Unlock corporate creativity to increase productivity, research suggests

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According to the latest global Adobe State of Create research, creativity delivers major benefits for business, the economy and society. “An investment in creativity and design is simply good business,” says Mala Sharma, VP and GM of Creative Cloud at Adobe.

“Creativity and productivity go hand in hand, but investing in creativity isn’t on the agenda for enough of today’s leaders. This survey provides a big wake-up call to businesses that they need to think differently and give employees the tools and freedom to be creative.”

Key findings

The latest global study surveyed 5,000 adults, key findings include:

• People who identify as creators report household incomes 13% higher than non-creators;

• Respondents globally believe being creative is valuable to society (70%) and the economy (64%);

• More than two thirds believe creative people make better workers, leaders, parents and students;

• Investing in creativity leads to business success. Respondents said that a business that invests in creativity is more likely to increase employee productivity (78%) and have happier employees (76%).;

• Bottom-line impact is also tangible: Businesses investing in creativity have more satisfied customers (80%) and are more competitive (79%).

Despite this, however, few people are realising their creative potential – there's “a gap in execution.” Only 41% describe themselves as creative and 69% report they are not living up to their creative potential. Creativity then is vital to success. “So, the question is why are we not prioritising creativity, when we know it is beneficial?”, asks Sharma.

“It is a question that is not easy to answer,” says Dammon Rice, head of CCDI Creative, a Cape Town-based consultancy offering creative workshops to unlock competiveness. “It is not well understood how to ‘think differently and give employees the tools and freedom to be creative’ as Sharma puts it. Creativity, which can be defined as the ability to come up with novel and useful ideas that add value, remains elusive to most organisations.”

Grappling with implementing creativity

David Slocum, faculty director of EMBA Programmes at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, wrote last month in an article for Forbes that there are several ways in which organisations struggle to grapple with creativity, particularly in leadership.

“There has emerged a persistent, high-level celebration of successful creative organisations and leaders as ‘creative voyeurism’. From Pixar, Google and Apple to Elon Musk, we tend to fixate on particular heroic successes – for example, life-changing products and distinctive innovation processes – without exploring more fully the specific conditions and situations in which they emerged (not to mention details of the many more failures occurring in these same settings).

“For leaders, in particular, approaches to individual development and organisational change, grounded in romantic notions of creativity and creative work, can often have a strong allure. With greater diligence and reflection, such pop creative leadership can nevertheless be overcome in favour of more proven and impactful approaches that genuinely honour and extend the important individual, business and social work of leadership and creativity.

“I would caution against a prioritising of originality over strategic concerns. Creative leaders elsewhere in the value chain or business model often guide more far-reaching innovations. The pursuit of ‘something new’ or ‘a magic bullet’ to allay anxiety over changing times, while resolving actual challenges, does not exist. Instead, it is about evolving mindsets rather than replacing toolsets, seeing change as a verb and agreeing to approach creative leadership as an ongoing collective process.”

Three key points

Rice says that there are three key points here to recognise – that organisations need to focus on proven and impactful approaches, that there needs to be a focus on strategic objectives not just originality and that it is an ongoing collective process. It is about people, purpose and process.

“Therein are the crux or golden threads that can assist organisations with unlocking creativity.

• People: recognising all employees as creative leaders, having the capacity to problem solve, be it in their individual capacity or in teams.
  
• Purpose: ensuring the problem solving and ideas are driven by strategic objectives rather than just originality.
  
• Process: investing in proven processes to bring these to the fore.

“Understanding and implementing a programme that invests in this can lead to a host of benefits – creativity can indeed become part of the agenda of any organisation. In many respects this approach is at its core a design thinking one – many will be familiar with IDEO, a leading proponent of design thinking — a proven method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way.

“In South Africa, the perception may be that these approaches are for the likes situated in Silicon Valley, but new ways of approaching long-standing challenges are exactly what organisations need in the context of our flat economy and development needs, and for improving our global competitiveness.

“Even within government, as an organisation working in this space, we have started to see tangible improvements in service delivery in clinics in Cape Town with this approach.

“Integrating creativity may appear a tough task for our leaders in 2017, but with the right approach, the benefits of this within our organisations are very realisable, and much needed,” concludes Rice.

For more information, email az.gro.idcc@ecir.nommad.