The essence of creativity lies not in finding the right answers, but in asking the right questions.
Leaders who exhibit this ability are able to integrate seemingly uncorrelated trends and events, and blending intuition with probing analysis, come up with the issues that will require a solution five or ten years down the road, long before anyone even realizes such issues exist.
"OUT THINK: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes" by G. Shawn Hunter provides a step-by-step outline for how executives can achieve this stage of creativity by shedding outmoded management and organizational biases.
"Being truly engaged frees those in flow to be deeply curious and explorative," writes Hunter. "They are more about solving a puzzle--finding out what lies beneath the surface of a problem. Being in a state of flow leads to finding more creative solutions."
We all have a shared understanding of the foundational aspects of leadership, starting with building trust, which means keeping business operations transparent. To be innovative leaders, we must build on this base by constantly reiterating and communicating core ideas, using powerful stories to propel change, modeling the behavior we wish to see, and above all, creating and sustaining energy in others in the organization. These foundational traits of the innovative leader constitute the terra firma underlying the journey to innovation.
Source: G. Shawn Hunter: Out Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes