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MANAGING AND MOTIVATING THE RELUCTANT CREATIVE
Your naturally creative employees are a valuable resource for unique and novel ideas. But if you ignore the creative potential of the rest of your employees, you may miss your greatest reservoir of novel ideas. Sure, these employees aren't usually creative. However, they can be. Ample research exists to show that practically every person can be creative regardless of intelligence, age, sex, or education. Why, then, aren't most people creative, and what can you do to tap the creativity of the "normal" person?
Earlier in this chapter, we noted that a significant difference between the naturally creative person and the rest of us was that they approached problems with a different mind-set. In contrast, most of us are locked into traditional thought patterns and processes. We follow the tried and true. We have been taught or have learned from experience that the way to solve a problem or confront something new is to relate it to a previous experience. What have we previously encountered like this and how did we respond? If our solution worked before, maybe it will work again. We compartmentalize and categorize problems and situations. For each type of problem or situation, we apply our preformulated, tested solution. And it usually works. It's not creative, but it is effective and efficient. Plus, it helps us to retain our sanity in an often confusing world. So what's wrong with that?
The problem with our traditional approach to new situations and new problems is that we tend to jump to solutions before we fully understand the new problem. We end up applying the right solution to the wrong problem. A classic example of this occurred in a large corporation. Managers of this company discovered that customer orders weren't being filled on time. They jumped to the conclusion that their employees needed training, and they spent thousands of dollars on a new training program. Yet even after the extensive training, orders were still not filled on time. It was only after the money had been spent that an enterprising employee suggested that employees were making mistakes and taking too long to fill orders because the order bins weren't always located in the same place. "Why not," he suggested, "paint the order bins different colors according to product line so employees could easily find what they needed?" His suggestion was adopted and performance improved almost immediately. His "creative" solution was quick, effective, and inexpensive. But no one had thought of it before.
In another company, managers noticed that the plant floor was cluttered with product. They jumped to the conclusion that the company had too much work-in-process inventory and implemented a Just-in-Time inventory system at great expense. Only after did they discover the real problem. The clutter on the plant floor was actually rework and rejects due to poor quality. What they needed was better quality control.
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