On Management Creativity

The beauty is you can mix tools for the tasks and you can seek to understand problems by the iterative use of these tools. The holy grail of creativity is to look quizzically at situations and think from multiple angles and not ‘follow’ the written down code always. It is OK to question - better questions will get you to the right answer!

- Rajesh Nair

As we build organisations and scale them up into institutions of scale and stature, typically two of the following happen. We overrate efficiency and we underrate creativity and adaptability. The concept of organisation structures for delegation of work pre-supposes the fact there will be minimum change of externalities and that these changes and the subsequent changes are most anticipated and are organic. But the recent times have shown how different this premise is. A pandemic taught us that no amount of planning can help us be prepared for the vagaries of the future, and there is no scientific mechanism which can help us predict things even at a basic 50 % accuracy. And yet we insist on structure and frameworks which drawn upon the vents of the past and we sugar coat these by calling them – management experience.

Adaptability as a management competency is here to stay. The pace of change is coming in at a tremendous pace, and the trajectory of change is steeper as well. Changing behaviour is extremely difficult. There are a few tips and a few guidelines about how to do that, but anybody who is very optimistic about changing behaviour is just deluded. It’s hard to change another people’s behaviour. It’s very hard to change your own. Adaptability is often manifested in organisations with creativity. As a concept, creativity is about thinking differently and not looking at everything in a linear or logical fashion. It is also about understanding processes differently. Process is probably one of those things that is fundamental to the running of organisations. One may even ascribe any entity as a collection of processes.