1. 1 NEW SHOES TODAY • ROAD TO CREATION, INNOVATION AND CHANGE
EXCITING ONE MILLION CLIENTS
PGGM
Increasing the Creative Capacity of a Pension Fund
Martijn van Kooij is passionate about creativity and believes that any organi-
sation uses only a small fraction of the creative potential of its employees.
He works as Manager of Business Development and Innovation (BDI) for PGGM,
the Pension Fund for Care and Welfare in the Netherlands. PGGM is a well
known company with over one million customers and around 1100 employees.
The company had defined five critical factors for success, one of them being
the ‘creative capacity’ of the organisation. Martijn (BDI) and Ramon Vullings
(new shoes today) laid out a programme: ‘Increase the Creative Capacity of
PGGM’ based on 3 pillars.
• Developing attitudes and skills for creative thinking (culture)
• Getting inspiration and generating ideas (ideas)
• Putting ideas into action (implementation)
Attitude, Space, Initiatives
The usual way to organise large changes within PGGM is a top-down
approach. For this programme, they decided to go bottom-up and let the
employees explore and follow their own passion.
BDI did not want to focus on ideas, but on initiatives. People with ideas were
encouraged to come into action. They were supported in developing their
creative skills via a train-the-coach approach and were encouraged to change
their working environment.
Key Activities in the Experiment were:
• 20 PGGM volunteers (who had attended a training programme for
facilitating creative sessions) took up the task of ‘change agent’, helping
the organisation with ‘postponing judgement’, increasing openness
for new ideas
• Creative sessions aimed at process improvement and alternative prod-
ucts (pension solutions) were organised
• A new intranet site was developed as an inspirational environment,
with quotes, images, cases of applied creativity from around the world,
current initiatives within PGGM and a special innovation toolkit. Note
that this was certainly not an idea management system. The intranet
solution was aimed at sharing initiatives and linking people with pas-
sion in this large organisation
• Specific communications were set up: a creativity toolbox with quick
reference cards, an irregular innovation newsletter and many physical
inspirational items in the PGGM offices
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2. 2 NEW SHOES TODAY • ROAD TO CREATION, INNOVATION AND CHANGE
Dream
A dream was put forward to trigger as many PGGM employees as possible.
The dream was formulated as: ‘Let’s make the front page of the largest finan-
cial newspaper in the Netherlands with a PGGM innovation.’
But this is only one example. Many activities took place, from bringing together
the top 100 people in the company for a World Café* meeting on values, to
having poets ‘rhyme’ meeting minutes, having clowns into the work environ-
ment and having the top management brainstorm in an elderly home (the
place where their ‘real customers’ reside). Opening up the attitude towards
change was the goal.
The front page was a bit out of league, yet PGGM did manage to make the
third page of Het Financiële Dagblad with one of their new initiatives, the
development of a pension in kind – a pension not just based on money, but
also partly on services – which is now one of PGGM’s on-going developments.
Looking back at the process these were the major learning points:
• Start with a small team who believe they can change things
• Make sure you make initial successes and added value visible
to the organisation
• Acknowledge ‘nearlings’ and continue to share them throughout
the whole organisation
• Work bottom-up. Individual passion helps to overcome internal
hurdles
• Make sure creativity is a means, not an end in itself
• Keep focusing on ‘giving space’ for new initiatives and allowing
experiments, knowing you need some nearlings to generate success
*A World Café conversation is a creative process for leading collaborative dialogue, sharing
knowledge and creating possibilities for action in groups of all sizes. See www.theworldcafe.com
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