Diversity Adds Creativity

By William Anderson

It is time to look at Diversity from a different angle. Not just because you want your business to be PC, inclusive and a‑racial. It is time to grab the opportunity Diversity represents for your business.

In the 1980s Disney’s Michael Eisner increased the Diversity of his workforce in order to bring in a wealth of healthy experiences. Only by doing this could Disney possibly ‘talk to’ their truly global audience.

So why is Diversity so important? Here’s a clue. Talking about creativity and innovation, Sir Tom Farmer said, “All you need is information, experiences and time.” Diversity relates to the middle of these three ingredients. The greater your Diversity the more potential creativity is residing in your work force. Where your people have been, seen and understood will influence their ability to view the World in a different light. And that is the corner stone of creativity.

For more information on courses in Creative Thinking, email william@the-teamworks.co.uk or use the free CallBack feature at the top of this page.

The World is not the way it is but the way we are, until we can remove the blinkers and take a different view. The broader and deeper the experiences you can draw on from your people, the more likely you will be able to achieve genuinely different thinking.

But why? Simply because of competition; intense, omnipresent competition from every corner of the globe, trying to win share in your market.

If you still need inspiration to use diversity to improve your creativity, look at Gillette. They use international resources to make sure that they are the ones that make each of their products obsolete. They are their own competition! That way they are always first to market with the next generation of products in their market.

Most of the companies I have worked with over the last 20 years in the UK are risk, change and innovation averse. They have pushed creative thinking into a special department or farmed it out to an agency. This has to change and a diverse work force, added to the mix, in order to spark new thinking.

For more information on courses in Creative Thinking, email william@the-teamworks.co.uk or use the free CallBack feature at the top of this page.

In Silicon Valley, the percentage of immigrants, women and youngsters in the workforce far exceed their representation in the rest of the population. It is no coincidence that Silicon Valley churns out probably more ideas and innovations per business than any other concentration of business in the World.

Just like Fusion Food, all companies need to bring together new experiences to spark new ideas. If your ingredients always come from the same stall, the same middle market, the same education background, you will only get the same results. You have to spice it up a bit. Fuse different ingredients of different influence to get different ways of looking at life in business.

And that brings me neatly to our team building exercises with cooking; team building cooking seminars; cunningly culinary team building, which you can read about when you come back to our site.

William Anderson is an associate of The TeamWorks delivering training in Personality Profiling, Creative Thinking, Leadership and High Performance Teams.

For more information on courses in Creative Thinking, email william@the-teamworks.co.uk or use the free CallBack feature at the top of this page.