Creativity at Work

Citation

Murphy, A. (2008), "Creativity at Work", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 104-105. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730810845333

The author, S. Ramachander, has 26 years' experience of senior management in large companies as well as 12 years' experience as a academic teaching on management programmes in India, in the UK Open University Business School and in the USA. In the Foreword, Professor Jane Henry, Open University, describes the book as offering soft approaches to change in organisations with an emphasis on other ways of knowing and on creative wisdom. However, it is a little unfortunate that she equates Western management with Anglo‐Saxon presumptions: a judgement somewhat less than creative in promoting the book to a global readership!

The preface explains how this book is more accessible and has more selective content that the previous book by the author: Ascending the Value Spiral, with the intention of being different and intriguing. In the Acknowledgements a range of very different thinkers are named as inspirations including Argyris, Buzan and Capra, prompting the reader to wonder how they might be integrated with the author's Indian traditions of thinking without overstretching credulity in the name of creativity. The Introduction goes some way to providing the answer by claiming that the purpose of the book is to be a handbook for mangers which will encourage them to unlearn and to let go of old mental models, to be counter‐intuitive and to look afresh at creating new options, to think of the future without linear extrapulation, to use heuristic approaches, rather than systems thinking, to think of organisations as complex adaptive systems, and not to be wedded to conventional wisdom. Instead, managers are being urged to unlearn old habits of systems thinking, to make connections between phenomena in order to better understand the universe and to value dialogue, listening and attention.

The 15 short chapters that follow elaborate the various aspects of creative thinking in organisations mentioned in the introduction, with charts and diagrams to walk the reader through the ideas, almost in textbook fashion. Additional ideas, such as Bateson's ecology theory and Zen Buddhism figure in support of eclectic thinking. Aristotle, Plato, Myers‐Briggs, P.G. Woodhouse, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot make appearances as well as Senge, and notable figures from the British Coal Board and Dutch Shell.

It is difficult to imagine precisely who the reader of this book might be, other than students of advanced management programmes. Eclectic material, such as is presented here, requires a considerable knowledge base on the part of the reader. If this is a workbook as it is described in the Introduction, it certainly demands considerable follow‐up work if the reader is unfamiliar with the concepts and references used.

It certainly is a provocative book, variously provoking amusement, irritation and insights across the different chapters. The diagrams and cartoons are mildly annoying in their simplistic messages and in many cases the references from the business world would be familiar only to particular types of training programmes.

The book is particularly gender‐free in its content and worldview with references to women managers or women leaders difficult to find. The role models and thinkers drawn upon are not considered in depth, possibly with the expectation that the reader is already familiar with them in any case.

However, the book's virtue is its message to managers to rely less on systems thinking and on linear conditioning, and more on eclectic wisdom drawn from complexity and emergence theory that transcends cultural and national boundaries and cultures, on action learning and dialogic decision making. The reference list is short but useful for the reader, anxious to follow up ideas drawn upon in their original source.