First move: Change the business

You cannot suddenly decide that an economy will become creative, or somehow issue an official directive that a business must become creative overnight.

If you want to facilitate creativity, you have to take the time to change the business environment itself. In particular, you have to put the right working conditions in place to allow individual creativity to flourish. A key element of such change is individual empowerment, or to put it more bluntly: changing the organisation's working dynamic.

The idea of the self-empowerment of workers is well illustrated in the concept of self-directed work teams (SDWTs). For many years, these teams have been extremely productive in many countries, especially in the Japanese auto sector. In essence, SDWTs comprise employees who have been given the authority to manage their business environment on a daily basis, and who are empowered to take corrective actions to resolve day-to-day problems. In short, SDWTs are expected to manage themselves.

This is a pretty scary concept for middle managers, who have always relied on the top-down model of hierarchical business management. It's easy to see why managers get frightened by the idea of SDWTs, yet I worked in a self-directed work environment for seven years at Bell Canada and I can honestly say that SDWTs are the best thing that could happen to any business that wants to change for the better.

Like other mangers, I was sceptical of SDWTs to begin with, but as my management role changed to that of coach and facilitator, our SDWT experiment took off and everyone felt the benefit. I didn't need to manage the day-to-day stuff for 50 people anymore and members of the SDWT felt they had been given a say in running the business, and consequently took ownership of it in a way they never had before. Creativity and innovation became the norm.

So, the choice is there to be made: stick with the same old management model and remain the same old type of economy, or try something new and creative by implementing SDWTs - or at least a Thai adaption of the concept that allows kreng jai to be a part of it.

I will explore this theme in a later article.

This is the second in a series. Niall Sinclair is also founder and managing director of Nterprise Consulting in Ottawa. He can be contacted at niall.s@bu.ac.th or nterprise@rogers.com.