Supervisory encouragement means encouragement by the managers to the creative efforts by the employees. According to Amabile (1998), the connection to intrinsic motivation here is clear. Certainly, people can find their work interesting or exciting without a cheering section for some period of time. But to sustain such passion, most people need to feel as if their work matters to the organization or to some important group of people. Otherwise, they might as well do their work at home for their own personal gain. Encouragement leads to development of morale and intrinsic motivation. In many organisations, new ideas are not seen as good or useful but are reacted critically. This type of culture increases extrinsic motivation but effects negatively on intrinsic motivation. Therefore, to enhance creativity, the new ideas of the employees should be considered and must be explored further. Kanter (1991) said “the successful creative leaders not only formulates a vision but has power to advance the idea and maintain the momentum.” It means that creative leaders need influential power to communicate their vision and the ability to inspire and assist others to carry their dreams on into reality. In Semco, though some new ideas resulted in failure but they were implemented and not only considered thoroughly but were also encouraged.
Encouragement from supervisors certainly fosters creativity, but creativity is truly enhanced when entire organisation supports it (Amabile, 1998). Creative organisations have such systems or procedures and culture which help in development of creativity. Information sharing and collaboration support all three components of creativity. Organisation support is very helpful in various acts such as discussion, taking of risk, exploration of new ideas, working in teams and many others. These all acts help the employees to be creative and work with high morale to achieve the objectives. In Semco, the first principle states that information is the ultimate source of virtually all power (Semler, 1994). There are open meetings in which information is shared between the employees. Nothing is kept secret in the organisation and employees know what are they gaining and what not.
The four P model of creativity.
The four P model explain the four qualities of creativity which are present in creative organisation. According to Jane Henry, these four Ps reflects the behaviour of creative people (David, 2007). These four Ps are as follows: -
- Playfulness: playfulness means how relaxed is our workplace. Proper free environment and independence is needed for prevailing of creative ideas. Semco provides a playfulness environment. Employees work from home also. This gave them a relaxed environment and thus enhances creative ideas.
- Passionate: Passionate means passion or interest towards a certain task. If an employee gets a task in which he is interested and would do with passion, then it increases motivation and also helps in creativity. In Semco, people who are interested to do a job are embedded in teams which make them passionate towards work which increases motivation and enhances creativity.
- Persistence: persistence means experience, experience helps in making a person expertise in any subject. This may lead to creation of new ideas which enhance creativity.
- Positivity: Positivity means optimistic approach towards the steps taken. It is considered to be the thinking of a people to see the negative situations as a source of learning rather than just taking them in a negative sense. This in turn leads to the people to develop patience to tolerate other failures.
Leadership: Leadership plays a very important role in developing innovation in the organization. Leaders know how to make people function as a group, and how to motivate them. With the right type of leadership, cultures could be reshaped and excellent results could be achieved. Leaders make direction, create strategy and inspire people to achieve the goal. Leadership helps in developing a proper climate and processes which enhances creativity in future.
Organizational climate: Generally creative organisations have created a climate which supports creative thinking. Usually this climate is known as OPENED climate (Biech, 1996). The term OPENED is explained as below:-
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O – Open-minded: - It encourages flexibility and creativity. It probably allows employees to experiment with using creative approaches and techniques creative efforts are included in the budget.
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P – Perceptive: - The company sees things from the employees’ viewpoint. There is an assurance that the work is rewarding both in professional and personal way. A participative atmosphere is encouraged by asking for and acting upon employees’ input.
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E – Equal: - people are respected for the diversity each brings. Leadership techniques and styles are individualized to fit the needs of each employee. Employees’ ideas are implemented well
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N – Nurturing: - free expression of ideas are stimulated. Employees are provided with knowledge through speakers, libraries, training and other learning opportunities that provide input for creativity. Regeneration needs are accommodated through paid time off and sabbaticals.
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E – Encouraging: - employees are encouraged to find creative, different answer. Not only are creative efforts awarded and reinforced but time is built in to be creative. Freedom and opportunity for self-expression exist.
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D – Descriptive: - communication is very good. Clear objectives and specific feedback are basic to everything the organisation does. Employees have frequent direct customer contact. A balance between structure and opportunity for creative expression exists.
A strong climate for innovation may act as a way of focusing employee attention and creating a collective mentality that is supportive of innovation. Building a creative climate involves a systematic development of organizational structures and, communication policies and procedures, training and bringing of organizational strategies into action.
Opportunistic behavior: - Innovative organizations are effective in identifying and exploiting business opportunities, including those neglected or perhaps overlooked by others. As an innovative organization you need to encourage this type of ‘strategic opportunism’ enabling opportunities to be not just identified but appropriately evaluated in relation to risk and successfully exploited ().
SEMCO as an innovative organization
As it is discussed earlier, Semco has various properties which enhance creativity. Therefore, it can be regarded as an innovative organization. Following are its various processes where innovation was introduced: -
Structure
Semco used to work in a traditional South American way till 1980 when Ricardo Semler took over as CEO. On the first day as CEO Ricardo Semler fired two third of al top managers (). He changed the long hierarchical structure to only three levels of hierarchy. The structure of Semco is much like a flat structure.
Semler started out with a functional organizational structure at Semco. Under this structure, decision-making took a long time and each department took independent decisions that sometimes were not in the interests of other departments. Then, the company shifted to a matrix structure. But again Semler kept on changing the structure of Semco. The present structure of Semco is as follows: -
At the centre of Semco are a group of six so-called counsellors, and all of them take a six month turn as acting CEO (Semler 1994). There is a six month cycle to be a manager ad then the responsibility passes on. The same thing is there with the budget cycle. The difference is that, the CEO cycle starts in March and September whereas the budget cycles are from January and July. This type of rotation keeps everyone in action and no one could be blamed for failure. This helps in distribution of responsibility, which is good for the organisation.
The structure of Semco is like concentric circles. In the centre of it, there are the six CEO including Ricardo Semler. The partners or the leaders are part of second circle and the next circle consists of the other workers or associates.
Concentric circles
Culture
The reproduction of business units into smaller units as and when the need arose created units small enough to operate with a commonly shared set of values, philosophy and culture. The organization was bound together by the three interdependent core values: Employee Participation, Profit Sharing and Free Flow of Information. These three values stemmed from the belief that participation in design and implementation of work procedures would give employees control over their work; profit sharing would bring in a sense of ownership; and the availability of information as and when needed would help the employees understand to improve their work practices continuously. Thus, culture was very helpful to develop a creative environment.
Leadership and change management
Semler can be credited with supporting the essential changes at Semco. He nurtured changes that might have been viewed as taking away his power and authority. He created an empowered environment where employees could innovate continuously. An idea he generated would later flood to the whole workforce.
3.0 Complexity
Complexity has always been a part of our environment, and therefore many fields have dealt with complex systems and phenomena. Indeed, some would say that only what is somehow complex – what displays variation without being – is worthy of interest. () Complexity is a way of describing what occurs in a system by its very nature complexity does not predict an outcome but looks at how complex systems can generate simple outcomes. This means that complexity science provides a new perspective to consider organisations and organisational activities. It analyse a business organisation to give a better insight into the nature of organisational behaviour than is offered by current approaches. According to Levy (1994) “complexity is a promising framework that accounts for the dynamic evolution of industries and the complex interactions among industry actors.” Organizations and complex systems are non linear such that there is no proportionality between cause and effect. This means that in non linear systems a small amount of input can lead to enormous change in the output. In the non linear systems the change is not continuous. Long term forecasting is almost impossible and dynamic change can occur unexpectedly as a result, flexibility and adaptiveness is essential for organisations to survive. Therefore, the organization needs to be creative and innovative so that they can move further and survive in this complex environment.
Complex adaptive system
Every human organization is a network of people, that is, individual agents who interact with each other and with agents in the other organizations that constitute its environment (Charan 1991; Mueller, 1986; Nohria and Eccles, 1992). Complexity in human organization is usually drawn on a concept of chaos theory and complex adaptive system. Complex means composed of many parts which are joined together. Adaptive refers to the fact that all living systems dynamically adapt to their constantly changing environments as they strive to survive and thrive and system means everything is interconnected and interdependent. Complex adaptive systems are succinctly defined by Mitlenton-Kelly (1998) as ‘dynamic systems able to adapt and change within, or as apart of a changing environment’. Emergence, co-evolution, self-organization, informality and unpredictability are the main features of complex adaptive systems (Stacey, 2000) and (Henry, 2003).
Complex adaptive system
Source: www.trojanmice.com
Complex adaptive system are made up agents who explore, self organize and learn to adapt changes. People as agents working in the organization are adept at self organizing. They learn from their experiences and turn things to their own advantage
Human networks
There are two types of networks which can be found. These networks are legitimate network and the shadow network.
- The Legitimate network: - it is that type of network interaction which is formally established by the most powerful members of the organization or established by well-understood, implicit principles that are widely accepted by members of the organization – that is a shared culture or accepted ideology. Such links exists before action is taken and are normally designed, or evolved, to enable the performance of what is judged by the most powerful, or the majority, to be organization’s primary task – what the members of an organization need to do to sustain the support of others outside the organization at a given time. The links in this network are in formal nature and are linear in the sense that one and only one response is permitted for any given stimulus, any outputs are proportional to inputs and the system is not more or less than its parts.
- The shadow network: - The second category of links is shadow network. It is informally established and is completely different from legitimate network. The links in shadow network are informally created in which agents develop their own local rules for interacting with each other in the course of that interaction. This system is nonlinear as compared to legitimate which is linear. In shadow system, many qualities are present which are not there in legitimate network. These are: - additional flow of information, energy and actions are flow of emotions, friendship, trust and other qualities.
Therefore, an organization consists of two sub-systems, one ideally linear but in practice non-linear to some extent. This system is legitimate system. The other system is quite definitely nonlinear, which is known as shadow system. Both of these systems can be considered as non-linear as shadow system is always non-linear and legitimate is sometimes.
Chaos Theory
Chaos theory was discovered by Edward Lorenz in 1960 when he was working on a problem f weather prediction (Higgins, 2007). Chaos theory is a rigorous and formal attempt to deal with the issue of emergent changes that take place in the business environment. According to Kellert (1993) “chaos theory is a qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behaviour in deterministic non linear dynamic systems.” Kellert’s statement suggests that system changes over time and its behaviour do not repeat itself.
Chaos theory looks at how very simple things can generate very complex outcomes that could not be predicted by just looking at the parts by themselves. It also focuses on the behaviour of dynamic systems that are inherently unstable. Chaos science is a science that seeks to explain the phenomena that have always existed, but its focus upon them is fresh and it has a multidisciplinary approach that comes out from the western science tradition that had become increasingly reductionism. A chaotic system is not a random system rather it is a deterministic one. For example: - earth’s atmosphere is a chaotic system. The weather comprises patterns in independent forces such as pressure, temperature, humidity and wind speed which are related to each other by non-linear relationships.
The concepts of chaos carry improved details of organizational behavior.
It attempts to explain the fact that complex and unpredictable results can occur in organization that are sensitive to their initial conditions. This means to predict the future with certainty, we need to know the initial conditions with infinite accuracy, since errors increase rapidly even with the slightest inaccuracy. This is the reason why the weather forecast is so difficult because we need to know the initial conditions which are independent forces with infinite accuracy. Chaos theory attempts to explain the fact that complex and unpredictable results can and will occur in systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions. The butterfly effect illustrates the essential idea of chaos theory. . The butterfly effect was first described by Lorenz in December 1972. It is related to a saying that, “a butterfly that flaps its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world”. This relates it to the non-linear system which states that small changes in condition of the system lead to large changes in future. It means that a very small incidence can produce impulsive and sometimes severe results by triggering a series of increasingly major events. The butterfly effect occur under two conditions i.e. when the system is nonlinear and each state of the system is determined by the previous state. For example: - in a business of transportation where trucks are loaded with goods by the help of big machines, a small defect in a machine can lead to delay in transportation of goods, which may lead to fatal causes.
Emergent Property of complex adaptive system
There are various properties of complex adaptive systems, important of them are emergence, co-evolution, sub-optimal, connectivity, simple rules, self-organising and many more.
Emergent property: - Rather than being planned or controlled, the agents in the system interact in apparently random ways. From all these interactions, patterns emerge which informs the behaviour of the agents within the system and the behaviour of the system itself. () Emergence refers to the global behavior of the system that cannot be understood from observing the local behaviors between system components among themselves and their environment.
Common example of emergence is a termite hill which is a wondrous piece of architecture with a maze of interconnecting passages, large caverns, ventilation tunnels and much more. Yet there is no grand plan, the hill just emerges as a result of the termites following a few simple local rules. Another good example of emergence is stock-market. As a whole it precisely regulates the relative process of companies across the world, yet it has no leader. There is no one entity which controls the workings of the entire market. Agents, or investors, have knowledge of only a limited number of companies within their portfolio, and must follow the regulatory rules of the market. Through the interactions of individual investors the complexity of the stock market as a whole emerges.
An emergent behaviour can appear when a number of simple agents operate in an environment, collectively forming more complex behaviours. Two of the major reasons why emergent behaviour occurs are intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback. Emergent systems must have a method by which the output of the system affects the input, and where the past results affect the future results. The type of feedback, however, can neither be purely positive or negative but must consist of a transformative combination of both. Emergent behaviour is hard to predict because the number of interactions between components of a system increases combinatorial with the number of components, thus potentially allowing for many new and subtle types of behaviour to emerge.
Complex adaptive systems are not only emergent but are also self organizing in nature. Self organizing means that system structure often appears without any pressure or involvement from outside the system. According to Prigogine’s theory (1983), self organizing systems not only maintain themselves in a stable far from equilibrium, but may even evolve. When the flow of matter and energy increases, they may go through new instabilities and transform themselves into new structures of increased complexity. This means the agents in organizations interact according to their own principles and intentions. They adapt themselves to the changes that take place in the organizational environment and act accordingly to the circumstances. Self-organizing systems need to be open to their environments. By being open they can exchange matter and energy and so stay alive and far from equilibrium. For example, when we look at the flock of the birds flying all together in the sky, we would think the birds would have to be rather intelligent to work out how to fly in formation like that. We would probably also assume there must be a 'bird in charge' giving the others instructions. But the reason is the birds self-organize themselves that they don’t clash with each other and fly in one direction.
This is another important property of complex adaptive system. Self organization and emergence lead to fundamental structural development and not just superficial changes. Innovation is a key tool of complex adaptive system operating in the edge of chaos where stable experiments, learning and adaptation to changes are carried out. This is how the organizations survive the over long and short term futures.
Innovation at Semco as an emergent property of CAS
Semco did some changes which made it an innovative organization. Following are its characteristics which categories these changes as an emergent property.
Structure as an emergent property
Emergent structures are patterns which are not created by a single event or rule. There is nothing that commands the system to form a pattern, but instead the interactions of each part to its immediate surroundings cause a complex process which leads to order. One might conclude that emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts because the emergent order will not arise if the various parts are simply coexisting; the interaction of these parts is central. The structure of Semco is a flat structure. It is more like an emergent structure as it doesn’t have any proper commands over the “satellite program”. The teams are made according to their interest and are complex in nature. It can be thus, easily predicted that structure of Semco is an emergent one.
Culture as an emergent property
An emergent behaviour can appear when a number of simple agents operate in an environment, collectively forming more complex behaviours. Two of the major reasons why emergent behaviour occurs are intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback. In Semco, the teams or satellites are made up of various agents who come in a group to achieve their aim. Thus, the culture of Semco can also be categorized as an emergent property of complex adaptive system.
Therefore, it can be explored that Semco is an innovative organization and its procedures for innovation can be seen as an emergent property of the complex adaptive system.
4.0 Modernity and Post Modernism
Modernity is a rational process. It is a process which works on acientific rationality. Modernity works on natural and social laws created by the universe. Modernity has the following features
- Necessity (natural and social laws)
- Universality (across time and space)
- Certainity and predictability
- Truth and reality
- Transparency or understandability
- Order of nature and structures
Post – modern concept developed from the failing of modernity philosophy
(Higgins, 2007). It does not work on laws created by universe but through creative human experience. Post-modern concept has the following features: -
- Contingency or chance
- Locality and the particular
- Uncertainity and provisionality
- Critique of tradition bound analysis
- Undecidability
- Ambivalence of human design.
Modernity and post-modern concepts can be compared with each otheron the following points: -
- Modernity guides towards consensual community based on knowledge gained through universal laws whereas Post-modern concept favoured the knowledge gained through creative of human experience.
- Modernity consider natural and social laws whereas post-modern concept consider contingency and chance
- Modernity consider certainity and predictability whereas post modern works upon uncertainity and provisionality
- Modernity believes in tranparency or understandability but post-modern concept belives in undecidability.
- Modernity consider order of nature and structres where as post modern concept consider ambivalence of human design.
Semco as a Post-Modern organisation
Semco could be regarded as more closer to post – modern concept on the basis of following characteristics: -
- Identity: - In Post – Modern approaches, individual identity is not clearly defined rather it shifts over time and is generally considered unstable. Same is the case with Semco, in this company the identity is not clearly defined as people keep on shifting their job titles.
- Politics: - The political implecation of this is that, it may be difficult yo imagine collective action, social movements, and social change toward some specific goal. For extreme postmodernists, there may be no goals or plans that people can or should attempt to strive for or achieve. In semco, people does’nt work towards a goal. They just do their own task and start working for another. This is a post-modern approach.
- Ambivalence of human design: - Post modern approach does not belive in structures or buerucracy as modern concept does. For semco, there is no beurucracy and only three levels of hierarchy are there. There is no proper structure.
These were some characteristics says that Semco could be an organisation with Post-modern approach.
5.0 Conclusion
In the changing environment it is important for the organisations to survive. The world is full of complexity and technology. It is very necessry for the organisations to innovate and be creative.
The above essay explains about innovation and analyses that how it can be enhanced in a crative environment. The qualities of creativity are discussed in detail and are further applied to an orgnisation.
In the second part of the essay, complexity is defined and analysed in detail along with chaos theory and one of its concept which is complex adaptive systems. the properties of the complex adaptive systems are discussed in the organisation.
Modernity and Post-modern concept is also discussed in detail and organisation is comared with them in the end.
6.0 Refernces
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Amabile, T. 1998. How to Kill Creativity. Harvard Business Review. September p77-78
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1999. A Systems Perspective on creativity in Sternberg, R(ed) handbook of creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge university press.
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Stacey R.D. Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics. The Challenge of Complexity. 3rd ed. Pearson
- Darwin, C. 1979. The Illustrated Origin of Species: London: BCA
- Jones, T. 2002. Innovation at edge. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann
- Henry, J. 2003. Creativity and Perception in Mnagement. London : Sage publications
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Semler, R. 1994 Why my former employees still work for me. Harvard Business Review. January p 64-74
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Jolly A. 2003 Innovation: harnessing creativity for business growth. Kogan Page p-172
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Urabe, K. Child, J. Kagono, T. 1988. Innovation and Management: International Comparisons. Walter De gruyter Page 3
- Biech E 1996 Creativity and Innovation: the ASTD trainer’s sourcebook McGraw hill professional page 3
- www.creativityatwork.com
