Unleash Your Creativity to Ensure Portfolio Success
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By Jen L. Skrabak, PMP, PfMP
Portfolio management is in large part about enabling innovation. And innovation starts with creativity. What’s the difference between innovation and creativity? As economist and Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt once said, “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”
Because projects and programs are the vehicles for implementing new ideas, creating new products or services and transforming current state, portfolio management enables innovation.
Creativity is not enough (this is the title of an article Professor Levitt wrote in 1963). Put another way, “Ideas are useless unless used” (another Levitt quote). Good ideas must be realized to mean something.
Since project and program management are all about executing a vision, value creation and benefits realization, they provide the natural vehicle for translating ideas into reality.
Portfolio management translates the right ideas into reality within the confines of organizations. It’s about order, process, structure and ROI.
Change Your Vantage Point
Of course, there’s always a danger of too much order and process stifling creativity. So how do we unleash creativity? Sometimes we’re our own obstacle to becoming more creative.
I believe the key to unlocking creativity is to increase our vantage points. A vantage point is just a way of observing our surroundings, facts and other information in order to create our reality.
When faced with a challenge, sometimes our tendency is to trick ourselves to view it as something we’ve seen before. Our brain does this in order to save us time. But this tendency to go on autopilot inhibits new ways of thinking and solving problems.
To see what I mean, get a piece of paper and draw a coffee cup. Did you draw the cup like this?
Most people do, since it’s how coffee cups are usually depicted. Now imagine the same coffee cup viewed from the top down.
Your vantage point matters—it frames the problem, which in turn impacts the solutions you can brainstorm.
Here’s another way of thinking about vantage points. In 2014, there were more than 108 billion business emails sent and received each day. (This doesn’t include instant messages, personal emails, social media messages and other electronic communications.)
We’re all inundated with data, information and images—your brain receives 11 million pieces of information every second from your environment. Yet it can only process 40 pieces of data per second. Which means it has to choose which tiny percentage to focus on, and which huge chunk to ignore.
How you see your reality is a choice.
What you choose to focus on shapes how you perceive and interpret your world. Your ability to train your brain to see other vantage points is critical to innovation and creativity, and ultimately your portfolio success.
Seeing your problems, your business, your team and yourself from different vantage points increases your creativity and innovation and accelerates results. Just like any other skill, creativity is something you can develop over time. Why not start now?
Posted
by
Jen Skrabak
on: March 30, 2015 02:54 PM |
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Comments (4)
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Tanya Boyd
Director of Creative Collaboration| Project Success Academy
Baton Rouge, La, United States
Thank you for sharing, this is a fantastic article!
The reinforcement of the differences between creativity and innovation really struck a chord in me.
Having the creativity to come up with fantastic ideas is a wonderful quality, but unless you put forth the effort to learn how to successfully execute those ideas and turn them into reality, you run the risk of just spinning your wheels.
Tolitha Lewis
Sr. Project Manager| Eli Lilly & Company
Fishers, In, United States
Jen, thank you for this outstanding reminder. "How you see your reality is a choice." Such a great quote and so true! Thank you!
Jen Skrabak
Portfolio Management Office (PMO) Executive| Strategy+PM, LLC
Calabasas, Ca, United States
Thanks so much, I appreciate your comments. I agree that knowing what and how to implement is that magic ingredient and difference concept and reality.
Kevin Coleman
Subject Matter Expert, Author, Speaker and Strategic Advisor| - Insights
Pa, United States
All too often people who stand to lose power and influence get in the way of creativity.
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