Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Three Principles in Building a Creative Digital Workplace

Creativity is an inherent ability that cannot be taught, only developed. 

Digital is the age of people, and digital work environment needs to embrace the abundance of information and the culture of innovation, put people at the center of business, and to both engage employees and delight customers. How can digital leaders set principles to encourage creativity, build creative digital workplaces and open the new chapter of digital innovations?

Encourage curiosity and build digital mindsets: Creativity is an innate ability to create novel ideas. Creativity in the workplace is fundamentally about the mental production of new ideas, not just any new ideas, but the creation of ideas that are both original and valuable. Everyone has the ability to create, but creativity is an inherent ability that cannot be taught, only developed. As businesses get more cut-throat in the hyper-connected working environment, this puts stress on the labor force that is not conducive to more creative and experimental thinking. But if you want to make a "creative culture," and build long-term business competency, you have to build a creative workplace which evokes the endless curiosity of its people and encourages the growth mindset for catalyzing changes. More specifically, a creative digital workplace will:
- Provide intellectual challenges and help people make progress.
-A place to strengthen their strength and expand their knowledge.
-A change to apply their ideas and recognition for their ideas.
-A place people enjoy learning and doing, sharing insight and bringing wisdom.


Encourage people to question the status quo and think independently and create an environment that encourages dissent and candor: Innovation is all about how to disrupt the old thinking and the old way to do the things. Innovation is about seeing things from different angles or solving problems in different ways. It’s about breaking down silos and breaking through conventional wisdom. Innovation journey is like taking a hiking trip on the trail, only very few or even no people ever went before, it takes courage and emotional maturity. Innovators are disruptive to the status quo, and often they are visionary as well, it means the seemly “misfit” nature of innovators are invaluable to push the business or the world getting out of the comfort zone, for advancement. Also working with innovative individuals who have a strong sense of self has many benefits as well, because often they are authentic with independent thinking skills and clear thought processes, no hidden agenda, fewer rules, say what they mean and mean what they say, to keep things simple, because simplicity is one of the most important innovation principles.


Help people feel more comfortable with chaos, uncertainty, and ambiguity and develop creative capacity: Due to the “VUCA” characteristics of digital new normal, the digital workplace today needs to become dynamic and informative. The more innovative the employees are, the less tolerant of structure (policies, rules, and paradigms) and less respectful of consensus one is. The workplace needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization (from top leaders to front-line employees) understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and exploit opportunities in new and innovative ways. The emergent digital technologies and tools help to break of silo paradigms and loosening overly restricted structure, utilize cutting-edge narrow band psychometrics to diagnose, assess and train the core factors of creativity such as, cognitive processes, personality, motivation, confidence, and build an open, hyper-connected and highly collaborative working environment for sowing innovation seeds, growing creativity fruits, and harvesting innovation abundance.


The digital workplace is fluid, alive, creative and productive. Organizations need to invest in the cultivation of capacity for innovation. Mutual trust, innovation leadership, and emotional maturity are all critical in building a highly effective innovation workforce and workplace and achieve an exceptional result.



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