Seeing New Patterns

Posted on August 02, 2010 by Ronald T. Brown, Ph.D.

The “2010 Global IBM CEO Study” is one of the largest one-on-one interview studies - surveying 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders from 60 countries and across 33 industries.

One of the primary findings of the survey was

:

* Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.

Creativity is essential when uncertainty is high, and where the future is expected to be a significant departure from what we’ve known in the past. When uncertainty is high you cannot just repeat the successful practices of the past and expect similar results. You will need to find new ways of thinking, new ways of operating and new ways of behaving. The IBM survey puts it this way…

“Creativity is often defined as the ability to bring into existence something new or different, but CEOs elaborated. Creativity is the basis for ‘disruptive innovation and continuous re-invention,’ a Professional Services CEO in the United States told us. In addition this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. Leaders, they said, must be ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful. They must be comfortable with and committed to ongoing experimentation… It’s not that CEOs are just now becoming aware of the importance of creativity - they have long been aware of the need to innovate their products, their processes and their customers’ experiences. But today, creativity itself has been elevated to a leadership style. Traditional approaches to managing organizations need fresh ideas, ideas that are intended to disrupt the status quo.”