Before you decide to employ a creative person think about if your organisation offers suitable working conditions for the creative process to take place.

Creative ideas do not develop in a vacuum; creativity is a multi-level phenomena requiring individual, team and organisational creativity to flourish. Mumford (2012)

• Do you have a positive organisational culture and work environment?
• Do you provide freedom, discretion, autonomy and time to decide how to perform tasks?
• Is the organisational structure flexible, not bureaucratic and without excessive hierarchies and centralised power?
• Are you open for a change and risk taking but also criticism and challenge?

And how are you going to recognise creativity and then evaluate it? And how are you going to manage creative people who are usually misfits, mavericks, outcasts and nonconformists deviating from the collective and suppressed by orthodoxy, bureaucracy and authority?

Today’s business is not ready for creativity – to the detriment of both the business and the creative person.

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