Leading creative learning for sustained performance
Dr Arthur Shelley Founder, Organizational Zoo Ambassadors Network and
Mark Boyes Creative Director, Knowledge Ink
CREATIVE
LEARNING
If you think you know THE ANSWER to THE PROBLEM, you are probably limiting your own and your team’s performance. The human brain is a self-organizing system which is very efficient at forming patterns around past experiences, it does this to automate decisions from what it already knows. OK, I hear you think… surely this is a good thing - learning from the past to speed-up decision-making? Useful for a world that is static, a world where past experiences would be a beneficial guide to the present and future. However, we all know that the world is an emergent complex place that is frenetic and ever changing and that this is where our decisions based on past experiences can generate sub-optimal options for future opportunities.
GLOBE - Growth.Leadership.Organisation.Business.Education 3 4
A key challenge we face is our early successes usually arise from solving problems in the way our education system taught us to. The ‘system and the authorities’ (teachers and employers) reward is from ‘discovering the right answer’. That is, working from existing knowledge with KNOWN principles and following the best practices. You can ask Kodak and Nokia how well this worked for their sustained performance going forward. If you reflect for a moment, you will realize that today’s answers are insufficient for tomorrow’s successes, as rapid changes in political and socio-economic relationships change customer and stakeholder expectations.
Why is creativity essential for sustained performance?