The process of creativity can be very messy. In fact, it is perhaps necessarily messy.
Like the artist’s workshop. The palette is volcanic, their clothes dirty, the floor is full of stuff, the place is bursting with stacked boxes, old newspapers, filthy pots and a collection of painted and semi-painted canvasses. The blank ones are in temporary waiting mode in a corner of the room. The vacuum cleaner was last seen in the place at the end of World War II. The workshop in fact seems like a World War III exploratory laboratory.
But the final painting is a beautiful and delicate masterpiece.
Creation emerged from chaos, from little daily pieces of Big Bang. The final, unique product consumed all entropy in the room, all cigarette smells, all residual double malts and a few gallons of mediocre coffee. All seemed to make their way in pilgrimage to that canvass.
I can’t imagine the same unique, beautiful masterpiece being created in a white coat laboratory, or a clinically sterile setting, or twenty Six Sigma workshops for that matter.
We have been led to believe that the shaping of a future in our organizations requires the strictness of Precise Mechanics. It is in fact closer to Clay Modelling . We aim for an amphora, but, in the process, the hands get very dirty and dictate every round trip to the final shape, spitting little pieces here and there, and witnessing the more than occasional falling apart disaster.
We need to understand that Precise Mechanics (read: reams of PowerPoints by Big Consulting) offer only temporary solace, the deceitful high of a few drinks followed by the reality of a painful hangover and the sense of an unsolved mystery.
Maybe we should send managers to do pottery instead of MBAs.
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ACCELERATORS from The Chalfont Project:
Renew, transform, re-invent the way you do things. Organizations today need to look at better ways, alternative and innovative ways to change the status quo. It’s not about being radical for the sake of it. Only if you try radical ways will you be in a better position to find your ‘fit for purpose’ goals.
As Michelangelo said: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’. He was a radical in the way we talk about it.
At The Chalfont Project, we have crafted a series of short interventions called Accelerators [1]:
- Reboot! The Game Plan – [1] Do you feel like you and your team are stuck in the day to day doing of things and many aspects of the running of the organization don’t make the agenda?
There may or may not be anything obviously wrong. Or maybe there is. But this is not a good enough state of affairs.
This high intensity, accelerated intervention takes leadership teams of all levels through a process of discovery and identification of both stumbling blocks and enablers will be followed by a clear ‘so-what’ and an action plan. It results in alignment around a well crafted Game Plan that reflects where they see the organization/team/department in the short to medium term and a detailed commitment to action that can be tracked.
- Critical Thinking [1] – Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes? Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?
In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking Methods and Questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.
You will learn about Strategy Acid tests and many Mind Fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.
These high impact, short interventions for senior teams, will:
- challenge ways of thinking
- provide immediate and trackable actions
- drive change
- develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.
Contact us [2] to find out more information or discuss how we can support your business.