In the paper attached I just need this paper slimmed down to 1 page single spaced 500 words, I still need the following sections in bold (creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution. ***No references Needed*** Just utilize the paper attached and it has be slimmed down to 1 page single spaced 500 words
Creative Abrasion Good ideas are produced by discussion and debate, so people need to be good at disagreeing if they want their groups to be creative and innovative. Creative abrasion comes from the friction of ideas rubbing against each other. There’s an element of conflict. It’s a process of creating and exploring ideas through discussion and disagreement. The first step for creative abrasion is to generate a lot of ideas. This isn’t the same thing as brainstorming — it’s more disciplined and focused. With brainstorming, ideas are generated without judgement or criticism. Creative abrasion has the supportive elements of brainstorming, but is also includes confrontation. Diversity means more than demographic diversity (race, gender, class, etc.). Diversity also includes intellectual diversity, people who think differently and people who have different skills. Diversity of thought is important for the group. Different voices add to the mix. Diversity attracts creative people who are stimulated by exposure to a mix of ideas. At Pixar, they hired a wide range of different people who all came to respect each other. Despite their differences, they all treated each other as equals. Conflict is a valuable tool. Intellectual conflict is nothing to fear. In fact, it’s good. But when conflict becomes personal and people turn on each other, it’s destructive. Leaders must point out destructive conflict when it arises; it shouldn’t be tolerated. It can be hard not to take offense when people don’t like your ideas. It can feel like a personal attack, and things can spiral out of control quickly. Some people will withdraw from the process rather than risk conflict. Productive conflict is a lot of work, and doing it right requires a lot of trust between team members. The feeling of community is important for the group to survive the conflict. If everyone has a deep sense of common purpose, they won’t take it too personally when their ideas are critiqued. Community makes people feel safe offering their ideas, even if people disagree with them. It is the leader’s job to remind people of the group’s purpose and values. The leader encourages people when they become frustrated with the process, the leader keeps the group working by asking questions and the leader strives to keep people stimulated and thinking. It’s important to keep people with diverse ideas talking to each other. It’s also important to connect different parts of the organization that might not otherwise be in communication. Leaders should avoid imposing solutions on the team. Instead, they should ask probing questions that motivate the team to generate their own solutions. Creative abrasion is a skill that can be learned and practiced. Creative Agility Creative agility is the ability of a group to repeatedly try to find out what works. Learning and development are important, but so is getting the job done. Ultimately the process should have tangible results, because at the end of the day, performance is what really matters. Too much structure stifles innovation, but not enough structure will result in chaos and lack of progress. Finding the right balance is tricky, and the leader must always monitor the situation and adjust the structure accordingly. Constant experimentation fuels innovation. Innovation, after all, comes from discovery rather than planning. Trial and error is the best way to explore when the path forward isn’t fully known, and good leaders encourage important creative activities. They support the pursuit of new ideas; they foster reflection and analysis; and they promote adjustments based on lessons learned. These activities take place repeatedly to work a problem until a solution emerges. Each cycle incorporates the lessons learned from the last cycle. How long it takes depends on how complex the problem is — sometimes it only takes a few iterations to find a solution, but sometimes experimentation can continue for years. New ideas should be pursued quickly and proactively. Keep your options open by testing several solutions. Don’t try to define what the solution will look like ahead of time. Spend as little time as possible in planning; instead, make prototypes, test them and repeat. Groups that spend most of their time planning are less successful than groups that are immersed in experimentation. The faster a group can test ideas, the faster the group will learn. And the faster it learns, the quicker it can figure out what does and does not work. Of course, this isn’t license to be sloppy — speed should be balanced with patience and a measure of rigor. In any group, a certain amount of failure is inevitable, so leaders must learn to tolerate it. Making mistakes is an important part of learning. If your group isn’t experiencing some failure, the team probably isn’t trying enough options. They are likely taking a low risk approach which will not result in innovative discovery. But while failure should be tolerated — and to a certain extent even cultivated — don’t try experiments that could damage the company or people if they fail. When failure occurs, don’t punish or try to assign blame. If you hunt out the guilty parties every time something goes wrong, no one will want to risk making mistakes. Everyone will try to play it safe. This will kill innovation. Sometimes people think that experiments are like pilot projects. They are not. Pilots are the first step in taking a new course of action, the first step in implementing an idea that has already been decided on. The goal of a pilot isn’t to learn new things, but to make sure the plan works. The goal of an experiment, on the other hand, is to explore. A valuable step in the experimentation process is to spend some time reflecting on the outcomes. This is where experiments pay off. Gather the data from the experiment, get feedback from participants and analyze the information. The whole team should be involved in the process. Then, take what you have learned and decide on next steps. There might be strong indications of what the next round of experiments should entail, you might conclude that you’ve solved the problem on which you were working, or you might find that the entire approach is unworkable and the project should be abandoned. Creative Resolution Ideas for new solutions are generated through discussion and conflict, and solutions are tested via trial and error. The next step in the process is creative resolution. At this stage of the game, it’s important to balance perseverance with endurance. Try to maintain a sense of urgency, while at the same time cultivating patience. The flow of ideas should be bottom up, not top down. Leaders establish the boundaries and conditions for the work, but for the most part, innovation comes from below. The leader is the “social architect” who makes innovation possible. Leaders should remind people to avoid either-or thinking. This mentality can prevent people from seeing possible alternatives. It’s important that the group doesn’t get locked into simplistic, binary thinking patterns. Part of the leader’s job is to help people hold several ideas at once. This isn’t easy to do: the instinctive reaction is to simplify things and gravitate toward one of the ideas. But the leader should help people avoid that mentality. Many leaders think their role is to make decisions, to act boldly, and they will be tempted to rush to a decision. But it’s important to resist the pressure to make quick decisions. The more patient a leader can remain in the face of complexity, the better the solution. It’s vital to trust the process. Leaders don’t tell people what direction to take, but they should be ready to tell the team to go back and search for a better solution. It’s OK to cultivate indecision in order to allow more time for ideas to develop. Eventually, though, a decision must be made. (Even then, unused ideas should be recognized for their value to the process.) Rules are tools that provide structure to the group effort. When rules are prized for their own sake, organizations can become rigid and inflexible. Instead, rules should be adapted to suit the needs of the team. Schedules, assignments, even seating arrangements are all tools that should facilitate rather than impede progress. But these structures should all be flexible, so they can be changed as the needs of the group change. Leaders should stay engaged with the group, asking difficult questions, raising issues that might otherwise be overlooked and sharing information that the team may need. They should require teams to show how their ideas could work in the real world. Giving the team autonomy and allowing the team to take risks, however, doesn’t mean the leader can disengage. Creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution are the organizational abilities that comprise a team’s ability to innovate. They are closely tied, working to help groups generate ideas. But the group must be willing to work together using these abilities. The leader has to ensure that these elements are all at play within the group.