Creativity for Agile

 

“Creative thinking is not a talent; it is a skill that can be learned. It empowers people by adding strength to your natural abilities which improve teamwork, productivity, and where appropriate, profits.”– Edward De Bono

The most in-demand skill in today’s business is creativity. In general, creativity is a thing done that is outside of common boundaries or expectations. It is achieved when teams are agile but face problems, discomfort, and tension. In business creativity and design are the most paired duo. When it comes to agile creativity and designs go hand in hand as agile started with software development and any development requires creativity.

If we see agile processes and methodologies, we will see that even after long-achieved progress in frameworks, agile is unable to get to the roots of creativity. Agile considers design and creativity as a group activity confusing the places where and how design should take place. Even so for agile, it is important to draw out creativity in the teams. With the book ‘Creativity Inc.’ written by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace where they have explained creativity with their experiences and some tips to get better at it, agile organizations can improve their creative strategies and their teams. In this article let’s dive deeper into creativity and get the best tips to improve our agile teams and organization's creativity for business use by knowing how to have the right people and providing them with the right environment to work with creativity. This article will provide you with tips for management and structure for being creative.

Tips to Encourage Creative Thinking

Braintrust

The very first thing you need to do to improve creativity is to hire the right people. It’s necessary to know who is working with you. Hire and support the team with smart, passionate, and well-informed people. It is necessary to have potential in a team when you want the great potential to work with.

Candor

When you have a great team with potential it is necessary to provide them the freedom to show their ideas, opinion, and criticism. Let yourself and your team be out of the safe bubble to be innovative and encourage creativity.

Empathy

When we have to reach a common bigger goal, collaboration is necessary. Discuss ideas with the team as they all have to work on it and drive a team towards achieving the common goal.

Tips to Embrace Creativity

As encouraging creativity is important, embracing creativity is also equally important for any agile team or organization to provide their best continuously. With the below tips, creativity can be embraced within agile teams and further strive for perfection.

Ideas are Not Born Fully Formed

We are too eager to work on any idea as soon as it is accepted but when it comes to ideas we must know that ideas are not born in a single go. A final idea is a collection of many ideas. Finding and supporting smart and good people will help us find and develop good ideas.

Fast Response to Change

We most times hold too tightly to our assumptions and goals. But to achieve the best for our goals we must hold tightly to our intentions but must be open to the goals with change in new information. We must be ready for surprises and able to let go of our assumptions. Along with this, we must have a close eye on areas for observing balance loss and quickly maintain it.

Discussion Must Occur on Failures

Leaders as well as team members must talk about their mistakes and failures. And gain feedback and solutions from each other. Along with this, the one who made the mistake must be ready to act for solving it.

Provide an Appropriate Environment for Creativity

When it is a fear-based and risk-averse culture in a team no one will go for creating new ideas and stay with the ones that have already worked. Keeping free and accepting mistakes and working on problem-solving culture in the team will make everyone enjoy their work and be more productive with being creative. Agile coaches and product owners play an important role in this as they are the ones who can create sustainable culture making everyone stay on the path of excellence making creativity a practice in an agile team instead of an abstract concept.

With steady improvement and practice, any agile team and organization can achieve a creative managing structure where great products and services can be provided by agile teams. The above tips will make agile organizations a fun-loving and enjoyable environment that gives their best with creativity and innovative excellence.

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.