Creativity and the Age-Old Resistance to Change Problem in RE

Creativity is about bringing unforeseen change to habitual ways of doing things. Understanding the challenges of introducing innovation in organizations is, therefore, essential during the requirements phase of today’s computer systems design projects. However, there are many legitimate obstacles to creativity. To explain some of them, we explore creativity in terms of change to norms that are well accepted in an organization. These norms are grounded in the worldview of the organization. Creativity is therefore constrained by the amount of change that can be made to norms and worldview. We describe some of the mechanisms that work in favor and against change and offer suggestions on how to make better use of these mechanisms in introducing currently accepted and recently developed RE methodologies into mainstream commercial systems design approaches.