Henley Business School's Puleng Makhoalibe will be hosting sessions at the Innovation Summit that involve unlocking creativity
Henley is an education partner at this year’s Innovation Summit and is the only business school to take such a role. This is how strongly we believe in innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship.
For the first two days of the summit we will be getting insights from the industry, the private sector, educational institutions and chief executives, as well as the government’s perspective on innovation and creativity. There will be well-rounded panel discussions, talks and keynotes including international representation.
Henley, as the education partner, will be hosting the Learning Space, which will include reports covering key insights from the event. This, we believe, will provide a rich platform for the exchange of ideas in order to birth new insights and new ways of working that will hopefully impact business and even the economy of South Africa.
It is exciting for us to play this key role as an innovation partner. On Saturday September 24, we will be hosting sessions involving playing with Lego, where the bricks will be used by corporate people to express themselves and their creativity.
We do similar workshops at Henley and have seen magnificent results. Recently we did a workshop where we had corporate ladies using Lego to imagine their future 20 years from now. This took their creativity to levels that previously they never thought possible.
This is the basis of Henley’s creative thinking strategy for business. The workshop helped these ladies create a new vision for their life, which can also be applied to business. Henley believes that creativity involves doing, and it is for this reason we are running these workshops at the Innovation Summit.
As an educational partner, we will be co-hosting an event called Ignite on Friday September 23 at 3pm where creative people will share their personal creativity principles. Business people will each share for 10 minutes on how they use creativity at work.
We deeply believe in developing the creative acumen of businesspeople as much as the business acumen of creative people. We believe that as a result of the Innovation Summit a cross-pollination between business people and creative people will emerge, facilitating new ways of doing business and hopefully new ways of monetising natural creative talents. Our focus is to develop creativity or creative attributes in business people.
The theme of the Summit is “Ignite, Accelerate, Innovate”. Henley brings to this the creativity aspect. According to a World Economic Forum report, creativity will move from being in 10th position in the top 10 skills in 2015 to third in 2020. This is not surprising.
The world around us demands that we look for meaning, purpose and passion — everything that the education system is not constructed upon. Organisations, governments, institutions and societies are not built on this crucial foundation, yet the world yearns for it.
The question is: how do we rethink industries, redefine work, rebuild confidence, recover and reignite the innate creativity we all possess? More importantly, how do you utilise this creativity to inspire your people and improve your organisation?
It is important to improve people’s abilities to deliberately use creativity and innovation. Encourage new ideas, imagination, new decisions and new actions, and inspire people to believe they can become creative and use creativity.
There are some practical ways businesses and organisations can release employees’ creativity through innovative activities to boost morale and engagement.
One way to do this is to bring people together around a shared need and value for creativity and innovation. We need to support people in using positive visions of the future as fuel for creative innovation and familiarise people with the creative process.
Picasso once said, “All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up”. As children, our world is made of stories, pictures and colour, but as we grow up this seems to dissipate. When we allow ourselves to explore, play and defer judgment, the creativity in us is awakened as we engage in work, projects and relating to one another.
We become comfortable with ambiguity and maintain the child-like curiosity that keeps us seeking the second right answer. Creativity allows us to remain in this space long enough to come up with ideas that are new to the world — what others call third-level thinking.
Creativity in business is integral to the future growth of South African managers. But most businesses remain reluctant to be creative for fear of failure. But for those who do, the potential exists to create business growth and enhance employee satisfaction and retention.
There is a change in the business world where creativity is being used not only for marketing but also in addressing business challenges. New, creative ways of working are being implemented and encouraged.
At Henley, we encourage students to think outside of traditional management styles. We find that allowing staff to be creative, even in the small areas of their responsibility, increases productivity, affects the company’s bottom line and can also provide a competitive advantage.
Puleng Makhoalibe is the head of the School of Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship at Henley Business School