Creativity is an essential ingredient in the success of any business. It represents that willingness and ability to improve what already exists or to make something totally new. It’s really about delivering greater customer value, fulfilling emerging needs, improving processes or starting something totally new. But many businesses struggle to be creative.
Active Knowledge Question:
Thinking back over the last five years, can you name something creative that totally changed your business?
What Stops Your Business From Being Creative?
I was asked recently to help a leadership team discover why their business seemed to struggle with being more creative. We started by breaking down how the team thought about creativity – what creativity is and then what its role is in the competitiveness and success of the business.
From this understanding, we then talked about what sparked creativity and landed on a list of elements that were considered essential for creativity.
Here is the list
- Proactive: creativity is seeded by ideas, and that requires that you think about what might be. You must be proactive, not just accept what has been done before but more you have to be leaning into the future.
- People: people have ideas; organisations have people. Organisations are not creative, but they can have people in them who are.
- Imagination: the best ideas are born in the subconscious; they come from dreaming and playing.
- Experimentation: trying new things all the time, a better every day mantra, is at the heart of creativity.
- Space: If you don’t have the time and space to think and are just overwhelmed with what has to be done, then nothing much will change.
- Passion: some people are always thinking about what could be done better; others need a little incentive to move in that direction. It’s always better if it comes naturally.
- Worthwhile: if something is worthwhile doing, it’s worthwhile doing well. But how do you decide whether it is worthwhile? This is where motive comes into play.
- Investment: creating something is an investment, actually a personal investment as it will be individual/s who put in the effort. Why would they do that?
- Failure: creating something new doesn’t always work; you might well fail more often than you succeed. But failing is the only way you will create something great. How do we feel about failure?
- The Zone: in business, creativity is about customer need and value, and process improvement. You need to be in the zone to discover new ideas, and that is either in the customers’ shoes and/or hands-on in the processes.
- Hands-On: creativity requires that you can feel it and get your hands dirty. Creativity comes from the hand-mind connection; it’s not a hands-off academic exercise.
- Team Sport: creativity is best grown as a team sport, and what we mean by that is that everyone can play and participate. It’s not restricted to a special few, because everyone can have great ideas given the opportunity.
- Celebration: success needs to be recognised, widely celebrated and attributed directly to the person/s who did it.
All of these elements are important, likely vital, to seed creativity and permit it to flourish in a business. But possibly the most important learning for this team was gaining a consensus around what creativity actually is and its importance in business success.
The Biggest Barrier
Most of the leadership team mentally assigned creativity as something their marketing people would do in designing a new campaign or something that only applied to Departments whose job was to develop new products. It was not seen as essential to daily operations and certainly not appropriate in most areas of the business. Creativity was special, not necessarily in a good way, and restricted.
The other side of this coin was that creativity was seen as ‘people wasting time and not doing what their assigned tasks were’. ‘If people try to be creative, we will never get anything done’, was almost a universal belief. Stepping out of this was also a belief that staff should simply do what their leaders tell them to do, follow the established processes, and just get on with it. Then, if there were a need for something to change, their leaders would tell them what, when and how.
As the unpacking of creativity occurred within the leadership team, you could see the lights turning on, a quietness emerging and recognition that the biggest barrier to creativity was the mindset of leadership to creativity and its role in competitiveness and success.
Many leaders can see creativity as working against the top-down command and control function of leadership. Other leaders, who see their role as empowerment, encouragement, with a light hand of direction, saw creativity as the natural outcome of good leadership.
Why Be Creative?
The core competitiveness of any business rests in the combined talent and effort of everyone working within and with a business. Leaders need to muster that core competitiveness to bring a business’s full potential to the forefront.
Creativity has a spectrum; some may say low to high, a mere innovation to something totally unique. It does not matter whether you see something as an innovation or a creative work; what is important is forward movement and impact.
In business, we are concerned with improving the value we can deliver to our customers to fulfil their needs today and tomorrow. Customer value is the domain around which we all compete. And forward movement can occur in small steps or giant leaps, with compounding often being the winning ingredient.
Creativity as a part of your business is simply leadership asking everyone to contribute their utmost to the success of the business no matter what role they may play in the business. If someone can see a better way to do something or a customer need that is unfulfilled, then please act on it should be the rule of the day, every day.
We can all be creative in varying ways and degrees, and it simply means a mantra of ‘better every day’. Look to the 13 ingredients above as these can and do apply to everyone everywhere.
Every business tries to be creative every day, as someone somewhere in that business is asking, ‘how can we do this better?’ Creativity should be insisted upon as a core task in everyone’s role description and not limited to a few. Everyone should be seeking to contribute to the success of the business, and that comes through doing things better each time we do them.
An entirely new level of performance.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
