The Creative Thinking imperative

To design innovative ways forward and shape our Future for the best, it is vital to move away from just recognising standard situations and providing standard answers.

Today's challenges call for us to tap on all of the Creativity and Knowledge at our disposal. They require a Creative - even "Revolutionary", not incremental - Thinking to invent the widest range of solutions for the challenges now facing our lives.

The 2010 IBM Global CEO Study, conducted among 1541 leaders accros the world, reveals that today's CEOs consider that Creativity trumps other leadership characteristics.  "We need to embrace ambiguity, take risks that disrupt legacy business models". "We need to find, recognize and reward creativity." CEOs saw the need to seed creativity across their organizations rather than set apart "creative types" in siloed departments like product design.

With few exceptions, CEOs expect continued disruption in one form or another. The new economic environment, they agree, is substantially more volatile, much more uncertain, increasingly complex and structurally different.

Still, decisions must be made. As CEOs turn their attention to growth, a significant number said their success depends on doubling their revenue from new sources over the next five years.

This means CEOs must shake up their portfolios, business models, old ways of working and long-held assumptions. They have to address what customers now care about and reassess how value is generated.

Insight about the path forward. It will require entirely new leadership styles, new approaches to better understanding customers, and new and flexible structures for their businesses

It is no longer sufficient, or even possible, to view the world within the confines of an industry, or a discipline, or a process, or even a nation. A critical aspect of their learning will be to determine which elements of complexity — for example, overcomplicated internal processes or inflexible customer interactions — are unnecessary or hinder value creation. Likewise, they will need to identify which aspects can be harnessed for greater efficiency, innovation or growth.