Creativity: a tool to boost your performance

01Dec

Creativity: a tool to boost your performance

Have you ever thought of creativity as a tool to boost your company’s overall productivity? Being able to think of new ideas can help you perform better and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

These days, businesses face one of their greatest challenges yet – having to do more with less. In order to do so, we must be resourceful and look for more appropriate methods to improve our work processes. By being creative, business managers encourage new useful and relevant ideas that will be useful to better their practices.

Many different strategies can be used to be more creative. As mentioned in a previous blog post, looking at things with a fresh perspective is one of these strategies.

Questioning preconceived ideas

In a related matter, challenging established paradigms – preconceived ideas or predefined concepts – is another great strategy. As per Sylvain Rouillard, psychologist and speaker specialized in creativity with more than 25 years’ experience, challenging established paradigms and changing the standards helps us think about new ideas that can be extremely creative.

For instance, let’s suppose that you wish to be able to answer a higher number of calls in the same amount of time. Of course, the first idea that will come to your mind would be to hire a new receptionist. Indeed, in your mind, it would be inconceivable to answer more calls without having to hire more staff. But what you should really ask yourself is: “Do we really have to hire more employees to answer all the calls? In fact, do we really have to rely on humans to answer those calls?” Maybe an automated customer assistance system would be the best choice for your needs. Indeed, such a system would be able to take as many calls as two full-time employees, and would do so twice as fast.

The same applies if you manage a company specialized in organizing events. You could considerably increase your company’s productivity by planning back-up events for rainy days. While your competitors would most likely cancel their events in such unfavourable meteorological conditions, you would be able to benefit from a situation that would normally work in your disfavour. Do you now see what this is all about?

Taking the time to find the right ideas

Furthermore, in order to finally experience the long-awaited epiphany, you might have to look for a lot of ideas that might not be all that great. You will then have to take your time, which will give you more chances to find THE idea that might be the best solution for your company. Do not rush into anything.

Distancing yourself from a task will allow your brain to reorganize all the information needed to solve your particular issue and will help you find the right answer more quickly.

There are many other ways to increase your ability to be creative. As a firm specialized in business process improvement, our role is to help you achieve your goals by finding various solutions that suit your needs.