Before you begin to work on the questionnaire, read the final report of a Creativity, Collaboration and Culture survey.
This is what our final white paper will look like.
Ideally, it will be presented at SXSW (or a similar setting).
This report will be completed after this course, so it's not anything you need to worry about, but I suspect some, if not all, will be asked to be involved in some capacity once the data are collected.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2Dv4MQMdbN4TGMtTGxMWDRzLWc/view?usp=sharing
As you read the report, contemplate the questions that you'd like to see added to our survey.
Feel free to comment below.
Jack
Some of the creative ideas discussed in the intro seemed fantastic, particularly the Virgin America airline comparison idea, but also the Dreamworks app. It was helpful for me to read a definition of creative destruction, and perhaps that should have been given to respondents before the survey was administered, as I'm sure not sure it is a widely used term. I notice that the respondents did not seem to feel as strongly about the need for creative destruction as they did about creativity as a general term, and creative destruction's numbers going up at the end seems to be a product of respondents becoming more familiar with the term.
ReplyDeleteA closed-ended question asking to define creativity seems very difficult, as is asked in Question 5, and might put ideas in survey responders heads for the rest of the survey. The information from the open-ended questions, though difficult to mine in a large sample, seem to be a strong collection compared with the other questions.
I'm wondering about the validity of the open-ended question section here. While I appreciate the value of information one can glean from open-ended questions, I'm thinking about how to go about presenting/summarizing that information in a credible way. Here, for example, the authors say that "only a select number of responses are highlighted," but there is no indication as to how those responses were selected, or whether or not they were representative of the general sample. This seems to me like a potential source of bias in any survey, as authors would always be tempted to cherry-pick responses that confirmed their hypothesis.
ReplyDeleteMany questions within the survey seemed like they had to have known the answer before they asked the question. For instance:
ReplyDeleteHow important is external communications when speaking to your customers?
Very important............................ 86%
Somewhat important...................12%
Not very important..........................2%
Not at all important .......................0%
Is anyone surprised by the 86%? I can’t imagine.
And then other possible answer option responses seem completely implausible by a business professional. Like:
Which of the following statements best describes how you would define “creativity”?
Again, it seems obvious that execs would err on the side of analytics/data to transform creative programs or they would choose taking creative thought and changing it into a business competence. The other two options: ‘tearing down to start anew’ and ‘making the complex simple’ seem, actually, really simple.
One of the questions I found weird was #2 in Section 3. That so few Cs considered building a positive corp culture an aspect of creativity. I don't know why, but if you are working in an environment that fosters creativity it seems reasonable that positivity would be a bi-product and one that they covet? A I reading that wrong?
ReplyDeleteLike Scott, creative destruction was a new term for me. It makes a lot of sense. But 88% of the respondents recognizing it as necessary was surprising. In my experience, the standard has been if you can't disprove the current model then lets stick to it. I believe that traditional media or Cs that work in traditional environments have a harder time with this concept than those in the industries where innovation and change are sought after, in a way. Who are these 88 percenters??? What do you all think, is it easier for some industries to accept creative destruction as key to success in this age than others? Can some businesses reinvent without "completely tearing down the old way and starting anew"?
If I were a CEO or C anything, I would do all I could to adopt the practice of job switching. It is a wonderful way to see what other teams are doing, how they are doing and develop respect for your colleagues whose work one may have underestimated. It is also a great way to witness how different parts get the whole thing moving. Love this idea.
On the other hand, I am skeptical about the "try new idea, scratch it if it doesn't work". In theory, it is a great approach but in practice, I feel as though "heads will roll if this doesn't work" is more universal unless you truly work in a company like APPLE or Facebook where innovation is the job.