Creativity in the professional business realm is firmly rooted in the ability to connect seemingly unrelated information, thoughts, ideas and strategies.  This requires a few key things:

1. Expectations must be communicated.  If you ask people to be creative, they can interpret that in many ways.  Provide the framework.  Start with describing the situation – not the specific problem to be solved, but the situation – the destination in general terms, the constraints, the history, and the clear objectives.  To do this, you must make sure you do not solve 90% of the problem in this step.  Leave it open enough to allow for creative thought, while providing a framework with immovable constraints, company values and goals not up for debate.
2. Describe the Creative Process.  If you ask people for ideas, and then don’t use any, tell them they are wrong or that their idea won’t work, you will stop the creativity from flowing.  “Yes, and…” is a good approach.  Explain that you want to brainstorm 100 ideas in 5 different areas.  Tell them what will happen next and how those ideas will be processed.  Involve others as much as possible in the steps of the process and the implementation.  You can elicit more involvement, especially from those you might think are not creative, by creating a safe and predictable place.
3. Ask Questions to clarify.  The idea that someone puts forth first is rarely their best idea.  They are testing the waters.  If they are shut down, you will never hear the good idea.  Curiously ask them the How, What, When, Where types of questions to better understand their suggestion.  Most of us cannot clearly communicate what is in our head in 30 seconds or less, especially with a creative or unique idea or concept.
4. Connect the Dots.  If you enter the creative process without ‘the solution’ in your mind, you have a lot better chance of combining seemingly unrelated ideas.  Group words on paper.  Create different categories.  Find multiple ways that different ideas connect.  Don’t jump too quickly to conclusions.  If you need an immediate solution, then have a meeting with your problem solvers and solve the problem.  If you want to stimulate creativity, give it time to grow and ideas to evolve.

Many an ambitious entrepreneur has worked tirelessly in a labor of love to create something really awesome without ever documenting a process.  Then, maybe someday, when the company gets large enough to involve levels of management and departments, it might be time to write processes.

This thought processes misses an enormous opportunity!!

The process of documenting processes in writing has multiple, powerful benefits:

1. It extracts, from the entrepreneur’s brain, the brilliant details of how they want things done, which have been the basis for their success.  These are things they often fail to mention, think others will automatically do, or don’t even realize they do themselves.  Gold mine of information!  Leads to consistency.
2. When followed by others, it leads to more effective communication of expectations, and enables employees to be more successful at completing tasks as expected.  Many processes can be turned into checklists to ensure quality performance. Leads to increasingly successful employees.
3. Maybe most exciting, they provide a basis for creativity.  How can you improve a process unless you know how it works now?  How can you know if a process needs to be improved if it is not done consistently in the first place?  By looking at and documenting each step of the process, each step becomes an opportunity for creativity and improvement.  Flowchart the process and circle the areas with greatest risk exposure, greatest opportunity to create awesome customer experiences and greatest chances to innovate and move ahead of the competition.  Leads to innovation and growth!

It can be quite a painful exercise to document processes – especially to getting started.  And, as innovations happen, the processes really should be updated.  But, even in a very growth-focused, entrepreneurial organization, there are still some people who ‘ground’ the rest of the team who, if supported by others, would gladly do this for you.  Who are these individuals in your organization or department?