It seems counter-intuitive, but limiting yourself can actually increase your productivity and innovation. Mark McGuiness of Lateral Action has an awesome article on how thinking inside the box can increase your creativity.
To underscore the point, Mark walks you through a short exercise where you’re provided an increasing set of limitations. Head over there, try it out for yourself, and see what you learn. (It’s ok – I’ll wait)
Welcome back! Does this give you any insight into how you develop HR programs? As an HR pro, I’ve often been frustrated with the limitations that many organizations put on HR that other departments (like Sales) don’t always have to deal with: smaller staff, smaller budgets, less strategic involvement.
In a way, these limitations may be a blessing in disguise. They free you to be more creative and innovative about the programs you create and implement.
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Thanks Chris, glad you found the article of interest. I wasn’t thinking of HR specifically when I wrote that, but having worked a lot with HR depts on training/development projects, I can see what you mean!
@Mark – thanks for stopping by! I actually think the article has applications beyond developing HR programs (even in terms of how you structure an organization’s work to help inspire creativity and innovation), but in the interest of writing something short and sweet, I focused on HR stuff. Great read!
Yes Chris,
Many HR staffs at my country now begin to (try to) think OUTSIDE the box but didn’t realize that how we can get more from our ‘inside’.
I agreed with your mention about everything-in-HR-is-less-than-the-other, everytime I see people suggest about how INNOVATIVE blah blah blah of their new projects but their didn’t do a budget forcast about their innovation (don’t mention about ROI, I didn’t hear this word from HR for a long long time).
Great article! Thanks to Mark!
And sorry for my bad engrish!
@Rising-Top – Thanks, and no apologies needed. Glad to have some international presence on the site!