F. The How of Creativity: Developing and Applying Creative Capability
Brett Cowell
Leadership, Connection, and Growth with Creativity. Author. Advisor. Founder - Total Life Complete, Filmmaker, Music Producer.
Introduction
In the previous article, E. What is Creativity? I set out to build a bridge between the overarching “Why?” of Creativity on one side, and a broader ongoing content series around the “How?” of creativity on the other, which will continue on from this point.
The overall objective of this “bridge” remains to enable you and the organization to use creative means to generate desirable positive outcomes in a repeatable way (this is where capability comes in), and to do and be things that you couldn’t or wouldn’t have otherwise.
Creative Capability is about much more than product innovation, or art for that matter, it’s about leadership and change, a growth mindset, creative problem solving, creative implementation. Injecting fresh thinking into potentially every aspect of what the organization or you do, how you do it, and how you think about what’s possible.
With that in mind let’s look at the Key Takeaways from this article:
To make these ideas more tangible, and certainly more visual, I’ve developed:
A quick-start path for becoming more creative, particularly for individuals, is to study the Blueprint Creative Process and work on your ability to perform each of the steps, and to work from end-to-end, from step 1 though 10, and understand the various inputs and outputs. There will definitely be some tutorials on this to come too, and I’ve already referred to the process in the #conversationsaboutcreativity video series on LinkedIn.
To give a quick sense of what the Blueprint Creative Process is about, I’ve grouped its 10 creative subprocesses into three process groups: Inspiration, Problem solving, and Actualization (IPA) as follows:
You can read the article (or wait for the videos) to get a more detailed description of each stage, but don’t worry too much about that for now. The message I want you to take away from this IPA discussion is that creativity is not only about discovering or generating new ideas, what I’ve called Inspiration. And it’s certainly more than solely sub-step 5. Ideation, which we often tend to equate to the entirety of the creative process, and specific tools e.g. “brainstorming.”
Creativity is also about Problem Solving (fleshing out, design, optimizing) and Actualization (including creatively implementing, putting the idea/design into practice) too. There are many more applicable creative processes too, and you’ll work on a library of them over time.
And as you’ll hear shortly Creative Capability also includes creatively ensuring that you get the benefits/outcomes that you’re seeking from creativity in the first place, including recognizing new opportunities that come to light.
While creativity is rightly associated with growth, it’s also about better managing and dealing with downsides and risks, at work and in life too. Thus, Creative Capability is perhaps even more germane a topic to the current environment that we work and live in, than other times when all “boats” are swept up by buoyant market and social conditions anyway.
For me, creativity is an integral part of everything I do: from my ambition to make the world a kinder, fairer and more sustainable place, to my work as entrepreneur and artist, to family “creative dad”, and my overarching philosophy of working and living, Complete. I’m using the Creative Capability Framework myself, to think through how and where to focus to get the overall outcomes I’m seeking from work and life.
Let’s recap the key takeaways from the previous “What?” article:
This article picks up from that final point by framing the “how” of creativity in the context of the Creative Capability Framework that I’ve developed from a cross-section of decades of experience as a management consultant, artist/creative, and entrepreneur, the work I’ve done coaching other leaders on growth, strategy, and creativity, and building on the ideas of my books The Good Life Book (2017), and Ascending Growth (2022), and numerous articles.?
The key reason we’re talking about a capability here rather than just an ability, is the need for repeatability.?
I’m not trying to get you to be creative once. You won’t achieve your desired outcomes and goals from creativity that way, and the greater potential for creativity is in tackling bigger challenges and unearthing new possibilities, not even visible from where you (or the organization) are now.
Any capability is necessarily built out in a more holistic, integrated and, yes, complete way including elements such as Strategy, Processes, People, Systems, Culture and other areas. These aspects are particularly important and even critical in the organizational context, but are key too for individuals as you wish to scale up your personal and professional creativity to have greater impact. Even the most ardent of artists want their work to reach an audience and move people.
I released v1.0 of the Creative Capability framework back in 2021, and we’re now up to v1.2, which has many practical enhancements. I want to give you a quick overview of that framework to set the scene for the broader set of content on “how”, and to give you some confidence that there is some structure and method around where we go next.
Actually, if there’s one thing that that cross-section of experience I just talked about, and study of communications, has taught me is that an article often isn’t the best way to communicate something! Following on from my point above, my key objective here is to let you know that there is a structured approach that is useful to organizations and individuals.
Anything more than that is a bonus!
I’ve often been critical, at least to myself, of how boring a lot of the material on creativity can be. I’ve spoken before of my experience and vision to teach creativity and other leadership, professional and personal growth topics as immersive experiences rather than in typical seminar or lecture formats too.
And creativity specifically, as a domain, is one where you learn by doing! Several times this week even I found myself shaking my head wondering what I was doing with this article.
Yet here we are!
Part of the reason is that I realized a while back that one of the major blockers to getting the benefits of creativity is not having a structured and practical understanding about what it is.
Another part is not having an overarching “why?” for moving forward, that talks to YOU as well as your career, the organization.
Another part is not having that why rooted in some authentic foundation, your / organization’s values, what you really want, what is true value.
Yet another part is not having a structured approach to planning it and doing it (what we’re talking about here)!
Another part is trying to make that “doing it” entertaining and having a guide to get you started/up to the next level. That’s why I’m here.
When I planned out how I’d lay the foundation for what will hopefully be a fun and engaging path forward I came up with the idea for an article series of which this is the last:
A.??? The Well. Navigating the Five Levels of Success
B.??? The Wheel. Better Work Life by Design
C.???? The Wellspring. Your Creative Flow
D.??? The WHY of Creativity
E.???? What is Creativity?
F.???? The How of Creativity: Developing and Applying Creative Capability
My plan from here is to bring the topic of “how” alive in many different (immersive) and hopefully interactive formats, but perhaps there will be a F.1, F.2, F.3 article series to capture specific use cases relation to organizational, professional and personal creativity respectively.
If there is a Part G it will most likely be a bit in the future and be about lessons learned from taking Creativity Capability on the road to a much broader audience.
Specifically, although it's clear to me based on experience, that individual, professional and organizational creativity are connected, and I have an initial playbook on how that can work, I’d be interested synthesizing many actual case studies on how to optimize that in the shortest possible path. The biggest bang for the buck in the shortest time. For now, the shortest path involves getting you hands-on with creativity as soon as possible, and some of that has already been covered in the #conversationsaboutcreativity video series on LinkedIn, check it out!
Without this strong foundation creativity devolves into a set of hacks, tips and tricks and imperatives. We run faster, at least for a bit, but are we even running down the right track?
Part of doing this the right way, is also recognizing the different audiences of this material: huge multinational organizations, leaders, professionals, consultants, changemakers and individuals.
And the task at hand: to drive positive outcomes for organizations, leaders, individuals and society, by upgrading the creative capability of thousands and potentially millions of people around the world.
To do all of this we need to have confidence that there is a structured approach somewhere, which we can dip into as required. That approach also lets us share lessons learned, and helps me and others plan out syllabuses (syllabi), programs, and “experience streams” for immersive creative development.
The articles represent a knowledge base of intellectual property: tools and frameworks that we can use, and return to on-demand/just-in-time as we need them. The framework is one I’ve been using and will continue to use to plan and deploy future materials, and one I already have in my toolkit as an evolution of what I’ve been using for high value services/coaching with leaders and organizations. Having a written down framework/picture is also key to refining, iterating and improving the approach, to go further faster, better, cheaper, with less risk and so on in future.
The Creative Capability Framework
Here is the top-level view of current version, 1.2, of the model.
Figure 1 - The Creative Capability Framework v1.2
The purpose of the Creative Capability Framework is not only to enable you, and the organization, to do and be new things, but also to do what you’re already doing differently in a way that drives additive desirable outcomes, and in a repeatable way.
The framework doesn’t wholesale replace your organization chart, operating model, business units or business functions, for example!!!
Rather it’s an overlay. It’s a way of thinking about, visualizing, and analyzing the flow of ideas and information to pinpoint opportunities for fresh thinking, designing a future solution, and putting all of that into practice in a creative way.
The last word before we step through the framework is about accessibility. My approach, and a value of mine is to make all of the core ideas of what I do freely and widely available for personal and not-for-profit use. All I ask is please always credit if sharing, and let me know how it’s working for you, since your examples, problems, and cases studies will help others on their journey!
However, commercial use, and access to detailed materials and tools, is only with permission, and/or suitable licensing or services agreement, given the implemented value of this framework might be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, DM me if you have any questions, for commercial inquiries, and for help making it happen!
Payoff
A key difference from other approaches to creativity is that we start with the ultimate end, the outcomes, in mind and in focus from the start. In the case of applied creativity, we use creativity as a means-to-an-end rather than an end for its own sake. Thus, that ultimate end is called the Payoff.
There are several reasons for this approach.
The first is that it’s easy to get caught up in the creative process and distracted with lots of “cool and shiny” stuff. A focus on outcomes keeps us on track to why we’re here in the first place. The Payoff, and how you articulate and position it more broadly, can represent a North Star, that motivates us/the organization. All other things being equal the more motivated we are, the more creative we’ll be. This is also a reason why it’s so critical to get the outcomes right that you’re pursuing in the first place.
The second is that, despite best efforts, many creative efforts fail or fail to deliver the benefits, even if the idea was good and implemented relatively successfully. Thus, there is a whole additional step called Value Actualization, which we’ll talk about next, that sits between the idea/product and the Payoff. Keeping the Payoff in mind helps us see the critical success factors in any improvement initiative, and helps us prioritize our work, and simplify our solution as appropriate.
The final reason I’ll mention for now is that if you’re clear on outcomes other paths and ideas might emerge as you begin to engage in creativity, which might be better than the original course of action. You then have the choice to pivot or adapt the types of products and ideas you’re working on to hit those outcomes. Just as a Vision helps set a direction, but not tell you all the steps to get there, a Payoff doesn’t tell you how to get there, and leaves the door open for, and invites in, creative options.
“Plan”, Ideas & Projects, Value Actualization
I’ll tackle these elements together, and this is actually an iterative and bi-directional process. We might work back from Outcomes to come up with the plan of attack (and a Strategy), and an idea of the types of projects we need to deliver upon those outcomes. Or we might start with the Strategy (linked to business strategy, vision etc.) and then link that to the plan and outcomes or Payoff.
The outputs of a developed Creative Capability are better ideas, designed and implemented well, and that generate desirable outcomes in a repeatable way. These ideas might be to do different things or things different, and I’m trying to position this as an overlay to what you already do, a way of seeing, structuring and focusing development and improvement.
To do this we’re sometimes walking a narrow line, risking putting “everything” into creative capability.
For example, the manufacturing process is not necessarily part of an organization’s creative capability per se.
However creative capability can reach into the manufacturing function in many ways, for example through application of techniques such as kaizen or lean, through manufacturing leadership and strategy approaches “growth mindset”, through moving to mass-customization (versus only focusing on economies of scale), as well as the seeking out and benchmarking around leading practices for what’s done and how it’s done.
In aggregate all of those changes, as a result of deliberately working on creative capability, might lead one to describe the manufacturing function as “creative” or with synonyms such as “strategic”, “world class” and so on.
If we looked at such a function, we’d see the hallmarks of a deliberate creative capability everywhere in terms of behaviors of leaders and employees, proactivity (and this so-called growth mindset again), that there would be practices and processes at every level to bring new ideas in, to understand and triage contextual factors from outside the organization, as well as inside.
Context?
This is a nice segue to discuss how creative capability sits within an external context, just at the creative process does too generally. This context includes the usual competitive, and Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal/Legislative (PESTEL) drivers that “push” on the organization, and individuals too.
Developing creative capability involves improving the ability to interpret and triage this external context creatively. A typical way that organizations do this is by looking for opportunities and threats from a scan of the external environment, but often those same organizations miss a trick, suffer from a lack of creativity, in seeing possibilities and finding innovative and potentially disruptive ways to respond to threats and change.
Leadership
I made the case in the previous article that to a large extent leadership is creativity and change. Not only that core leadership activities and skillsets could be called creative e.g. Strategy setting, but also in the context of Creative Capability the way we approach developing those core leadership skills is creative too.
The 10 core leadership skills I identified in the previous article were:
This was not meant to be an exhaustive list, but an 80/20 attempt to hit all of the areas of greatest impact. Picking a couple of examples. Strategy is creative in that it takes certain inputs (external context, internal strengths, weaknesses, vision and so on), and then dynamically converts them into outputs: direction and strategic plan. Strategy at its best is more than an analytical process with a single “answer”, it’s art and science, and thus creativity is required in designing and defining it. A well-worn example is the difference between IBM and Apple pursuing a strategy of focusing on personal computers. Same overarching strategy, completely different approaches.
Almost always the place to start in developing organizational Creative Capability is with Leadership. Getting a little hands-on creativity, that also helps further developing the leadership skills above, and others.
In fact. if we double-click into the Leadership bubble we have three areas:
Attitude. We often say that leadership support is important to any creative/growth initiative, and while that is true, I’ve broadened the concept in to one of Attitude, which includes point-of-view, how individuals and the leadership team think and feel about creativity and creative capability and so on. It’s more than just support, and certainly more than words, definitely requiring walking the talk. Behaviors.
Ways of Working. This wraps up a number of ideas about the productive practices that individuals and the leadership team adopt, and experience/lessons learned in dealing with Creative Capability in themselves and the organization.
Just as there are ways-of-working related specifically to product innovation projects, for example, things to watch out for, a sense of where value lies, and how to get the organization behind it. There are also ways of working related to creative capability development, particularly since this might cut across one or several end-to-end processes, business functions, countries and so on.
领英推荐
Customers, Employees, Suppliers, Partners, Other Stakeholders, Diverse Knowledge
Despite the importance of Leadership to creative capability development, the individual leader will not have the monopoly on good ideas, and in fact the organization itself shouldn’t treat creative capability as some sort of “ivory tower.” Rather, creative capability is more often than not a network or ecosystem including those inside and potentially outside of the organization.
I’ve also included Diverse Knowledge here too to underscore that knowledge is one of the fuels of creativity, and a good portion of that knowledge will be outside the organization. There is a general connection here that I want to note to Senge’s idea of the learning organization. I’ll note it and move on, since this is only one facet of what we’re discussing and don’t want to confuse the topic for you.
I do want to mention benchmarking though in the broadest sense around so-called “leading practices” and seeing these, getting this knowledge, can sometimes have a seismic effect on transforming the organization which has become blinkered in its approach. I’ve experienced this several times in working with corporate clients, and it’s not just about copy-pasting practices, but the new knowledge also brings with it a new way of seeing, and reframes existing knowledge within the organization, to come to a new, tailored way of thinking about and doing things.
This same kind of principle applies to individual creative capability too. It’s not all about what’s happening inside! In the Person bubble you’ll find something called Network, which recognizes this.
Strategy
There is an interdependent relationship between business strategy, and the strategy for creative capability.
Often creativity is most urgent to leadership teams whose organizations are plateauing or going backwards in terms of results. This might be due to a “fixed” mindset and/or culture rather than a growth one, and that might be reflected in the current strategy or lack of one.
In the process of aligning and developing our strategy for creative capability, we might look to the business strategy and see if that is sound or needs tweaking or revising. As I’ve said before, looking into creative capability can hit at the core essence of the business, questions such as “who are we?”, “what value do we add?”, and “to whom?” And these questions might need to be tackled head on if the organization is to turn around current results.
Once the business strategy is sound, we can get into whether the organization has the right capabilities to execute upon the strategy well, and what can be improved.
The strategy might call for growth but, for example, the Customer Acquisition, Expansion and Retention cycle, what we called “orbits” and GX in the book Ascending Growth, might not be working well.
A new strategy might imply the need to develop certain capabilities, such as the move from product to solution selling, the ongoing march of digitization and digital transformation, dealing with/exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI), or working on moving from products and services to thinking in terms of and delivering distinctive overall experiences.
At the other end of the spectrum, you might not think that Strategy applies to artists, for example. It often does though, as my friend Jennifer Wester described in an episode of b-side, paraphrasing, “just because you can make anything, doesn’t mean you should.” Strategy is about making decisions that say where you’re going to focus, and also what you’re not going to do, given limited time, resources, and not wanting to dilute your brand and portfolio.
This also comes back to Value Actualization and Payoff too, in any sort of applied creativity, since you want the creative idea in its final form to have maximum impact, get you where you desire to go. Often quality is much more important than quantity. This often means focusing, playing to your strengths, differentiating yourself from others, marketing well, and so on.
Culture
Just as competitors and PESTEL provide the external context, Leadership, Culture, Measurement & Motivation and other areas provide the internal context.
People sometimes call Culture an intangible but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s not, and there has been an increasing recognition that culture drives or at least sets the stage for driving outcomes. As with any discussion of culture it comes down to behaviors. Are current behaviors supportive of discovering and/or generating new ideas and ways of looking at things, and selectively putting them into practice or not?
Governance & Policy?
We’ve talked already about leadership ways of working, and organizationally Governance & Policy set the guardrails around the development of creative capability, but they also seek to remove needless impediments to bringing in fresh thinking, often by pushing decision making down as close to the problem or opportunity as possible. Clear governance can be used to speed things up, not only slow them down! We aim to not always become hamstrung and always shy away from the unfamiliar. A business can be creative without constantly putting the core business at risk!
Processes
Two of the limiting beliefs about creativity are firstly that it’s solely about the 5. Ideation step, and secondly, it’s haphazard mental state within individuals that cannot be documented. In fact, it is legitimate and productive to see creativity as a set of processes even if each is not 100% perfect.
The Process bubble is really about a library of processes that enable the organization to bring in fresh thinking, design future solutions and selectively put those into practice at different levels and in different parts. For individual creativity, a process view is immensely valuable too, and is almost always where we start with hands-on practice!
The first process in the Creative Capability Framework - Process library is the Blueprint 10-Step Creative Process I talked about earlier, and which is shown below.
Figure 2 - The Blueprint 10-Step Creative Process
Each process has inputs, one or more processing steps, and outputs. The “Product” I’m talking about here is ideas more broadly, including physical products and artefacts, ideas, strategies, plans and so on. The reason I’ve moved away from labelling the output arrows of the overall Creative Capability Framework as “products” is that it becomes a distraction from the fact that that framework is about leadership, new ideas and ways of seeing problems and opportunities across the organization, and a growth mindset, not necessarily, and in many cases not at all about the product innovation process. This is especially in services or asset-intensive industries that do not produce branded products.
Other examples of widespread processes that might make it into your library are Design Thinking, and the Innovation Funnel process, for example.
In addition, the organization will likely develop several meta-processes related to Creative Capability such as how to tackle benchmarking or the analysis of end-to-end processes.
Finally, there are business processes such as the Strategy setting process which might be formalized and “upgraded” to be more creative/get better outcomes.
Another process example I often use since I have a lot of experience in it is Integrated Business Planning (IBP) or Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP). These processes allow improved creative and cross-functional problem solving to optimize business results.
As a general point the organization will improve its creative capability by eliminating organizational silos and “broken”/suboptimal hand-offs between functions and areas, improving communication and collaboration, and creativity.
Processes apply to individuals too. There’s a circle called Traits Habits & Practices within the Person bubble, which covers off how individuals build up consistency in their activities and outputs. This can move on eventually to the next step where practices are further formalized into processes. This formalization step can be a good opportunity to optimize how work is organized and performed, and particularly in the example where a certain milestone or format requirements must be hit to avoid rework! Examples of that which I work with regularly include photography, audio and video production, 3D graphics and so on where optimizing your workflow can save hours and days on each project, and avoid losing work!
People Skills Structures Places?
Here we get into roles and skills needed to drive creative capabilities. Any change in a process, to achieve a more creative or optimal outcome, for example, might likely have a knock on to roles, skills and structures.
Often, we need changes in structures, reporting lines, and forums to drive improved collaboration, communication and outcomes. A Creative Capability intervention will look into these areas.
Any kind of doing different things and things differently, particularly top down from a new strategy might have a direct skills or headcount implications. We can talk about general requirements in people such as the right attitude and openness to change and new experiences. Like any potential organization change, it needs to be analyzed and thought through, with a change readiness/talent management lens.
Since creative capability works through the business rather than replacing it, pursuing it doesn’t necessarily involve increasing overall headcount.
In practice, there might be a temporary team in a “Creative Capability Office” to provide analysis and project management support and coordination, and so on. BUT as I’ve just already said any change to the business might have implications that increase or decrease headcount, but this can be evaluated based on established mechanisms for ROI/business case calculation, and roadmap/pipeline evaluation, and the freeing up of idea flow might also mean redeploying existing roles.
In Structures I also include forums/meetings where people can meet, share information and ideas, creatively problem solve and so on. Often the humble meeting becomes a creative front and opportunity area, as we upgrade it to enable creative additive outputs, and to drive better outcomes.
Lastly, I’ve added Places here since it’s still important whether that be physical or virtual. In organizational setting I’m talking about co-locating teams, the “water cooler”, and the various approaches to getting chance encounters of people bumping into each other, the physical topography of information and idea exchange, and so on. There are also aspects of the physical environment that affect creativity, even the color of the walls (it’s true)!
There is a whole topic here around how to maintain and improve creativity in the virtual environment and whether it is possible at all, one driver for companies bringing employees back on site. There are ways to make creativity work online, teaching and developing creativity is certainly possible in a virtual environment!
Measures & Motivation?
What get measured gets done, and when we’re doing different things and things differently, we need to invest the time in clarifying the best set of measures to support the transition to these new ways of working, and ongoing operations/new-BAU (Business As Usual).
Generally, since creative capability is working though the existing business, we’d expect to see an uptick in outputs/outcomes already being measured and tracked. And there is a relatively long history and body of experience around how to track projects and other performance improvement and strategic initiatives (“how do we measure the effectiveness of better leadership and/or a new strategy?). There might, as you’d expect, be a need to develop specific and/or temporary KPIs to measure the effectiveness of the enhancement you’re putting in place.
We can also measure the maturity of creative capability and the overall itself, and perform an opportunity assessment to identify prioritized areas for improvement.
As I mentioned quickly already (intrinsic) Motivation is a key element linked to increased creativity.
Often just asking people to be creative isn’t enough, even though they are getting paid to do a job.
There are other reasons for this too including that what you’re asking people to do doesn’t match how their performance is measured, or not acknowledging the risks of doing something outside of the status quo, or organizational culture.
We need to align all of that, and look for ways to connect where you want fresh thinking, to a bigger goal or purpose, and to build in feedback mechanisms to give employees a sense of progress and achievement.?
It is also important to be able to signpost what has already been done and the results achieved, particularly since many aspects of business today are seemingly intangible, and it can be hard to see how significant effort or new ideas have made a difference to the whole.
This is also true at the individual level too! And I want to put a note about wellbeing here too, we want to make sure that personnel, and ourselves, don’t burn out because of unrealistic expectations, and/or the stress of change/always doing something different, and not being able to find some kind of grounding and routine.
Knowledge & Experiences?
These are another of the raw materials of creativity, both for organizations and individuals. Organizations face a perennial problem of how to leverage the entirety of their combined knowledge in an optimal way, and dealing with several other detailed challenges around how not to lose individual knowledge when people move, or move on. I think we get this, as well as the need to hire/develop people with the right knowledge to do not only the job of today, but to build and run tomorrow too.
Individual people bring different cultural, community and experience lenses, for example, which can help make the final product more distinct, and/or more impactful to audiences.
Tools / Systems / Data
As the name suggests, tools, technologies and data are required to support creative capability. Not all tools will be electronic! I think that we get that there will be tools involved at some stage, for collaboration, knowledge management, pipeline management, production and so on, and we will dive into more details as we consider specific use cases. Two things, firstly about data, that analysis and creativity go hand in hand. Data driven insights can be an essential stepping off point to further creativity, but won’t necessarily tell you the answer of how best to use the insight!
Secondly, technology and creativity have always been associated, from the portable paint tubes and The Impressionists, to the Roland 808 and hip-hop, and now to the possibilities of spatial computing and AI. Artists are often the first to fully exploit and demonstrate the use cases of a new technology, even aside from what the makers of that technology intended. In a sense, watching the buzz around AI feels like a movie we’ve seen a few times already, breathless optimism that a single technology will be a silver bullet for all the organization’s issues and opportunities. How does it fit into your strategy? How will customers and employees react? And so on. Technology can help you do new things, but are they the right ones?
Person
While the People Skills Structures bubble is about people and roles generally, the Person bubble gives us the ability to look into more detail about the individual. Even as we talk about an overarching Creative Capability, single individuals, leaders and creatives have a critical effect on the outcomes produced.
Clicking into the Person Bubble
If we “double-click” into the Person Bubble we get the next level of detail, as shown in the diagram below.
Figure 3 - The Creative Capability Framework: Person
I will go through this super quick, since we’ll be coming back to Person again and again in much of the coming materials around “how”. I’ve already started referring to this too in the #conversationsaboutcreativity video series on LinkedIn:
Where to start?
I’d encourage you if you haven’t already to at least skim through the earlier articles in the series, and read the key takeaways. There is already pre-work there that you can do to lay the foundation for what’s next.
Part of getting the best outcomes and most progress from creativity is solving the right problems to begin with, and the earlier articles set the scene for that.
So, start with a felt problem, or something that captures your imagination. You can also start with a feeling/mental-emotional-state that you wish to express or explore. A felt problem is something acute not abstract, it hits you in the heart, the mind, and the gut. If there is some emotional force behind your problem then you’ll be motivated so solve it, to be creative, and you’ll be on the lookout for ways to make that happen. As the saying goes, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” In the same way a feeling/mental-emotional-states are something that can immerse us, and can lead us in any number of interesting directions: to a piece of art, to a conversation, to a new product idea, and many many more. Don't discount feelings just because they don't always come with an apparent implementation plan and business case!?
All of a sudden, the question won’t be if or when to get started, but how and where. And the initial to answer to that will be to take some of the initial steps in the Blueprint 10-Step Creative Process: 1. Framing, 2. Ingestion, and so on. Get clear on why you’re solving the problem, and what you believe it will give you (and why you want that), to get to the ultimate outcome you seek. Do some quick reading and research, reflect on that, try to 3. Synthesize, bring out the key points, the “so what?”, what did you learn, what’s next?
Often, even when working with Leadership teams on organizational scope, I’ll try to get them focused on something that captures their imagination, either a vision of work and/or life, or something they’ve been persistently curious about in a reoccurring way.
Working on something that is personally meaningful to you is often the best approach, before jumping in to the biggest problem you have at work. Working out why something is meaningful tells you something important about yourself too, and that might provide more context for the right goals or the right way to approach those goals. Also, personal creativity can be quick and low-risk, while still giving you hands-on experience in the process, and actually developing leadership skills too, vulnerability and collaboration for example.
Key Questions / Use Cases
If you’ve been following along with #conversationsaboutcreativity on LinkedIn, you’ll have already started to get some hands-on experience with creativity. There is much more to come there, and in a more structured way I also want to cover specific organization, professional and personal use cases.?
Those use cases or questions might include:
I look forward to sharing those cases with you in more interactive forms. Also, please let me know what you want to hear more of, what the real-world use cases or questions that you’re grappling with.
In Summary
In summary, let’s return to the key takeaways from the article:
Lastly, here is the "everything" diagram, bringing together all of the concepts on one page:
I'll be using this diagram, and other tools to step through the key concepts of the model/process, the interaction between the two, and how to use the models for to tackle real-world problems and goals in coming weeks and months!
Until next time, all the best, have a creative week!
#innovation #creativity #management #leadership #creativecapability
Leadership, Connection, and Growth with Creativity. Author. Advisor. Founder - Total Life Complete, Filmmaker, Music Producer.
9 个月I kind of buried the “lede” here but scroll to the end of the article for the use cases/key questions that will lead you into the framework, which is all about generating real world outcomes in a repeatable way: Personal: How do I become more creative? How do I do that video, book, podcast, song, recipe, event, or pursue that experience? How do I creatively deal with real-world problems such as finding work-life balance, meaning, growth and so on? Professional: How do I move to the next step in my career? How do I become a better more rounded leader? How do I execute a career change, and know where to? Organizational: How do we drive sustainable growth? How do we embed a growth mindset in the organization? How do we turn around our current performance, get some new ideas and thinking to the table? Answers to these in future content. Which are most important to you? Which would you add? #dontburythelede #creativecapability #cowellscreativecapability #thecreativeprocess