Fostering Creativity In Engineering

When companies are very small-literally as they are starting-up-innovation abounds. Team members of all disciplines regularly come up with ideas that involve ideas that span across the company and not just their craft. There’s a constant need to keep trying things out and tweaking. Virtually, everyone understands that the team is experimenting. I have witnessed this with dozens of startups in my work as a consultant, and it is always an exciting time.

However, it is apparent that with every additional organizational layer, people tend to paint themselves into particular boxes. Their ideas no longer encompass the entire context. They stop tweaking and focus on execution-even if the company has yet to reach its product/market fit and still requires constant innovation. And, obviously, there’s a point at which a company can just stop improving itself.

I wholeheartedly believe fostering innovation and novelty is a way to induce self-actualization in teams and create world-class engineering organizations. Here are some of the principles I advise clients about to maintain and increase their creative output.

A big part of being able to innovate relies on having an awareness of what actions and options are available to you. In R&D, that usually means knowing all sorts of nooks and crannies of our tools and keeping abreast of new advances in technology. I typically call this Tool Mastery, and for someone to possess it, she does not need to remember by heart all the different configuration options available. She does need to have knowledge of the possibilities. You should be hearing things along the lines of “I recall that they made changes that allow treating these things differently a year ago let’s check the changelog.”

One rarely gets such deep Tool Mastery from executing on tasks. Those certainly help, but we tend to default to using tools and options we are already familiar with. Instead, creativity happens when regularly take new paths. Play with the features introduced in the new version, even if you’re not sure you need…

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