Creativity is a key skill for agile teams and businesses. The document provides tips to encourage and embrace creativity within agile frameworks. It recommends hiring smart and passionate people, giving teams freedom to share ideas, and discussing failures to improve. An appropriate culture that accepts mistakes and solves problems can foster creativity. With practice of these tips, agile teams and organizations can achieve a creative structure to provide great products and services.

1. Creativity for Agile

3. “Creative thinking is not a talent; it is a skill that can be learned. It empowers
people by adding strength to your natural abilities which improve teamwork,
productivity, and where appropriate, profits.”– Edward De Bono
The most in-demand skill in today’s business is creativity. In general, creativity is a
thing done that is outside of common boundaries or expectations. It is achieved
when teams are agile but face problems, discomfort, and tension. In business
creativity and design are the most paired duo. When it comes to agile creativity and
designs go hand in hand as agile started with software development and any
development requires creativity.
If we see agile processes and methodologies, we will see that even after long-
achieved progress in frameworks, agile is unable to get to the roots of creativity.

5. Agile considers design and creativity as a group activity confusing the
places where and how design should take place. Even so for agile, it
is important to draw out creativity in the teams. With the book ‘Creativity
Inc.’ written by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace where they
have explained creativity with their experiences and some tips to get
better at it, agile organizations can improve their creative strategies and
their teams. In this article let’s dive deeper into creativity and get the best
tips to improve our agile teams and organization's creativity for business
use by knowing how to have the right people and providing them with the
right environment to work with creativity. This article will provide you with
tips for management and structure for being creative.

6. Tips to Encourage Creative Thinking
Braintrust
The very first thing you need to do to improve creativity is to hire the right people.
It’s necessary to know who is working with you. Hire and support the team with
smart, passionate, and well-informed people. It is necessary to have potential in a
team when you want the great potential to work with.
Candor
When you have a great team with potential it is necessary to provide them the
freedom to show their ideas, opinion, and criticism. Let yourself and your team be
out of the safe bubble to be innovative and encourage creativity.
Empathy
When we have to reach a common bigger goal, collaboration is necessary. Discuss
ideas with the team as they all have to work on it and drive a team towards
achieving the common goal.

7. Tips to Embrace Creativity
As encouraging creativity is important, embracing creativity is also equally important for
any agile team or organization to provide their best continuously. With the below tips,
creativity can be embraced within agile teams and further strive for perfection.
Ideas are Not Born Fully Formed
We are too eager to work on any idea as soon as it is accepted but when it comes to
ideas we must know that ideas are not born in a single go. A final idea is a collection of
many ideas. Finding and supporting smart and good people will help us find and
develop good ideas.
Fast Response to Change
We most times hold too tightly to our assumptions and goals. But to achieve the best for
our goals we must hold tightly to our intentions but must be open to the goals with
change in new information. We must be ready for surprises and able to let go of our
assumptions. Along with this, we must have a close eye on areas for observing balance
loss and quickly maintain it.

8. Discussion Must Occur on Failures
Leaders as well as team members must talk about their mistakes and failures. And
gain feedback and solutions from each other. Along with this, the one who made the
mistake must be ready to act for solving it.
Provide an Appropriate Environment for Creativity
When it is a fear-based and risk-averse culture in a team no one will go for creating
new ideas and stay with the ones that have already worked. Keeping free and
accepting mistakes and working on problem-solving culture in the team will make
everyone enjoy their work and be more productive with being creative. Agile
coaches and product owners play an important role in this as they are the ones who
can create sustainable culture making everyone stay on the path of excellence
making creativity a practice in an agile team instead of an abstract concept.

9. With steady improvement and practice, any agile team and organization can
achieve a creative managing structure where great products and services can be
provided by agile teams. The above tips will make agile organizations a fun-loving
and enjoyable environment that gives their best with creativity and innovative
excellence.

10. About Advance Agility
We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company.
We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are
doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our
vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every
process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the
shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility.
Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless
execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record
give us an edge over our competitor.
Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We
provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and
more trainings. Write to us a contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting
needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer
or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.