 1". This experimental culture has birthed multimillion-dollar businesses and therefore a worthwhile pursuit
Creativity and innovation can’t be possible without an entrenched synergistic environment. To excite synergy there have to be cutting edge of ingredients like clarifying goals, transparent communication, cultivating a collaborative culture, providing cross-functional training, establishing clear roles and responsibilities, encouraging diversity and inclusion, facilitating team-building activities, implementing collaborative tools and technologies, providing regular feedback and recognition, leading by example, encourage cross-functional projects and celebrate successes together.
Some organisations reward and appreciate great business ideas from employees. This motivates a culture of high performance. Employees become more fired up to benefit from the goodies of seeing ideas and seeing the light of day. This encourages professional creativity and innovation because there is some pie to be gained.
Humankind loves new things. That is why organisations keep rebranding and repositioning to stay relevant. Those who don’t invent are consigned to be buried by more ambitious organisations. Organisations should stay fresh to kill the poison of routine.
