Creativity and the Management of Change

Citation

Rausch, E. (2000), "Creativity and the Management of Change", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 19 No. 9, pp. 805-807. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.2000.19.9.805.2

Creativity is a difficult subject. It is both real and ephemeral, tantalizing and forbidding at the same time. It is involved in, and affects everything we do and think. What’s even more perplexing are the subject’s many aspects, and the wide range of perspectives from which it can be viewed.

This is where Rickard’s volume makes its most important contribution, using an exceedingly creative approach. The author uses several metaphors such as “platforms of understanding” which are crafted from “jigsaw puzzles” for creativity and for its most important segments. Each puzzle puts together the subjects that are well established in the business disciplines, the “orthodoxy” as he calls them. However, inevitably there are some pieces missing in each puzzle. Rickards calls them the “suppressed voices”. He identifies these and uses them to complete each one of the puzzles. Other metaphors speak of the “handful of books” for each subject, and the idea of a “personal quest or journey” which he uses to bind together the topics and chapters.

Thus, starting with key insights from the literature, taken from the “handful of books”, he designs the jigsaw‐type puzzles in which he first arranges the clearly known elements and then explores the blank spaces that remain.

The unstated objective of the book is to help students of organizational studies gain greater familiarity with the slippery, elusive topic of creativity.

He starts with the platform of understanding of business disciplines, a 12 box matrix‐type “puzzle” in which the ten perimeter boxes represents the “common pieces” – the orthodox approach. The ten boxes are labelled, clockwise, starting with the top left box: economics, marketing and strategy, quantitative analysis, finance, organization studies, accounting, human resource management, international business, operations and technology management, and management information systems. The centre two boxes are then expanded in a separate, smaller matrix of six boxes which represent the “optional core” of business discipline – the topics that are either not uniformly included in the curriculum, or are covered unevenly if at all. These are the primary focus of the book and are listed as creativity, innovation, culture and climate, leadership, management of change, and postmodern views. The book covers them in chapters 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, and 9, respectively. They constitute three “suppressed” voices, or heresies: the humanist, structured, and interpretative paradigms which demand attention from the dominant managerialist viewpoint.

From there he moves to the development of platforms on the practitioner’s perspective of creativity, creativity history, innovation, marketing, strategy and their neighbours (related issues), decision‐making, culture (including climate), leadership, change (and its management) and modernism, and the relevant segments of economics. On the way are many charts with two coordinates, subjective/objective, and radical/regulatory, creating window‐type boxes with which the author attempts to show how the dominant voices inevitably draw the suppressed ones into their structured corner. The relationships, as the author perceives them, are not easy to understand because the explanations are somewhat brief and therefore require extensive effort to decipher the message which the author has intended.

In summary, this is a most unusual and ambitious approach to the understanding of creativity. Much of what the author says will strike responsive chords among readers who share his concerns about the inadequate treatment of so many subjects in business education, and the lack of emphasis on creativity.

Unfortunately, though, the author does not provide any comprehensive summary or conclusion, but rather leaves the reader somewhat in midair at the conclusion of the last chapter, which surprisingly, is on economics, and beyond – hardly a topic that sheds extensive light on the meaning and application of creativity.