CreatOrg Workshop - From Doubt to Drive

Abstract

Creativity is becoming increasingly essential in today’s workplaces and organisations. However, though everyone is believed to be creative, not everyone feels confident enough to express their creative ideas. The organisational culture plays a remarkable role in shaping the creative climate. If its core cultural value does not support and encourage creativity, employees may experience a lack of creative confidence. Therefore, to address creative confidence in organisations, it is crucial to study the organisation’s creative culture and implement interventions that are culturally sensitive. For this project, Rabobank and PostNL were selected as the organisation cases, specifically their innovation project teams within the innovation departments as the project focus.

The project was carried out qualitatively to study the innovation contexts of Rabobank and PostNL, in which the main participants consisted of the innovation coaches and coachees from the innovation project teams. By analysing and mapping out the creative cultures of these two companies, several key cultural values were identified. These include: high power division, reverence for company history and traditional way of working, adherence to clear rules and aversion to uncertainty, emphasis on group connections and collaborations, and a drive for success and achievement.

To help the innovation coaches in fostering greater creative confidence in the coachees, an intervention called “CreatOrg workshop” was designed. It is a templated journey (a workshop with 4 activities) that encourages coaches and coachees to reflect on their previous coaching and workshop experiences together. The workshop aimed to increase sensitivity and awareness towards the creative cultural values of ‘care’ and ‘fun’, while inspiring participants to generate potential ideas for fostering creative confidence in future coaching and workshop settings.

Later the concept was evaluated with respondents from Rabobank and PostNL, as well as other relevant stakeholders from different organisations. The results indicated that CreatOrg workshop effectively increased participants’ creative confidence and enhanced their sensitivity and awareness towards both ‘care’ and ‘fun’ creative cultural values. Participants also found it inspiring and acknowledged its potential for long-term use.

Rabobank and PostNL could directly benefit from CreatOrg workshop and the insights from their creative cultures. Other organisations might also find it helpful to reflect on their own creative cultures by studying the demonstrated creative cultural values of Rabobank and PostNL. However, further communication and follow-up validation within Rabobank and PostNL is needed. Future research could utilise the combined cultural model proposed in this project to explore organisation/culture-related subjects. Additionally, the intervention itself could be experimented with more types of organisations in the future.