Creative Organizations vs Creative Individuals

I love Mal's post below, but would like to respectfully disagree. Mal's question is a great one--"What can organizations do to encourage the individuals within them to be more creative?" However, I think we still get a lot of insight from thinking specifically about the original question: "How can we make organizations more creative."

What I am driving at is essentially a deeper look at Mal's point #1: "Encourage Diversity." No matter how diverse a group, its organizational structure will influence the creativity that emerges from it. That's why I want to keep the phrase "creative organization" in our vocabulary.

Taking a culinary tack, suppose our organization consists of vegetables and broth. At one extreme, we can structure this as one bowl of broth and another bowl of vegetables. That's OK but not as good as vegetable soup, which integrates the two together. But if we try too hard and integrate too much, things deteriorate into bland homogeneity and we get pureed vegetable soup. Gross, but perhaps necessary if you lose your dentures.

Organizational creativity follows the same recipe. See here for more.