| Creativity, Innovation and Change |
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MGT B822
Creativity, Innovation and Change
| Introduction |  |
MGT B822 Creativity, Innovation and Change aims to help you facilitate creativity at work by enabling you to develop a more creative attitude, learn creative ways of managing problems, promote a creative climate at work, manage innovation and revitalize your organization.
A large degree of flexibility has been built into this course, to give you a better chance of being able to concentrate on approaches that are relevant to your situation at this time. We do not expect you to master all the ideas here, rather, we hope you can apply those that are relevant to your situation to good effect.
Creativity and innovation involve encouraging people to think for themselves in order to establish a 'creative edge' for the organization, but also trying to get them to work together, because no large project or organization can function without close co-operation.
| Course aims | |
This course is intended to help managers increase their capacity to respond creatively to the challenges of the new millennium. We hope that it will work at four levels.
At the personal level: to help you develop a more creative attitude in yourself and encourage a more creative attitude in those around you.
At the departmental level: to provide a broad range of problem-management methods to assist imaginative and effective thinking.
At the organizational level: to explore a range of approaches designed to help develop a creative climate, share knowledge, manage innovation, and revitalize organizations.
At a conceptual level: to understand some of the ways in which perceptions are influenced by history, culture, belief, cognition and life experience.
| Course structure | |
The course materials are split into four topics with associated text and media. 'Creativity, Cognition and Development (1)' introduces the course concepts and addresses creativity, perception and style. It has a psychological orientation and is largely angled to a consideration of the individual level of creativity. 'Managing Problem Creatively' teaches a wide range of approaches to problem management. 'Organizing for Innovation' addresses the organizational level of creativity and looks primarily at the characteristics of creative climates, ways of managing innovation and approaches to revitalizing organizations. 'Creativity, Cognition and Development (2) addresses the wider impact of national culture and development. The basic structure of the course is shown in the Table 1.
There are three tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) and a three-hour examination.
Table 1 Topic coverage and associated materials
Topic Book/Reader Others TMA Creativity, Cognition and Development (1) 1. Creativity, Cognition and Development (Parts 1 to 3)
2. Creative Management and Development (Parts A, B, C & F)1. NEO-Five Factor Inventory
2. Audios 1 & 2
3. Media Book
4. ReadingsTMA01 Managing Problems Creatively 1. Managing Problems Creatively 1. Problem Solving Techniques*
2. Videos 1 & 2
3. Audio 5
4. Media Book
5. ReadingsTMA02 Organizing for Innovation 1. Changing Organizations
2. Managing Innovation and Change1. Readings
2. Videos 3 & 5
3. Audios 6, 7 & 9
4. Media BookCreativity, Cognition and Development (2) 1. Creativity, Cognition and Development (Parts 4 to 5)
2. Creative Management and Development (Parts D & E)1. Videos 4 & 6
2. Audios 3, 4 & 8
3. Media Book
4. ReadingsTMA03 * These are examples of major problem solving techniques. A comprehensive 'Technique Library' which covers description of around 150 creative, problem solving, mapping and related management tools is reserved in the OUHK Library for reference.
| How to study | |
People have different patterns of study so you should approach the course in any way that suits you. Some students may opt to read the relevant assignment before reading the course text in any detail. After reading the main course text, you could study the articles referred to in the readers, readings or set book that particularly interest you. Do also look through the Media Book and listen and view the audio and video.
The NEO-FFI inventory is for your reference. If you are interested in completing it you may also want to include the results to answer TMA1.
| Course contents | |
Course books
Book 1 Creativity, Cognition and Development
Book 1 offers an introduction to the course as a whole and many of its key concepts. It looks at the way thought constrains action through an examination of creativity, cognition, perception, style and development. Part 1 starts by showing how the differing ideas about what causes creativity affect the strategies and policies designed to generate creative endeavour. It examines the characteristics of creative people, teams and organizations. Part 2 looks at the nature of perception and cognition, showing the key role of intuition and tacit knowledge in management thinking. It explains the ways in which mind sets, metaphors and paradigms limit and facilitate perception. Part 3 examines differences in creative problem-solving and decision-making styles, and ways in which these relate to the various organization roles. It includes an inventory to help you explore your style. Part 4 describes the effect of deeply held cultural values on management practice and forms of organizational development. It goes on to consider the extent to which our ideas about personal development are a product of our history and how our cultural heritage affects the way we seek to understand and change the world. Part 5 examines how organizations can attempt to grow in a sustainable way that takes account of the environment and illustrates how organizations can benefit from engaging in socially responsible activities. Some of the ideas about creative management and innovation introduced here are revisited in more depth later.
Book 2 Managing Problems Creatively
Book 2 adopts a largely local focus, at the level of the individual in a small face-to-face workgroup, committee, project team, etc. Such groups tend to have a portfolio of issues to be tackled individually or collectively. Problem-solving and facilitation skills are associated with this topic to help with this.
Book 2 provides precepts and frameworks to help you conceptualize what 'problem-solving' involves, and to challenge some of the more familiar assumptions about it. Methods and techniques of various kinds (divergent, convergent, diagrammatic, analytic, intuitive, narrative, etc.) are provided by the Technique Library, and the Technique Selector.
Your main task in the block is to select a sub-set of techniques appropriate to your needs, to apply them to a current problem that you face, and to report back on this experience and what you have learned from it.
Book 3 Changing Organisations
The third course book focuses on how to develop a creative climate, manage innovation, and renew organizations. It looks at the different kinds and levels of innovation, and ways of scanning the environment such as benchmarking and the use of scenarios, along with structures and systems designed to develop, manage and sustain innovation. It goes on to examine factors involved in entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship, and attempts to change organizational climate and culture. It concludes by looking at popular approaches to restructuring and renewing organizations, such as quality, empowerment, reengineering, learning, knowledge management and self-organization. The book contains a range of text and video case studies that illustrate some of the major themes of organizational creativity.
You can think of the course as switching focus between reflection and practice, and between looking inward at yourself and your team, and looking outward at the organization and the wider world. 'Creativity, Cognition and Development' is more concerned with reflection, focusing on individuals and teams, as well as the wider cultural influences on organizational practice. 'Managing Problems Creatively' and 'Changing Organisations' are more concerned with practice. The former is concerned with trying out techniques appropriate for individuals and teams, and the latter with ways of developing and sustaining a creative and innovative organization.
Readers
In addition to the 3 books written specially for the course, the course offers the following readers:
Reader 1: J. Henry, Creative Management and Development (3rd edn) (London: Sage, 2006)
Reader 2: J. Henry and D. Mayle, Managing Innovation and Change(3rd edn) (London: Sage, 2006)
Further suggested readings are also mentioned in the readers.
Audio-visual material
The course has a DVD consisting of six videos; and nine audio programmes each generally of 30 minutes' duration. Broadly speaking, video is used for case studies and for demonstrations of techniques, and audio chiefly for discussions. Each programme is described in the Media Book. This document also contains a lot of useful teaching material.
Technique Library
An encyclopedia of creativity techniques is included in the Technique Library.
Face to face tuition
There will be five supplementary lectures, ten tutorials and two surgeries.
Assessment
There is continuous assessment during the year by means of the three assignments and a three-hour examination at the end of the course.
TMAs
The TMAs provide targets for your coursework encourage you to put your ideas down on paper, and give you an opportunity for feedback, advice and guidance from your tutor. They test your practical grasp of the course conceptions and techniques and your ability to communicate knowledge and ideas in writing in a well-structured, well-argued and clearly expressed manner.
Exam
In the examination you are required to answer four questions in three hours. A specimen examination paper will be issued to you later.
| Teching style | |
MGT B822 has attempted to adopt a flexible, student-centred approach that gives you considerable flexibility in deciding which parts of the course are more relevant to you. We have included lots of activities because we want you to spend much of your time doing things, rather than passively reading, watching or listening.
You are expected to use only a fraction of this rich supply of materials and resources during the course. We have provided this richness principally to allow scope for personal choice.
We also hope that by the end of the course you will have the nucleus of a creativity, innovation and change bookshelf. Creative development is a continuous process, so we want you to have the resources to continue once MGT B822 is over.
Facilitative approach
Our approach to teaching creative management is predominantly facilitative, rather than didactic. To support this facilitative approach, we have placed a lot of emphasis on encouraging you to identify your own needs, on providing a wide range of resources to give you scope for adapting the course to meet those needs, on facilitation communication channels amongst you, and between you and the teaching staff, and on encouraging you, where appropriate, to contribute your expertise to MGT B822 learning community, as well as drawing on that of the teaching staff.
One of the main reasons for the large element of choice and the high level of flexibility in the course is to allow you to make the coursework more relevant to your situation. If you can do this, then you MGT B822 work need not always be something different which requires you to devote large amounts of specific time to its on its own, but can contribute to, and overlap with, your other work.
If you find it hard to choose which material to focus on, take a small risk: make an arbitrary decision and see how it goes. Although the right choice often feels more comfortable, you may learn just as much form the wrong one. MGT B822 tutors will normally give as much credit for thoughtful and perceptive discussions of what went wrong as for descriptions of success.
Another key course feature is the emphasis on networking in the sense that all good managers have to network: obtaining information on the grapevine, knowing who to ask about particular topics, knowing who to bounce ideas off and so on. It has been argued that networking is a key element of creative management, and we see it as the complement of being a 'reflective manager'. Networking means learning from other people's experience, reflection means 'learning from your own experience'.
We recommend that you employ any or all of the communication media available to you to network with fellow course participants: channels you set up for yourselves (e.g. personal meetings, social events, telephone calls, letters, fax messages, etc.) and those supplied by MGT B822 (e-mail, discussion board, tutorials, day schools).
Declaring some of our values
Courses are never dispassionate and neutral in content. They always to some extent reflect the values of their authors. If we can't override our values, we should declare them, and here are some of our main ones.
We believe that we should be helping people to find their own creativity, not giving everyone the same fixed set of instructions on 'How To Be Creative'. We felt that, if creativity is about becoming autonomous, self-reflective and self-directing, and perhaps being a bit stubborn and persistent and able to go against the crowd, it would be wrong to teach it in a rather structured way. Important learning experiences often come from encouraging people to share and explore problems and concerns that really matter to them. We hope that the course, its theory and its practice, will provide you with a setting which supports that kind of sharing and exploration.
We believe that to be effective in practice you need a combination of imaginative, evaluative and decisive skills, and that it makes little sense to teach either 'creativity' (in its limited divergent sense) or 'decision making' (in its limited convergent sense) in isolation. The course places a lot of emphasis on finding out how to integrate 'flights of fancy' with 'feet-on-the-ground' decisions. Options that could never be realized are useless, but so is trying to decide which is the best of a limited set of options, when a little imagination could have generated a new option far superior to the rest.
We see management as being about working with others to direct or contain personal and organizational change. The managerial task is a subtle interaction between the outward movement of making the situation change to match a personal vision, and the inward movement of changing yourself (or others) to fit more productively the 'flow' of the situation. The course tries to emphasize both of these poles (personal change and situational change) and to explore their interdependence.
We believe that the enormous variety of experience and characteristics within and between individuals, teams and organizations is a vital resource. If this variety and differentiation can be harnessed constructively (rather than being treated as something to be overcome or smoothed over) it can be used as a major source of personal and organizational intelligence, vitality and growth. However, valuable differences will only surface where they are allowed to. For this reason there must be: an expectation that different people will want to do things differently, respect for people taking other approaches, even very different ones, and a willingness to learn from them, you must show a degree of personal independence in recognizing and choosing your own approaches.
- We believe in the value of questioning and challenging as means of opening up options. This applies as much to your relationship with the material and views in this course as to the problems to which you may wish to apply the course techniques. In creativity there is a lot to be said for constructive scepticism with a light touch!
In creative work, there is some truth in the idea that the only rule is that there are no rules. Your task is to see things afresh, particularly those things that are hardest to see afresh. For example putting on 'story-telling' rather than 'scientific' spectacles produces some very informative changes of perspective.
In this course, we encourage you to 'see things afresh' in whatever ways you can, and to try to welcome the challenges that may be generated even when they are uncomfortable, but also to be patient and realistic in recognizing that there are limits to how much challenge a given situation at a given time can tolerate.
