Creative Confidence- A way to Improve Agile Creativity

Creativity is a way to look forward to the future. It provides foresight for anticipating unexpected disturbances and flexibility for questioning our biases and assumptions. Creativity considering in professional industries can be considered in three flywheels which include technical, business, and human factors. Technical factors implicate what technology you can create and it is the factor where most innovations start, business factors imply the creativity in creating the funding for business and finding out of the existing market or creating one for your requirement or products, and the third human factors appeal to be creative in human psychology and design for meeting the peoples need.

Agile valued creativity and innovation always find a way to improve and train agile people for improving their creativity. When it comes to an agile environment it is easy to build up your creativity. But many times individual fails to overcome their fear and suppress their creativity because of many reasons. The fear that suppresses the creativity of an individual and solutions to them are provided simply in the book ‘Creative Confidence’ by Tom and David Kelley. The explanation and concept in the book will give a clear belief that creative confidence is the soul of design thinking. In an agile environment, design thinking has an important place hence making creative confidence is also an important aspect of agile.

Let’s discuss on what are the fears that hinder creative confidence and some tips that can help you with it.

There are four main fears which are as follows

Messy Unknowns

Generally only understanding the issues from the data and updates from others will create the complexity and mess about the unknowns. When the individual has empathy for users internally and externally it becomes easy to be more creative as they are aware of the complexity of issues. It is always better for an individual to get out of their comfort zone and understand the actual issues with their own eyes helping them understand the main issue and be more creative with it.

Being Judged

Everyone has a fear of being judged on their thoughts or ideas, restricting their creativity. But one must let go of this fear and use the time to reflect and systematic planning of their ideas for more assurance on it. Always being constructive with your feedback is also a way to take the first step from your side not to judge others.

First Step

“The first step is the hardest”- Marie Anne de Vichy

It is always hard to start. There is a fear of taking the first step. Many have an idea but are not ready to take the first step and work on it. But build up the courage, stop planning, and get started working on the idea. By taking small-small steps you can reach the goal.

Losing Control

Many have this fear that if their ideas are not accepted they will lose control over others. But one must be aware and open-minded to think clearly and if other's ideas are better than theirs then one should accept them. They must understand the importance of working collaboratively, give up control for the betterment of projects and make better use of different perspectives for development.

In creative confidence, these fears are explained with the example of a snake. Where students with having fear of snakes are removed with smaller steps at once like

·       Watching snake from afar

·       Watching keeping door open

·       Watching others touch the snake

·       Touching using gloves with your hands

·       Touching with your bare hands

This example gives a brief explanation of how one can overcome a fear of any type.

In short, for developing creative confidence within oneself one must

·       Go out and see the world and ways to make it better

·       Bring the research together and try to make complete sense of it

·       Spend time developing different and many options and ideas

·       Get feedback on ideas and improve them

·       Prepare a plan and follow it

·       Understand and emphasize customer’s need

·       Collaborate with team members as success in innovation cannot be achieved at any scale without a team.

With the above step, anyone can build up their creative confidence and improve their creativity without having any fear. They will understand that positive or negative feedback can help them grow when taken with the right mindset. They know that in an agile environment there is no failure but only learning from the mistakes and every constraint added is an advantage for them as a lack of resources forces them towards creativity.

Anyone from the above discussion can verify if they are having this fear and if they are restricting their creativity and can use the mentioned solution for improving their creative confidence in an agile environment hence improving the team’s creativity.

 About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.