|
By: Michael Donahue, CMAA "Creativity is most likely to take place at the edge of chaos and order" - Chris Bilton, Management and Creativity" When you read this quote, you might have said to yourself, “That is exactly where I am.” As an athletic director, you are constantly trying to stay organized and keep chaos at bay. Despite this fact, however, many athletic directors do not have a sound understanding of creativity and innovation and how they can be implemented within their athletic departments. This is surprising given the fact that many athletic directors, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, have had to exercise their creative and innovative muscles on a daily basis. Problems need to be solved, and needs need to be met. So why design for creativity and innovation? The main lesson people tend to take from the writings of Charles Darwin is survival of the fittest. But I would argue that that lesson misses the mark. Because the species that best survived were only the fittest due to their adaptability to their environment. Therefore, I would argue that it's actually survival of the most adaptable, and athletic directors who are able to quickly adapt to their environment, and the many challenges it presents, are going to be the most successful. That process of adaptation requires creativity and innovation. Innovation springs from two sources. The first is needs driven. This source is what athletic directors encounter the most. It involves identifying a need and generating a number of ideas in order to address it. For example, creating a new inventory system for uniforms, or devising new ways to generate revenue at athletic events. The second source of innovation is discovery driven. This requires the ability to recognize an unexpected or unforeseen opportunity that leads to the invention of something new and useful. In order to recognize such opportunities, an athletic director must be prepared to do so. This preparation will be further explained later, but athletic directors must be armed with a bias for action in order to take advantage of such opportunities. Another reason why athletic departments should be designed for creativity and innovation is because it provides for a competitive advantage on and off the field. On the field, if your teams come from an athletic department that emphasizes creativity and innovation, your teams will seek to rapidly adapt in game to what their opponents are doing, and they will consistently keep their opponents off balance through a combination of inventive play design and execution. Off the field, your athletic department will benefit from harnessing the collective brain power that already exists within it. Many minds are better than one, and creativity requires generating many ideas. The more brains that are engaged by your athletic department, the more likely it is to be innovative. Finally, an athletic department that emphasizes creativity and innovation will be fulfilling the greater mission of education, which is to prepare young men and women to be active and engaged citizens in our society. In order to be active and engaged citizens, you have to prepare your student athletes for a world where the pace of change is rapid and increasingly so. You must teach them how to keep up with the pace of change (i.e. adapt), and how to be successful in an increasingly competitive and face-paced world, which means teaching them how to be the driver of change. We constantly hear about how we have entered into the creative economy. It is possible to use athletics to prepare young men and women for such an economy. Remember, interscholastic athletics is the continuation of education by other means. What are creativity & innovation? Creativity refers to an idea that is both original and appropriate. Another word often substituted for original is novel. For an idea to be considered creative it must be new in the given context. For example, the concept of dynamic ticket pricing was introduced by the San Francisco Giants in the late 2000’s, but that concept had been used by airlines for many years prior. Creative ideas also must be appropriate in that it must serve some purpose, such as solving a problem or accomplishing a goal. There is no sense developing a better paper ticket system when digital ticketing systems are becoming more prevalent, and people are carrying cash less frequently than they once did. It is not unusual to hear people use the words creativity and innovation interchangeably, but it must be understood that they mean different things. Creativity is the generation of new and useful ideas, and innovation is bringing those ideas to life. For example, you might get creative and come up with new ideas for a social media policy for your athletic department for student athletes and coaches, but you still have to whittle down and expand on those ideas in order to ultimately produce a document that will serve as the official policy. What is the Athletic Director’s Job as the Creative Innovation Champion First, you should recognize the value of creativity and study it in order to develop it in yourself and others. Like an athletic skill, creativity can be improved the more it is practiced. Set aside time to both study it and exercise it. This can be done by reading or watching videos. TED has entire YouTube channels devoted to the topic. Keep an idea book or idea folder on your smartphone, and record ideas that might come to you at random times. It is common for new ideas to come to you when you are not actively thinking about them. Set time aside during athletic department meetings for the purpose of generating and reviewing new ideas for improving the way the department functions. Tanner and Reisman, in their book Creativity As a Bridge Between Education and Industry Fostering New Innovations, listed the following as important characteristics of a creative innovation champion:
Servant leadership has been identified as the leadership style best suited to facilitate creativity and innovation within your athletic department. Servant leaders set clearly defined goals, determine and refine processes, and help navigate their followers through well-defined paths. You should not be the primary source of creative ideas but rather you set the conditions for creativity ideas flow from others. Second, creativity and innovation should be promoted and modeled, especially by you, the athletic director. The power of example cannot be understated. Let it be known amongst the entire athletic community that you value everyone’s ideas, and you want to hear them. Demonstrate this by designing programs and policies for collecting stakeholders’ ideas and make public the process for their review and possible implementation. Third, construct a creative environment for all your program's stakeholders. This means not only your coaching staff, but also your parents, alumni, sponsors, etc. The beauty of constructing a creative and innovative environment is that it promotes engagement at all levels, which should be a goal of any athletic director. Remember that environments shape culture, and your goal in designing your creative environment is to make creativity and innovation a part of “this is what we do here.” Principles for Design No two athletic department creative environments will be alike. It is important to remember that your department should always be a reflection of you and your community. However, all creative and innovative environments should be built upon some foundational principles. Here are a few of my suggestions for you to consider when building your creative environment. 1. All people are creative In order for you to establish a creative and innovative athletic department, you have to start with this core belief. It is not uncommon for people to automatically assume they are not creative because they don’t paint, write, act, compose, ect. This is a mistake. The arts do not have a monopoly on creativity. All people are creative, just to varying degrees. Remember that just because someone might not be creative in one environment does not mean they cannot be creative in another. In fact, it is precisely because people bring with them varying levels of expertise in different subjects that makes creativity possible. It is your job to encourage creative thought from you coaches, student athletes, and other key stakeholders. Help them get past this notion of not being creative. 2. Quantity leads to quality One of the key components to creative thought is divergent thinking, which is the ability to produce a large number of ideas or possible solutions. This is closely tied to another concept, flexibility, or the ability to produce a large number of ideas from different categories. It may be required to produce hundreds or even thousands of ideas in order to arrive at one new and useful idea. Think of our country’s motto E Pluribus Unum (of many, one.). Once many ideas are produced, convergent thinking is used to narrow in on the most useful or practical ideas. Therefore, divergent thinking and convergent thinking form the backbone of creativity and innovation, and should be one of the pillars your athletic department is built upon. The graphic below illustrates the process. It is often depicted as a diamond or series of diamonds. I like to think of it as a heart beat, and it could form the heart beat of your athletic department.
3. Seek Diversity When it comes to creativity and innovation, diversity is a facilitator. For example, let's focus on creative team building. Diversity in cognition, or the way people think, increases team or group creativity. Creative thoughts are often sparked by diverse stimuli. Stimuli can take many forms, and is discussed in more depth further down. 4. Spark a fire and get out of the way Intrinsic motivation is the fuel of creativity. In other words, creativity is generated when someone is working on something for its own sake (i.e. playing for the love of the game). For many of your coaches and staff, intrinsic motivation is not a problem. They are self motivated to be coaches or administrators because they love what they do and the impact it has on the lives of young people. This connects with another creativity concept known as flow. Flow occurs when a person is “in the zone.” Creativity literally flows from a person and they get lost in the task. Time seems to stand still. The task and the person seem to be perfectly matched. Flow can occur within teams as well. Author David Pink writes about this in his book titled Drive, He argues that the essential ingredients for entering flow are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. As an athletic administrator, you have to monitor how much autonomy you give your coaches and staff. Are you giving them the space they need to be creative? Do they feel encouraged to both think of creative ideas and share them? Mastery comes through the combination of education and experience. While experience can only occur at the pace of time itself, education can be done at an accelerated pace. What opportunities are you providing your coaches and staff to help them become masters of their craft? 5. Prepared minds are creative minds Creativity can be demanded of athletic directors at any time anywhere. That is why it is important to understand the concepts of serendipity and improvisation. The word serendipity tends to be misunderstood. People associate it most with the word luck, more with freak luck. Something that was completely out of anyone’s control. However, luck has been defined by some as when hard work meets opportunity. This is closer to how you should view serendipity. Robinson and Stern define it as when “a fortunate accident meets with sagacity (keenness of insight).” As the leader of your creative athletic department you have to make your staff and key stakeholders aware of serendipity and increase their capacity to identify those moments of opportunity because they can be fleeting. Prepare them with a deep knowledge of how the athletic department runs and where you want it to go. Make them aware that your department gets to where it wants to go quicker when serendipitous moments are taken advantage of by everyone. Improvisation, or creativity on the fly, is an important skill for any athletic director. Most times athletic directors employ this skill in response to a challenge: a missing bus, unruly fans, facilities conflicts, inclimate weather, or even a global pandemic. However, in order to be effective at improvisation, you have to have sound training in the fundamental knowledge and skills demanded of an athletic director. Just as a jazz musician must possess a working fundamental knowledge about music and the skill set to play an instrument in order to participate in an improvisational jazz session, so too must an athletic director have a sound understanding of his or her fundamental skills. An athletic director’s fundamentals begin with the 14 legal duties. Elements for Designing a Creative Environment In their book Corporate Creativity: How Innovation and Improvement Actually Happen, Robinson and Stern listed the following as the six essential elements of corporate creativity:
Alignment refers to the degree to which the interests and actions of your athletic department support your key goals. It should not be a mystery to any key stakeholders what the mission and key goals are for your athletic department. They should be clearly spelled out in a publicly available document, and they should be reviewed at least annually. Creativity is very sensitive to alignment. It provides the framework and direction in which your staff will direct its creative efforts. The mission statement acts as the north star, and the key goals provide the path to get there. Most creative acts come from self-initiated activity. The Wright Brothers are a great example of this. They started working on the airplane for its own sake. It was a labor of love. They were intrinsically motivated to do it. Your staff should feel encouraged to do the same thing, but directed toward improving the athletic department and especially the experience of the student-athletes. This could take the form of your coaches devising novel offensive or defensive schemes for their sports. Super Bowl champion coach Bill Walsh designed what became known as the West Coast Offense while an assistant coach for Cincinnati because his quarterback had a weak but accurate arm. Many of his former assistant coaches were encouraged to design their own plays and present them to coach Walsh. He had four offensive assistant coaches go on to win Super Bowls as head coaches themselves (George Seifert, Mike Holmgren, Mike Shannahan, and Brian Billick). Unofficial activity is closely related to self-initiated activity. Essentially, unofficial activity takes place within your athletic department but with no official sanction by the athletic director. In fact, this article is an example of an unofficial activity. Most of it was written at the end of every workday. The point to take away is that unofficial activities should be encouraged, but you should also have a plan for what to do with them. Set aside time for staff members and key stakeholders to present what they have been working on. Make it an event. Google actually tells employees to set aside 20 mins a day to work on whatever they want. Then they have what is called Fedex Day, where employees are expected to “deliver”. Gmail is the result of unofficial work activity. As mentioned earlier, serendipity is when “a fortunate accident meets with sagacity (keenness of insight).” Your staff should be prepared with an understanding of what serendipity means in order to identify fleeting moments of opportunity that must be taken advantage of. You should describe what those moments look like. This could take the form of a chance encounter with one of your prominent alumni who is looking to donate money to the athletic department. Diverse Stimuli was mentioned earlier. Take note of what sparks creative thoughts for you. Is it a picture? Music? An object? Or could it be a specific setting? Creativity can be sparked by anything from anywhere. Pay attention to when and where you have creative thoughts and prepare to capture them. Help others find what makes them creative and prepare them accordingly. We will relabel within company communication as within department communication. In other words, does your staff and key stakeholders know where to go to communicate a new idea with you the athletic director? If not, then there could be a well of good ideas just sitting there within your athletic department going untapped. A simple suggestion system can do a lot of good. Also, how often are you getting your staff and key stakeholders together and providing them opportunities to exchange ideas. Remember, creative environments are places where ideas are flowing freely, which provides the opportunity for them to be combined and recombined into potentially new and useful ways. These free flowing environments are usually informal settings, such as a happy hour or faculty lunchroom. Are you creating opportunities and physical spaces for these more informal moments to occur among your coaches and staff? Something as simple as a well placed coffee maker or water cooler could provide such a place for coaches and staff to meet and have such exchanges. Practices to Avoid Premature Judgement will kill idea generation. You want to be sure that people feel safe to voice their ideas both privately and publicly. If their ideas are judged to be “bad ideas” out of hand, then they will stop trying to come up with new ideas or they will never share them if they do. You should make it clear that all ideas will be considered and evaluated in a way that is both fair and impartial. Therefore, remind yourself and your staff that your athletic department is a judgement free zone, and everyone should take off their white wigs until the appropriate time for the judgement of new ideas. Avoid idea squelchers. Essentially, idea squelchers are phrases people say to themselves and others when they first hear a new idea. In other words, it’s how people “shoot down” new ideas. Here’s a (very) short list:
Tanner and Reisman suggest the following four steps to “squelch the squelchers.”
Quotas are killers of creativity. They have the same negative effect whether they are explicit or implicit. Requiring idea quotas often leads to “spoof ideas”, duplicate ideas, and misalignment. Spoof ideas are essentially the same idea restated multiple different ways. Duplicate ideas are self explanatory but a natural result of requiring people to produce new ideas. Misalignment occurs with idea quotas because people start to focus only on producing ideas rather than focusing on the stated goals of the organization, or in this case your athletic department. Essentially, creativity needs to become part of your athletic department’s culture (this is how we do things here) not creativity quotas. Quick Summary Why Design for Creativity and Innovation?
What are creativity and innovation
What is the Athletic Director’s Job as the Creative Innovation Champion
Principles for Design
Six Elements for Designing a Creative Environment
Practices to Avoid
|
Designing for Creativity: How You and Your Athletic Department Can Become Creative Innovation Champions [NIAAA]
