Leading the Adaptive Challenge - Creative

A creative challenge necessitates doing something that has never been done before. It lies in bringing something into existence that can make a positive contribution to the organization. It is imaginative and inventive work requiring persistence, exploratory thinking, and constant experimentation.

A creative challenge emerges when a group faces a problem or opportunity that no current strategy or practice can successfully address, and an incremental approach based on developing latent values and resources appears to hold little promise.

In essence, the group must invent a solution; they must discover an answer to their predicament, or no progress will be possible. Unlike a development challenge, a creative challenge requires a significant break with the past and an unconstrained leap into the future.

The condition of the people facing a Creative challenge is that the people facing a creating challenge are stuck. They fill like they have hit a wall and are at a loss as to what they must do or how to proceed. The group does not possess in its current repertoire of knowledge a solution to their predicament.
 

The barriers that impede progress are the limitations and boundaries that contain and refrain the people’s thinking- their psychological state, the group culture, and the prevailing paradigm in which the problem occurs. Creative work stirs up an array of emotions in people: some get excited by the process, and some seek to squelch the process because it disrupts the world they know.

The promise or aspiration (vision ) on the other side of the barrier:

The promise available in a creative challenge is that if the people can accomplish something that has never been done before and produce a breakthrough in their thinking and collective efforts. They can function at a higher level of productivity or profitability, or have a better shot at success.

The leadership task is to generate a mood and orchestrate a process to get people to transcend their current thinking and discover a successful response or solution to their constraining predicament.

The essence of exercising leadership to address a creative challenge lies in helping foster the circumstances, attitudes, and processes that make such outcomes possible.