Management is applied creativity

Innovation to the rescue: Adopting a resilient management style

Administration is often considered as something very dull and boring. In the process of organising something or trying to control it you need to understand it completely, you need to get the full picture of it. You need to apprehend the nature of the job you want to do at its full dimension. This process requires analytical skills and surely intelligence. It also requires that you try to incorporate every single point of view into your plan, not solely your narrow perspective.

This is the easy part. You would be a fool to believe that there is a single concrete thing in life you can rely upon. Life cannot be described solely by logic, thus you cannot create a managerial process relying solely on a functional system. A sudden, unexpected event could alter your initial evaluation of the job that needs to be done, or circumstances might change the nature of your objective itself, making all the effort you’ve put in analysing your endeavour at stake.

You need to be able to break the rules you, yourself, have initially set. You must be both able to create a sufficient ruleset and have the mental and psychological ability to overpass it when it is needed, adapting to the unexpected circumstances that will eventually come up. Your initial managerial system might be agile, but no matter how well you have thought it over, someday there will be a good reason to dodge it. That is exactly what we call a breakthrough. It might not be a technological breakthrough, you might not file a patent for it, but it is still an innovation.

Ordinary life is very easy to manage, you set up the rules and you are done, but managing the unexpected, requires something that is less tangible than analytical skills. You need intuition. A skill that is very hard to trust because the outcome of your inner process is not measurable. You usually don’t know how you came up with an idea. It is a very complex and chaotic process. You work under extraordinary, maybe even unseen-before circumstances. You are still trying to achieve the same thing that you were successfully managing before by applying a simple ruleset, but this time you need to take initiative without a robust reasoning to support your decisions.

That’s when creativity comes in. We rarely think of creative people as problem solvers. You might think that creativity is of less importance because it is playful and usually related to fun. This way we fail to understand it’s key attribute; creative people feel intrigued to bypass what the rest of us consider as a dead-end. This mentality is exactly what is giving them the ability to be innovative, to break the rules and to implement ground-breaking concepts fearlessly. Channeling this ability and using it in administration when you face a dead-end, when life forces you to discover a flaw in your existing system, could prove to be a key implement, capable to transform an inflexible governing process to a resilient management style with thriving performance.

The fact that creativity comes with preinstalled intelligence, means that you can get both analytical skills and adaptability in one single characteristic. Analytical skills are a prerequisite for the successful understanding of whatever needs to be managed and adaptability is a crucial skill that we rely upon to ensure the sustainability of our efforts. The only thing you need to worry about, is how to initiate a creative process and allow it work in favour of whatever project it is that you have to manage.