Representation and Structuring of Organizational Creativity by Soft System Methodology

Sustainable competitive advantage is the essential way for organizations to survive in the modern competitive environment. Since competitive advantage based on creativity is one of the most crucial factors for the survival of current organisations, the factors that influence organizational creativity processes should be considered at organizational decision-making level. As many people and factors are involved in organizational creativity, decision-making becomes complex and unstructured real world issues with chaotic systems behavior and, consequently, hard operation research methods will not able to represent and solve it properly. Soft system methodology is one operation research’s methods applied to represent, structure and solve complex problems. Therefore, in this study, which is part of a PhD thesis, in addition to explaining the soft system methodology’s steps we describe in detail how the first four stages of the Checkland soft system methodology were applied to represent and structure the sustainable organizational creativity problem. The conceptual model was created based on information gathered from experts and specialists in organised meetings and in-depth interviews who were exposed to data previously collected in reviewing individual, group and organizational creativity existing research results. At the end of these meetings and interviews we designed and developed a rich picture, root definitions, CATWOE analyzes and the conceptual model for organizational creativity.