Creativity and Project Management: Why You Should Care?

Stephanie Barnes

Stephanie has over 25 years successful, experience in knowledge management and accounting in the High Technology, Health Care, and Public Accounting sectors.
She is an author of several books, chapters, and articles on knowledge management as well as an accomplished artist having had exhibitions in Toronto and Berlin.
For more than 10 years Stephanie has pioneered the radical idea that our current knowledge management practices do not go far enough in the support of knowledge work and knowledge workers. The German GfWM (Gesellschaft für Wissensmanagement) published the first article on Radical Knowledge Management, the PDF can be found here: https://www.gfwm.de/kuratiertes-dossier-gkc20/. Another, longer version of the paper was published in July 2021 and can be found here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frai.2021.598807/full.
A two additional articles have been in the journal Business Information Review, both focus on implementation.
Stephanie can be found on the web at www.realisation-of-potential.com, and LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/stephanieabarnes.

Stephanie took over and started with an introduction of herself, working as an artist in Berlin (GER) and having over 17yrs of experience as a consultant to support variety of companies and organizations even in the tense situation we currently find ourselves in. As a consultant and facilitator, she is used to first bring everyone onto the same page by calming them down by taking a deep breath, and leading them through a guided visualization.

After getting us grounded, she went on to explain to us what our VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) world is all about and what it demands to cope with it. Additionally, she listed all the expectations that we have on ourselves as ambitious workers to fulfill the demands that we put on ourselves. And herein lies a discrepancy because we first need to (re-)learn our creativity in dealing with this world in a focused, resilient, and problem-solving manner.

We can relearn our creativity by tapping into how we learned as children: play; and also through improvisation, getting enough sleep, eating, and drinking more consciously is all gone when leaving school for taking on our first job she explained to us. Thus, our creativity must be re-trained for getting the VUCA world better under our control. Here, she continued with a little exercise in creating scribble drawings ourselves while keeping our eyes closed. After finishing a few circles with a pen on a piece of paper we had to continue to draw eight lines around or throughout our picture with opened eyes; Mona asked her whether or not we had to keep our eyes further closed because she had forgotten to tell us to open them again. The exercise made a lot of fun since hardly anybody expected to get anything viewable out of it, but it did not matter. The purpose of the exercise was to sharpen our senses for being creative. Whether it needs to be a drawing, some picturing in the nature, using LEGO® bricks for creating any monuments, etc. is not important. Any activity that triggers our senses she emphasized does reach the goal in being more creative than before and opening us up to seeing the world differently.

For making it clear why creativity is so important to us she showed us a list of twelve benefits in being creative that came from Sir Kenneth Robinson. Something that any agile leader directly recognizes is that creativity comes along with lifelong learning, multidisciplinary, systems thinking, problem-solving, iteration, and innovation to just mention of a few of those benefits.

But what does it mean to our role and functions as a project manager, SCRUM master, Product Owner, or Product Manager? Only by inspiring our teammates and encouraging their curiosity will leaders be able to obtain new solutions to things that no one has ever thought of before, as she brought to our attention. Creative Leadership will be our new role as leaders in near future to sustain ourselves and our organization in our VUCA world.

Finally, Stephanie finished her presentation by answering a few questions from our audience about new work, for instance, or on how to apply an icebreaker to an event or gathering for getting a collaborative discussion going. For the last item she left a handout with useful tips of icebreakers for our members to be downloadable from our member area (presentation+handout). Also, her presentation can be found there for downloading.

We would like to thank Stephanie for her time in holding an interactive speech about creativity and giving us some insights for what reasons creativity should be important to us. Furthermore, we would like to thank our audience – also our late comers – for their interest and dialogue. Of course, we are all grateful for the work from the board of PMG-G for making it happen.