 Contact me if your answer to any of the above is yes. From May 1st I shall be offering online training customised to your business needs in my areas of expertise – leadership, creativity and innovation. From 5 to 50 participants. From 30 minutes to as long as you like, one hour at a time, maximum of four hours in a day (with breaks). Spending too much time watching a screen and listening to one voice is tiring and boring. This is not how good strategy is crafted or how organizations and teams can evolve. So much more is achieved by energizing the knowledge and skills brought in by each member and forming a shared vision. Whether it’s time for strategy or time for customer care, time for disruption or time for consolidation, time for serious thinking or time for fun (or both), the best outcomes arise when short and feisty collaborative sessions alternate with individual reflection. All my sessions are engaging and interactive with your organization’s requirements and your people’s moods in mind, and with my own expertise. Contact me for a conversation at [email protected] or tel +357 99 67 11 73. Training for Cyprus-based companies may be eligible for HRDA subsidies. CREATION is an anagram of REACTION  Covid-19. A deadly virus is challenging our creativity and our reactivity.
«Πενία τέχνας κατεργάζεται» comes from the Greek poet Theokritos (3rd century BC), and roughly translates into “necessity is the mother of invention”. Our creativity is indeed reacting to the coronavirus framed by many problems we seek to resolve. Let’s recognize how important for good creative outcomes it is to: Understand the context. Never before have we been privy to so much information so fast. Our big data analytics are OK but we genuinely need more to make sense of things. The information we want is not only on the virus itself but also on its impact on the economy, politics and society too. Working with good information is crucial for good outcomes. Define the challenge(s). We are faced with a huge number of challenges: understanding the malady, minimizing the spread, coping with the infected, minimizing deaths, keeping health professionals and supply chains alive and well, making the best of isolation, finding a vaccine, getting back to work, getting back to (a new?) normality and so on. Clearly defining the challenge you want to address is the best basis for finding creative solutions. Seek imaginative solutions. We have plenty and keep them coming everybody. Many valuable ideas come from where there is already some expertise – 3-D printing, scuba-diving for masks and ventilators, online forums for teaching, meetings, music, theater, comedy, deliveries – or those that come when suddenly small things in family and social lives become vital. The best ideas however come from purposeful imaginative thinking. They can be sparked by humor, dreams, unexpected connections and a healthy relationship with the impossible. Covid-19, this horrible little thing will only respond to action, the right action. It takes a lot to transform fear and dismay into resourcefulness and optimism. And a lot more to make a creative idea go live. Consider how vital it is to: Choose the best solutions. You have great ideas. Which are the best ideas based on the value they will bring when implemented, their originality and their feasibility? The spread of coronavirus is forcing us to make very big decisions with knowledge that is highly imperfect. Every option has pros and cons and time seems to be a luxury. This makes us nervous as to the risks of what we are undertaking in matters in which we have zero experience. But we cannot avoid making the choices rapidly. Get buy in for your ideas. We may think selfishly – ourselves, our families, our countries first. However when an invisible threat lurks at close quarters we are all better off in ensuring our choices are taken with others in mind. The best way to sell creative solutions is with a spirit of positivity and community even if the time for consultation and dialogue is absolutely minimal. This will also help further effective implementation and risk-sharing. Make your solutions happen. Whether learning new things online or deciding what restrictive measures to impose on others, action is paramount. Creativity is not only a thought experiment, it is realized only in practice. It is best to transform your ideas into reality sooner rather than later. Which of your ideas is now ready to go live? When do you start? Good luck! Creativity does not have values, people do. Even as the biological effects of Covid-19 are the same for all, its overall effects on the haves and the have-nots, the well-governed and the badly-governed, the selfish and the altruistic, the close-minded and the open-minded will be quite different. To do a good job as humans we need harmony between global ideas and local action and, we need to best use both our technical know-how and our human skills. Consider: Global creativity and local reactivity. Two different realities in our present world order have become obvious. The first is of a world that is highly interdependent and, indeed, there has been unprecedented exchange of knowledge between countries on Covid-19. The second, is that the forces of execution of public policy are governments of nation-states and this has led to a dogged concentration on the plight of one’s own. These realities could produce reasonably efficient mechanisms for dealing with coronavirus on a global scale, only if the spirit of international collaboration does not yield to xenophobia, which is also raising its ugly head. Technical know-how and human skills. Two other realities affect the ways we operate in this crisis. Our advanced specialist know-how and practice in many areas – medicine, health management, equipment, essential supply chains, security, communications and much more – are invaluable in helping us cope with this crisis. However innovation is shaped by culture – the way people absorb and use technology. We would be nowhere without the human skills needed to relate to others, to win people’s trust or to gain acceptance for public programs which involve sacrifices. Without these our innovations will be at best underutilized. As we face Covid-19 can we help open values win the day and can we use our human skills to ensure our technology is serving humanity?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |