Rotten Habit #2: thinking creativity is fluff

Welcome to the second edition of the Rotten Season, our weekly insights into the hidden factors destroying your culture — and how to fix them.

Creativity is often treated as if it is a special thing, reserved only for geniuses and the unshaven. This is nonsense. It is also damaging to organisational culture.

Let’s start by busting the myth that creativity is the preserve of the chosen few. There’s an old saying that there is a novel in all of us. This is true, at least from where I’m sat – we all have our stories to tell. It doesn’t mean the novel in me would be of equal merit to the novel inside the next person. (Especially if the next person happens to be Zadie Smith or Martin Amis.) I might not be able to create a novel that’s a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t. But I haven’t given the 99% perspiration Thomas Edison believed was needed. In life, you get what you do.

Everyone has an innate ability to be creative. Look at how sophisticated and ingenious children are. They can create imaginary worlds. They can collaborate with others to build new things. They can manipulate their parents (bless them). Unfortunately, this creative tendency often gets squeezed out – by parents wanting an easier life; by an exam factory education system; by the world of work. But failing to nurture a capability isn’t the same as that capability not existing in the first place.

Organisations in general – and businesses in particular – fear creativity. Business has rarely promoted people who think or express themselves in creative ways. To do so has seemed “un-businessy”.

Every business issue that needs a combination of intellect and ingenuity needs creativity. It was always the case, but it is particularly so now. In the past, a vendor had limited time to communicate the need or desire for a product or service. That time has reduced. More broadly, many businesses also find themselves in categories which get disrupted. Or at least where their competitors may change direction on a pinhead. 

Organisations must now be flexible and adept as well as robust and competent. Whichever way you look at it, this is a call to creative arms.

In the organisational context, creativity might result in making and shipping excellent things. They might be physical products, services, or digital products. They might be new things or tried and tested products sold and/or delivered in new ways. But, on a broader scale, creativity is much more than that. It is about using ingenuity to navigate through complex and ambiguous situations. It is about the application of intellect, instinct and imagination to spot and execute a strategic path through a given problem.

There are many examples where creative thinking has worked wonders for organisations. In a communications context, the John Lewis adverts have succeeded so well that the brand has become synonymous with Christmas itself. And these adverts are not only creative in their ideas. They also focus on selling an emotion over a product or service. Further, they are creative in their strategy: they break normal retail broadcast ‘rules’ by only going out once a year.

There are many fans of Warren Buffett. This is not only because he is successful, but also because the way he communicates with his shareholders and the wider market is so quirky. Everyone in the US stock market, and many others besides, take fifteen minutes out of their year to read what he has to say in a few typed pages. In marked contrast to certain other billionaires, he tweets annually.

In pricing, the Dollar Shave Club in the US – with its copycats elsewhere – has hugely disrupted the men’s toiletries industry. It has further forced its competitors to follow in the wake of that disruption. Stella Artois has also been creative in both strategy and execution. It has become known for being “reassuringly expensive” at the same time as becoming renowned for being cheap.

For new products, Marmite has done well to exploit a ‘one product’ problem and diversify, with some success. And there are many other ways in which organisations can be creative about category. Everyone in business knows the story of 3M. While trying to invent a type of glue that worked, and being unsuccessful in the endeavour, the company managed to invent the world’s first use for glue that didn’t work. Bingo: the Post-It. In more recent times, Burberry has conjoined the catwalk with ecommerce; many companies have changed from selling software to selling subscriptions to software; and Unbound has conquered print-on-demand publishing.

But let’s not stop there. People in HR can be creative. People in supply chain management can be creative. People in accounting can be creative (and this does not mean ignoring regulation). You know this, too. In your career, you have tried to emulate your creative colleagues and competitors. You envy them for the things they do and the way they are. You do not envy the others.

Creativity isn’t valued enough, either in society or in business. This is because it has often been seen as too ‘risky’ – an emotion that business in general finds uncomfortable and prefers to avoid. But the creative businesses mentioned above have one notable characteristic in common: a healthy attitude to risk.

That attitude doesn’t come about because one person decides to take the risk (even in the case of Buffett). It also doesn’t mean that the risks aren’t actually risks (sometimes they are). It is because the organisation has a culture that is comfortable with risk.

The advice, then: understand that risk is both entirely subjective and entirely necessary. Foster discussion on this – and use this process to define how creativity is lauded, confronted, and assessed within your culture. Easy enough, right?

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