The Creativity at Work Blog

Introducing the Management Innovation Index© to North America

Individual • Practice • Strategy • Environment • Culture

The three big challenges for companies over the next generation are going to be:

1. Adaptability: How you build things that can transform themselves.
2. Innovation: How you mobilise the imagination of every single person in your organisation.
3. Engagement: How you create organisations that are so engaging emotionally and intellectually that people want to bring their capabilities to work.
   — Gary Hamel, The Future of Management

Synchronizing Your Strengths

The Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre, an Australian-based global management consultancy of which I am a Senior Associate, has developed a new research tool:

The Management Innovation Index (MIX) is designed to assist organisations in synchronizing  leadership, management and strategy, for innovative and measurable business outcomes.

MIX gives you a snapshot of your organisation’s management innovation capabilities and capacities at a given moment in time. It does this by surveying your organisational culture, environment, strategy and practice and your employees’ beliefs and attributes in relation to management and innovation.

How MIX Works

Data is collected through the MIX on-line questionnaire, which takes approximately 12 minutes to answer 46 questions about:

1. The organisational culture and environment
2. The organisation’s strategy processes
3. The organisation’s creativity and innovation practices, and
4. An individual’s personal traits and beliefs in relation to leadership, management, creativity and innovation.

These four components need to be in synch for an organisation to capitalise on its creative capacities. This questionnaire can be completed across entire organisations, across brands, across teams or on a ‘silo’ by ‘silo’ trial basis. Organisations have used the MIX to compare a difficult area and a successful area of their organisation simultaneously. As the MIX data builds, organisations can be benchmarked against other organisations and industries against industries globally.

The Outcome – The MIX Assessment Report

The MIX Report provides you with an executive summary and a detailed analysis that:

• Reveals your organisation’s current status on leadership, management, creativity and innovation
• Identifies factors that trigger and obstacles that inhibit strategic, team and individual creativity and innovation within the organisation
• Benchmarks your organisation against itself, industry, and general data collected across all the Management Innovation Index surveys
• Recommends training and development in management innovation, strategic, creative leadership and creativity techniques which are tailored to suit your organisation’s assessment report
• Offers access to the Creative Leadership Forum’s portal and facilities with up-to-date research reports, creativity tools, papers relating management innovation, leadership, creativity and innovation

Download the Management Innovation Index -MIX Brochure (PDF)

What Makes MIX different?

Most diagnostics survey employees behaviours (ie learning styles, personality thinking styles etc. Leadership surveys concentrate on the leaders’ behaviour and actions. There was little on assessing the system or processes used in organisations except for surveys that were self-serving, supporting the systems already in place.

Thus, to understand an organisations’ creative and innovative environment fully, the Creative Leadership Forum set about designing an on-line survey tool that could construct an approximation of a creative ecology within in which organisations operate, so an organization could see its strengths; synchronize its efforts, allocate appropriate resources to work towards augmenting the emerging opportunities and thus better realize its business opportunities.

The Research behind the Index

MIX grew out of a Creative Leadership Forum (CLF) research project conducted in Australia during 2007 and 2008 seeking to answer the question “Is management creative and innovative?”

• 82% of employees see themselves as being creative, whilst only
• 49% view their organisations as creative.
• 50% of the organisations with innovation objectives, have systems and processes which stifle or impede the employee’s abilities to deliver innovation.

Further research revealed those organisations who had stood the test of time creatively such as GE, Apple, News Corporation and Deloitte, clearly understood how to create environments and systems in which management facilitated and thrived on creativity and innovation as a prime business driver.

A search by The Creative Leadership Forum for a diagnostic tool or survey that could capture the essence of this environment to enable organisations to reflect on their management innovation capabilities and capacities came up empty-handed.

The economists and their statistics offered little in the way of meaning or understanding, simply classification for types of creative or innovative organisations or industries, (ie these type of organisations fit creative industries, these type fit IT industries etc.)

Organisations that show creative or innovative tendencies don’t fit easily into economists’ statistical classification. Creative organisations came from all sectors, and each organization is systemically and uniquely creative. Just as no two paintings are the same, no two organisations are the same and statistics based on bell curves offer no insights.

The MIX Pedigree

Some 18 months ago, the Creative Leadership Forum teamed up with Dr Ed Halteman, a PhD in statistics and survey and senior consultant to American on-line company, SurveyGizmo, to design the management innovation diagnostic tool.

MIX draws on diverse sources such as Henry Minztberg’s theories on types of organisational strategy; the Creative Leadership Forum’s own research on the attributes of creative leaders; and an audit of organisational readiness for innovation developed by TRACTORS, (a Leonardo da Vinci project involving 8 European universities funded by the European Commission).

MIX has been field tested by business and government organizations  in Australia and responses have been highly favourable.

Management Innovation Index
Testimonial

We used the small sample of our team (14 people) to conduct the survey and then use this as a trigger for discussion on how we could improve our commitment to innovation and creativity. The survey itself was interesting and useful but the real value came in the facilitated session which Ralph Kerle ran for us afterwards. We used this to tease out some of the thornier questions from the survey and it expanded into a much broader conversation about how we worked as a team, how we should work with other divisions within the ABC and in a 90 minute session also generated some entirely new ideas for enhancing our commitment to innovation. These are now being discussed with the People & Learning division of the ABC and will feed into the ABC’s broader innovation strategy.

Abigail E. Thomas
Head of Innovation
Australian Broadcasting Commission

Download the Management Innovation Index -MIX Brochure

To discuss how Mix can benefit your organisation
please contact Linda Naiman.