After all, they are at the coal-face with customers every day of the week, and that s a very fertile place for spawning great creative solutions. Encourage your staff to pick one problem they are interested in and feel able to solve, and give them the license and space to work on finding a creative solution. Recognise their success, and make them feel valued as a creative contributor. They will then approach everyday tasks with a new creative mind-set that could generate amazing results for your business. Encourage your staff to be on the alert for serendipity, that is, fortunate accidents that occur in the context of focussed insight.
Creativity often involves making new connections between things that seem unconnected at the time.
Serendipity helps to bridge the distance between these things. It could occur when a customer makes a casual throw away comment to a sales assistant, that then allows the assistant to make an instant connection with a better way of displaying goods on the counter. Serendipity happened to me when I keyed in a typo on my word processor. At the time I was focussed on finding a catchy, imaginative phrase for a chapter heading of a book I was writing. My clumsy typing gave me my solution in an instant, but only because I was alert to this meaningful coincidence.