LEAD from your CREATIVITY DOMAIN

APPENDIX I:  Savanting Study 10

LEAD from your CREATIVITY DOMAIN because Leadership is Creational and there’s a Creativity Crisis

BUSINESS  CASE  and  IMPLEMENTATION  STEPS

• • • • Job description of creativity accelerator team
      • Implementation steps
      • Business case to establish creativity accelerator team

Job Description of Creativity Accelerator Team

If you were charged with making successful one of the new creatives successful or one of your R&D project leaders, I think you would do the following:

• • • provide strategies, possible models of a solution or how to proceed, information on approaches that have worked or not worked, ideas on possible solutions, and so on;
    • provide institutional knowledge from the company as a whole, from departments, and from individual jobs;
    • provide research and education on ways to accelerate creative success such as from the R&D veterans reporting to you;
    • provide research and education on the relevant territories where creativity is to be generated; provide environmental scanning and trends on relevant fronts;
    • provide problem-solving for each impediment to progress. Creatives can then offload issues to your team while they continue with their work.  Perhaps you could provide trouble-shooting SWAT teams recruited specifically for each time and place of the impediment and dispatched to the location.
    • recruit human resources and other resources to accelerate idea-generation and implementation;
    • make the best use of the creative expertise in your R&D department to help the company transition to a creative culture;
    • remove obstacles, administrivia, bureaucracy, and politics interfering with peak performance and speed;
    • provide the financial justifications and business cases for implementing what the creatives have developed;
    • provide motivation;

Sample Implementation Steps

Let me suggest some implementation activities to get you started, Nicholas:

1.      Make a business case to establish your Creativity Accelerator Team

There are statistics available to help you calculate these costs:

• • • You’ll want to research the cost of losing institutional knowledge by discarding your noncreatives: for example, according to HR Advisor, unique knowledge comprises 42% of the total knowledge the average employee uses in his or her current role.  Fire one person and that unique knowledge associated with someone who has done that particular job is permanently lost.

• • • The costs of both recruiting and onboarding each new hire is likely known in your HR department. These costs for onboarding so many new hires at once are likely larger.  Someone must be training, mentoring, coaching, and leading them which takes them away from their jobs.
    • There are opportunity costs if creations and inventions are delayed.

Other calculations to consider:

• • • There are financial gains for speeding the creative work of the new creative hires so they can concentrate without distraction. Having support staff will minimize the disruptions to the creative process
    • There are financial gains for improving the company’s competitive advantage through new creations and innovations.
    • You can pitch that you’re the one to lead this program because R&D is the company’s reservoir for expertise in innovation, invention, and creativity.  R&D experts have the experience with creativity to train other parts of the company
    • Reengineering and a change in the corporate modus operandi can release hidden creativity assets already embedded in the organization.
    • There are smarter ways to infuse organizational creativity than fighting the talent war for the scarcest talent on the planet.
    • What you’ll be proposing is a revolutionary new model for increasing corporate creativity. This should be of special interest to a new CEO trying to make a name for himself in the world.
    • Add statistics from experimenting in your R&D department

2. Start your creativity acceleration program within R&D and skunkworks projects already reporting to you. make your R&D project leaders your first “clients:”

• • • to practice;
    • to improve your department’s performance;
    • to provide performance data for proof of concept to enhance your pitch to the CEO and other department heads to empower the Creativity Acceleration Team to work company-wide;
    • to give you time to understand and perfect your “Nicholas talent science” and how those talents will be developing over time;
    • to recruit people from R&D with your talent constellation for the Creativity Acceleration Team – especially those who institutional knowledge;
    • to train your Creativity Acceleration Team with your “Nicholas talent science,” your values and modus operandi;
    • internalize the identity of both a creative and creational leader and develop your natural leadership style for this new role: lead-by-solution organically.
    • to find or develop resources and procedures for the team to support creative projects;
    • to study the creative process from R&D’s company experts;
    • to learn best practices for R&D, creativity, and upgrading company creativity; to learn best practices for speeding and upgrading innovation, invention, and creation;
    • to learn how to teach logic-sourced creativity.

1. 3. Begin recruiting outside of R&D
   4. Connect the dots of each project as you do for each client until you find the right direction for the company as whole so projects can be accelerated by the direction of advance and trends for the company and industry.
   5. Publicize the Creativity Acceleration team to other departments grappling with creativity issues. Share resources and knowledge.
   6. Keep relevant industries informed of your creative approaches.
   7. Keep improving your talent science and creativity domain. Frontier, create, push the envelope on how you do what you do.
   8. Invent and experiment with new company models and best practices for transitioning to increased creativity and adaptivity for companies and individuals.
   9. Develop your natural leadership style: lead-by-solution organically.
   10. Analyze the successes and failures of projects supported by Creativity Acceleration Teams to improve the team performance. Create a creativity-acceleration database to capture performance results and analysis.
   11. Differentiate the Creativity Accelerator Team into various specialties: execution creatives for implementation of the results of creatives, problem-solving SWAT teams, resource sourcing, researchers, administrators, IT for creative project acceleration, and so on.
   12. Create a newsletter to report performance, shared knowledge, strategies, and tips
   13. Make recommendations to the company for improving corporate creativity or creativity-project performance. Join up the creativity projects for synergy.
   14. Provide training classes to present best practices for increasing individual and department creativity
   15. Provide training classes to develop creativity accelerators and execution creatives.
   16. Organize all projects around your company’s creativity domain
   17. Promote distributed leadership beyond your area of authority
   18. Support many personal “clients” across the company to meet significant goals.
   19. Be proactive in pitching Creativity Accelerator Team support across the company
   20. Offer advice to manager across the company for how to create a culture of creativity
   21. Shift company culture to one that promotes operating in top-talent flow from one’s creativity domain within the company creativity domain.