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166 Power Up Your Mind

ways in which the museum dealt with visitors. He decided to send
all his senior staff on Disney’s quality service course in Orlando.
Disney World may not seem very similar to a natural history
museum, but Neil reckoned that his staff would make creative con-
nections to the customer care offered by the leisure industry—and
that is exactly what they did. If you go to the London museum now
you can also see a move toward edutainment of which Walt Disney
would have been proud.
Sir Michael Bichard, Permanent Secretary at the British
Department for Education and Employment, is passionate about
moving out of the traditional field of the civil service:

I learn and enhance my creativity by meeting people. I invest as much time
as possible in visiting projects. I find I pick up good ideas that are not fully
developed and I am able to work on them until they are fully formed and
of potentially national impact.

Thinking like this is essential in a creative organization. Great
Ormond Street, London’s famous children’s hospital, recently dis-
covered there was much it could learn from Formula One pit stop
tire and fuel changes when it came to improving its systems for
intensive care beds! Often, there is no training course available to
meet a very specific identified need, and for organizations deter-
mined to improve all aspects of their operations continuously, get-
ting out and seeing how other organizations do things is essential.
It is often helpful to visit enterprises that are not like yours, but
where some aspect of their operation might stimulate your creativ-
ity. So, a bank might look at how a leisure attraction deals with its
customers, a manufacturing business might look at systems in a ser-
vice industry, and so on.
The same approach works very well for individuals looking
for new thinking about the way they manage aspects of their work.
In this case, it might be that an individual could choose to find out
more about how people from very different organizations manage
people, run meetings, handle internal communications, etc.
As well as going out to see how other people do things, it can
be very helpful to invite people in to work with you. In some orga-