We explore how to identify and support creative people in your business. Learn how to work with different types of creativity and build a creative team and culture. Read this for ideas on how to best use the talents of creative people.
Ask what “creative people” look like, and most people will think of the sort of punky, scruffy, tattooed types you find in advertising agency creative reviews. There’s a definite perception that “creative people” are rebellious mavericks and that “normal” people aren’t creative.
But while many people who earn a living as creatives fit that bill, it’s by no means a prerequisite. Creativity is a state of mind, not a state of dress.
There are many different ways to be creative, and everyone has some sort of creativity inside them.
The creative challenge (and opportunity) is how you unlock that creative ability.
Definitions of creativity usually start with producing or using ideas. Those ideas might lead to something tangible, e.g. a piece of art, music or writing. Or even new packaging, advertising or a website.
But those tangible outputs all started with an idea. And everyone is capable of having ideas.
We can all ask questions and make statements. That’s how ideas start. We can all turn questions and statements into concepts or designs. That’s how ideas evolve. And we can all turn concepts or designs into a plan.
That’s how ideas come to life.
Creativity isn’t just for big, complex projects like advertising campaigns and innovations. It covers almost every part of our lives, and we use it every day without even realising it.
Think about it this way. Someone asks what you fancy doing at the weekend (a question). You suggest heading into town for a few drinks (a concept). You decide where and when you’ll meet and which bars you’ll hit and let everyone know (a plan). There are all the elements of creativity in there, even though you’d never think of this as being creative.
Without knowing it, you’ve followed your own creative process. Your question generated some ideas. You refined those into a concept. Then, you built a plan to action your ideas.
Many different factors influence how creative you think you are. For example, you’re usually more comfortable “being creative” if your parents were creative, you studied a creative subject, or your job demands lots of creativity.
But one of the more interesting creative influences is your personality type and preferred working style. There are different ways to assess these, but one of the most common is the Insights colour profile system.
This asks you a series of questions, which then positions you against two axes.
First, how introverted or extroverted you are. Then, how much you’re driven by thinking versus feeling. You end up as one of four personality types identified by a colour to make them easier to remember.
We’ve explored how these 4 personality types affect your creative style in another article, but here are a few highlights :-
The key here is that creativity doesn’t have to be an individual task. In most cases, business creative challenges are solved by teams.
For example, most agency creative teams work in pairs with a copywriter and art director.
It’s not just that they bring different technical skills but also that they see creative problems differently. Their different perspectives usually lead to more creative solutions. You get a broader and more varied set of ideas about how to solve the problem. It’s a core part of many creative collaboration processes. (e.g. see our article on Six Hats thinking).
If you want your business to be more creative, you have to set up a creative culture.
Culture is how things get done in a business. If you need to create something, then things need to get done. Your culture should encourage good creative habits that make things happen.
There are many different elements to creating culture. However, there are 2 areas creative leadership teams should prioritise :-
A wider and more diverse group of people coming up with ideas means you get more and better ideas.
You want open-minded, playful and curious types who like to nurture rather than kill ideas.
There are many different tools you can use to make sure teams are made up of diverse styles.
As per our creative culture article, one of the most common is the Kirton Adaptive Innovation (KAI) model. It shows how some people prefer easy-to-implement but relatively safe ideas. In contrast, others prefer to go after more breakthrough ideas.
Other common tools used to organise teams to have diverse styles include models from Myers-Briggs, Insights and Belbin.
Many businesses struggle to think of diversity beyond basic demographics. So you might think a mix of genders, ethnicities and ages gives a “diverse” group. But diversity goes deeper than that and should also factor in different personality styles. If your whole team come from similar job and education backgrounds, works together regularly, and thinks in the same way, you won’t get a diverse set of ideas when they’re faced with a creative problem.
Creative leaders need to think about how they mix teams so they don’t settle into this groupthink complacency. For example, they might invite a guest speaker / thinker to a brainstorming session to challenge teams to think about a problem from a different perspective. They might set up a debate about the creative challenge and assign people to argue the case in the opposite way to their natural style.
One of the most effective ways to build this diverse thinking into your creative process is to use a technique which forces you to view problems from different perspectives.
One of the most well-known is the Six Hats technique pioneered by Edward De Bono. When facing a creative challenge, it asks team members to think about the problem from different perspectives, giving each perspective a different colour hat :-
This is helpful as it forces you to break away from your default approach. It stops you from getting stuck in only one way of thinking and encourages you to take a more holistic and unbiased view of how to solve problems.
How you reward and motivate creative thinking is also part of the people element of your creative culture.
For example, there’s the challenge of setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for creative thinking. You should have some sort of quantity measure (e.g. number of ideas generated) but also some sort of quality measure. It’s not just about how many ideas people come up with but how many good ideas make it.
You can offer monetary rewards for coming up with or crafting good ideas. Raises, bonuses and promotions based on increased sales and profits when ideas make it to market, for example. These can be motivating.
However, motivation is usually more internally driven when it comes to creative thinking. So, the leadership team need to publicly recognise and encourage more breakthrough ideas. When they set a good example, people are more motivated to be creative.
You might wonder why more businesses aren’t more creative when there are so many clear business benefits to being creative.
If there’s a clear creative opportunity, why do so many businesses seem to make it hard to get ideas away?
2 main factors drive this :-
Creativity changes things. It creates something new that wasn’t there before. The challenge is that our brains often don’t react well to change.
When we notice something different in our environment, our instincts and emotions kick in and put us on alert. A part of our brains called the amygdala takes over, also known as our “fight or flight” response. (See our thoughts on thinking article for more on this).
Our natural response to a change (which most creative ideas are) is to attack it or to run away from it (both of which are about protecting ourselves).
So, a key task for creative leadership is to remove the fear of creativity / change. This usually involves training and practice so that people become familiar and comfortable with the idea of creativity and change. When something’s familiar and comfortable, you no longer fear it.
So, give people opportunities to be creative. Remove any perceived barriers to being creative. Make it the “norm” in terms of how people think and act in your business.
The other big challenge is that most businesses have another NON-creative mode that drives most of what they do. This operational mode is about routines, processes, systems and habits. Writing reports. Having status meetings. Looking for cost savings. These all drive the business’s efficiency. Doing things well.
But creative mode deliberately asks you to step away from all that. To put the day-to-day operations of the business (temporarily) to one side. It asks you to reflect on what’s happened. Hypothesise about what might happen. And come up with ideas about how you should change your business to make it different and / or better in the future. The focus here is on effectiveness. Doing the right things.
A lucky few people find it easy to switch between these two modes. However, most people have a natural leaning one way or the other. And it’s usually those stronger in operational mode who tend to wield more power and influence. For example, the finance team control the budgets. The supply chain team manages all orders and inventory. The IT team manage all the technology and information systems.
These functions often don’t see the value in the different habits of creative thinking. It can take lots of time, persuasion and training to get these operational thinkers to also see the creative opportunity.
So, how do you pull all this together to define what your business needs from a creative people point of view?
Well, it starts at the top with the leadership team.
They set the direction for the business. They steer the ship. It’s up to them to define the business’s creative needs.
This usually comes out in how they set up and manage the creative culture of the business. The type of people they hire. How they organise those people. How they motivate and reward them.
It’s also in the systems and processes that drive how the business works. For example, how you manage innovation. Creative approvals. How you give feedback. When a business sets itself up to encourage and enable creative people, you can see it, hear it and feel it in everything they do.
A business’s creativity is a reflection of how well it sets up and manages the process of creating, crafting and commercialising ideas. Done well, this is how you find ideas that mean business.
It seems ironic that many people have such an uncreative view of what creativity is and what it looks like. It’s often seen as a special talent reserved for a gifted few.
This is a mistake. A missed creative opportunity.
This guide explored the idea that everyone can be creative. It’s a case of finding everyone’s unique way of being creative and setting up your business to encourage and celebrate that uniqueness.
For example, we looked at the role of different personality types on creativity.
We touched on the value of seeing creative problems from multiple perspectives using tools like the Six Hats approach. Plus, we talked about how important it is for leadership teams to define their creative needs and set up their culture to allow creative people in their business to thrive.
Check out our creative habits and how to be a more creative company articles for more on this. Or get in touch if you need advice on how to better support creative people in your business.
The Three-Brains team know a lot about creative skills. We can help you use creative thinking to come up with clever, brand-building ideas. We then help turn those ideas into action with creative advice and support in areas like writing, graphic design and brand storytelling.
Check out our coaching and consulting services to learn how we can help you. Or get in touch if you need help with a specific creative thinking challenge.
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