Businesses want Creativity more than ever, but the effort to make it work somewhere other than marketing keeps throwing them for a loop. The solution: stop re-inventing it, and learn how it already works, from other fields that already get it right.
2. Creativity is a competency. And now it is deemed indispensable.
It has officially been promoted from “recreation” to “work”.
For organizations that assess themselves as not being creative enough, the
sense of urgency to “become” creative most often translates into action as
“getting” something they don’t “have”.
Business is good about committing to plans. Yet reports about satisfaction
with this pursuit are highly mixed.
Most organizations say that it is more difficult than they expected, and
many have stopped what they were doing about it, without a planned
successor.
3. Of those who continued pursuit, only a small percentage say that they are
happily successful, while less than half say that they have confidence in
continuing despite lack of success to date.
So, the overall situation is that even while half or more still have intent,
most of them are unsure of what to do and unimpressed with previous
results. Most, in other words, still say they do not “have” enough creativity.
Reasons for the shortfalls will vary, but in a business perspective it is not
hard to see that “getting creativity” has three main efforts.
It needs to be developed, implemented, and leveraged for benefit.
Because of that shared perspective, there is some opportunity for different
business organizations to compare notes, in apples-to-apples fashion.
4. But why not take notes from non-business areas that have already figured it
out?
The obvious cases are the Arts and Sports – behaviors, and industries,
where creativity does not “have” performance but instead “is” performance.
Those areas have characteristics in common that amount to the creative
state so desired by business.
The real question is whether business has the will-power to adopt them.
The important observations to make usually look like these Top Lessons from
Art and Sport:
Development tells individuals that discovering their abilities is desirable and
practical.
Implementation says that the organization intends for them to improve that
way.
Leverage decides what expectations are normal to value.
9. There are many competencies that can be critical to the business
differentiation that helps create or sustain security and advantage in a
market.
Creativity is one of those competencies, but the organization must learn to
logically recognize competencies as resourceful behavior.
The ultimate importance of understanding creativity is in dispelling the key
inhibitors that the organization brings to it: ambiguity, uncertainty and
frustration.
Cultivating creative behavior means making it systemic and self-
regenerating; cultivating benefit from creativity means understanding when
the behavior is most likely to create a desired opportunity.
Whether defined by a stakeholder or by a provider, an increase in
opportunity is the target principal “product” of creativity.