Executive Conversations: Is creativity the key to success in business?

Executive Conversations is a series of talks with experts that seeks to examine how business is evolving within the context of an ever-changing landscape.?

Technological advancements, such as the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), are changing the nature of business and how we work at every level of an organisation. One could argue that for an organisation to thrive and not just survive, the single indispensable element that can enhance any given skill set is creativity. As business strategy and management expert Jacques Bughin said , “What we know is that robots still need to be fed by data and algorithms which means everyone who is creative will still have a job. This is a skill that will be nurtured even more than before.”?

But what is creativity? How do you encourage it in the workplace? And can creativity be taught? We sat down with Professor Marie Taillard, Associate Dean for Executive Education (ESCP London Campus) and L’Oréal Professor of Creativity Marketing , and Professor Dr. Robert Wilken, Chair of International Marketing and Vice-Rector for Research and Faculty (ESCP Berlin Campus) to discuss these questions and more.?

The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

ON DEFINING CREATIVITY

The ability to be creative seemingly cannot be imitated by technology to date. It is an important individual skill that gives humans a competitive advantage over technology.?

Professor Dr. Robert Wilken: There is no universal de?nition of creativity. Creativity in the workplace is generally characterised as the human ability to generate ideas that result in the creation of something new and useful. Guilford (1950) de?nes divergent thinking as a core element of creativity, driven by cognitive processes such as ?exibility, ?uidity, originality and elaboration. Creativity can be considered in terms of the product, the process and the person becoming creative. The ability to be creative seemingly cannot be imitated by technology to date. It is an important individual skill that gives humans a competitive advantage over technology.?

Professor Marie Taillard: I think Robert and I agree on the definition. It’s one that throughout the literature exhibits basically two characteristics. First, it needs to be something that’s novel. Second is the concept of value, or more precisely, value as relevance to a particular context. Some people talk about a third characteristic that can be controversial: esthetic value. Somehow people get the sense that it needs to be pleasing, pleasing to the eye or the mind. For me, the esthetic element is also part of the value element. If people are looking for something that is pleasing, then it becomes of value.?

RW: I think the dimension of value that you mention in the common definitions is related to the usefulness of novel ideas and their application.?

MT: That’s why I use the word relevance. Recent work at McKinsey clearly shows the importance of combining creative and analytical thinking and seeing the two as part of a broader triple-play between creativity, analytics, and purpose . At the same time as we are promoting creativity, managers are increasingly relying on data, algorithms and analytics to make decisions. I think it’s so important that managers see beyond this apparent contradiction and actually embrace the complementarity between data-informed and creative decision-making.

ON DATA, ANALYSIS AND CREATIVITY

RW: Your comment regarding the combination of creativity and then data, algorithms and automation, for example, are seemingly on different ends of a continuum. So it’s interesting to combine these two dimensions to say what makes a good decision-maker in the end. I do think that relying on data exclusively is a threat to meaningful decision making. The underlying process of analysing data and the assumptions of underlying algorithms are typically unknown by a majority of people. So in many cases, it’s basically unclear what produced these results. The trap is that we would just outsource the analysis of data to some kind of algorithm that we don’t understand. That is the threat. But it does not mean we should not use data somehow. And the second component, the essential ingredient to any meaningful decision, that’s creativity.?

MT: To me every single step, even when you’re talking about data and analytical decision making, is informed by creative thinking. First, what data are you going to collect? If you think of two businesses, two competitors, one way that they can compete is in the kind of data they collect. Two, what questions are you going to ask of the data? That, to me, requires a huge amount of creativity because you need questions that are going to then be able to inform your decision making to create competitive advantage. Three, what kind of algorithms and statistical manipulations are we going to effect on the data? Once we have some answers, how do we interpret them, and how do we communicate them to people so that they can actually feed them into a decision making process. So you need creative thinking every step of the way as you are collecting and analysing data and as you extract every last bit of value out of it.

ON TEACHING CREATIVITY

MT: If you were to have asked me fifteen years ago whether I was creative, I would have said absolutely not. I would have said I was the least creative person you ever met. And now, I actually think I’m a pretty creative person. Absolutely, creativity can be taught. In my course on creative thinking, I often reference the book by David and Tom Kelley, the founders of IDEO, Creative Confidence , and they posit that if you feel confident about your creativity, you’re going to start exercising it. Creativity is like a muscle that needs to be exercised, and the more you exercise it, the better you feel about it, the more confident you are about it, and the more creative you can become.?

RW:? I agree with you, Marie, that you can teach techniques to develop creativity. This is the essence of any teaching programme. You provide techniques that can be applied in different contexts, as well as some kind of blueprints so that you can generate ideas, generate specific results. Of course, there are predispositions that make it more or less easy to benefit from that training. People respond differently to these techniques.?

MT: Beyond different responses to these techniques, I would say that you have those willing to try and let themselves think differently, to take risks.

ON FOSTERING CREATIVITY IN THE WORKPLACE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF FAILURE

RW: There is a certain level of openness that is required. It includes flexibility and the willingness to try new things while also rejecting some ideas. This back and forth requires feedback loops, a culture of constructive criticism where it is okay to make mistakes and to not necessarily have the immediate solution to a problem. For example, in my recent research project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and directed by Professor Katrin Muehlfeld from the University of Trier, we observed that when all (or most) team members have to use a foreign language, then they may become more tolerant towards language-related mistakes, and teams generally allocate more time towards finding creative ideas and solutions.

Psychological safety is essential to ensuring creative confidence.

MT: Robert, as you know, I’m a linguist by training, and I think that one of the things that happens when we speak a non-native language is that we accept a certain element of ambiguity or vagueness both in what we say and in how we understand others. For people who speak several languages, you really do get comfortable with the idea that there isn’t just one right way to say something or to understand what someone said, that there’s room for interpretation, creative interpretation.?

You also talk about mistakes, and I think you’re absolutely correct. Psychological safety is essential to ensuring creative confidence. If you are in a team where you feel like you can screw up and it’s fine, then you’re willing to take risks, and then you can be creative. A lot of what I do in my course on creative thinking is really around letting people try things out. I do this using Lego Serious Play , and it really helps to liberate people. They find a different voice suddenly that helps them go beyond the tried and true.?

ESCP Business School Executive Education & Business Solutions offers a diverse range of programmes that include methodology on creativity, like Professor Taillard’s Executive MBA core and elective courses on Marketing and Digital Marketing and her work on leadership with senior executives in our custom programmes . The Excutive MBA is ranked 6th worldwide by the Financial Times.