Creative Reasoning is integral to an organisation as employees who think broadly and deeply using skills, behaviours and dispositions such as reason, logic, resourcefulness, imagination and innovation help the organisation stay ahead of the competition. According to me, Creative Reasoning can often be a perception strategy in order to ascertain the viability in and around hurdles of, far-from-orthodox yields!

An IBM study reveals that 60 per cent of CEOs identify creativity as the most important leadership quality for success in business. To ensure innovation and growth in the workplace, it is essential to foster creative thinking among employees.

Here, I have curated a simple step-by-step key to foster creative reasoning and thought process among employees in an organisation.

1. Employee Participation: The first and the foremost thing any organisation must do to promote creativity at the workplace is to involve the employees. The employees must feel connected to the organisation and that is incentive enough to be innovative. It is important that the employees are aware and their inputs are sought, as regards, the organisation’s strategies and challenges. Active participation initiates more ideas and initiatives.

2. Innovation Matters: When an employee is heard, he feels wanted They need to understand that the organisation would like to know their thoughts and ideas and is interested in implementing them. They must feel part of the initiative wherein your business processes help you stay ahead of the competition unless an employee feels ‘wanted’.

3. Open doors to new ideas: There is a need to give employees time and respect their ideas with group workshops and brainstorming sessions. When collective minds work together, it is easier to pinpoint loopholes, identify problems and ensure organisational growth. Open your mind and allocate time for new ideas.

4. Training and development: Being familiar with creative problem solving may need formal training and mind mapping. This enables the employees to be more creative and work on ideas that can be translated into reality.

5. Open ends, open avenues: Encourage your employees to understand how other organisations work, educate them with success stories and enable them to keep abreast of competition, broadening people’s thinking through other people’s experience helps creative innovation.

6. Encourage newer approaches: When employees take a fresh look at an existential situation, they may find alternative ways of working that enable better results. 7. Encourage employee suggestions: Sometimes the smallest of employees come out with the best of ideas, provided someone out there is willing to lend an ear. Agreed, not every employee comes out with the best, but by discouraging them, you actually lose out on organisational growth which could be stemmed by an idea.

8. Accept risk-taking: We all learn from our mistakes. So do our employees. If an idea doesn’t work out, let the employee know that you appreciate his initiative and encourage him to ideate again. Risk taking is a part of business and is inevitable if you see creative ideas and innovation.

9. Motivation is a must: Bringing ideas to need to be recognised, respected and awarded. Apart from the above, those who ideate on a regular basis need to be awarded and encouraged, irrespective of error they were utilised by the organisation.

10. Implementation – The final step: Creative and innovative thinking is of any consequence only when the organization puts it to practice. The important thing is to zero in on worthy ideas, put them to practice, ensure that innovative employees are encouraged, rewarded and fresh ideas are sought on a regular basis. Only then will the process of initiating creative thinking at the workplace be of some consequence.

A rather impressive word-play for Creative Reasoning could also be Reasoned Creativity! But, as Keith Holyoak, a distinguished professor of psychology with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) eloquently explains in Mental Leaps, a thoroughly researched journal that he co-published with Paul Thagard, “Analogy is a mental tool that everyone uses to some degree. Understanding how we draw analogies is important for people interested in the evolution of thinking,” where he goes on to focus on both, creative thinking as well as errors of everyday reasoning!

And that is something to take home to think about.