Introducing Creative Capability

Organizations generally see the imperative and benefits of innovation, of developing corporate, team and individual creativity, and of developing and maintaining a positive and productive corporate culture.

Despite this, many organizations are still grappling with getting any sustainable traction in these areas, particularly when it comes to delivering dependable, material and measurable outcomes.

So, what is missing, and what can be done to bring the possibilities of innovation, creativity and culture into reality?

Introducing Creative Capability

Let me give you the three big ideas in this article upfront:

1. It is valid and useful to treat creativity as a capability, something that can be systematically developed, tested and maintained over time – and that delivers measurable value to the organization. A nine-dot creative capability model will be described in this article
2. There is value in development of a generalized creative capability across the organization, and narrow and deep in specific parts of the business, using a tailored approach
3. There is a structured creative process, to be introduced later in this article, that is widely applicable to different problem sets and contexts. This process links to specific, trainable competencies that can be used to repeatably increase creativity even in “non-creative” people

For almost two decades I worked on transformation and change projects, typically for large global companies, in scores of countries around the world. I started my career in large-scale technology implementations, moved through customer relationship management and forecasting/S&OP, and finished up that chapter of my career as a strategy and operations troubleshooter for emerging markets.

In the five years since that corporate career, I’ve written a book, produced videos and music, and “taught” creativity to individuals and groups, through seminars, coaching and immersive experiences.

I’ve had time to reflect on creativity, in the broadest sense, and the essence of successful change (getting people to think different and work together). Inevitably, this also involved looking at the traits in individuals and organizations that are roadblocks to productive and sustainable change.

Those reflections would fill one or more books by themselves, yet there is a common thread around developing creativity in the real world, and “getting people to think different and work together”. It became apparent to me that these change and transformation projects I was running had many parallels with, and in fact were examples of a creative process.

This insight, along with the insights from my own creative and artistic journey and from collaborating with creative people across the arts, business and community sectors led me to try to formalize both the idea of a creative capability, and a broadly applicable 10 step creative process model, to be discussed shortly.

Creative capability at its core is about creating value through being able to generate (or at least recognize) and put into practice (as an individual, team or organization) new, useful and beautiful ideas in the context of a particular a situation or problem, and in a repeatable way. Don’t get hung up on the word “idea”, since I’m talking here about: products, services, songs, changes, movements, business processes, cures, disruptive innovations, en/intrepreneurial businesses, revolutions and so on.

You’ll see how creative capability overlaps and brings together elements of other disciplines such as strategy, marketing, change management, project management, product development, culture change, communications, performance improvement, innovation, creativity and so on.

Creative Capability is more than simply learning creative skills or the practice of creative thinking (although it certainly includes developing those things). You'll see the full 9 dot model of creative capability below.

For something to be a capability, an individual or organization must demonstrate the capacity for, and practical application of one or more abilities, towards a specific output or outcome, or applied to a particular example.

To have a capability, you must also be able to satisfy yourself/an objective party that you can use your creative capacity in future in a repeatable way.

A capability is demonstrable, measurable, and repeatable.

And the capability approach to creativity is a long way away from the individual genius view of creativity that so often captures our imagination.

While, in a sense, we’re all creative, a majority of individuals and organizations do not see themselves as creative, or demonstrate creativity as a defining trait. What’s more, an organization can, of course, be inhabited by many creative people and still not be creative overall, or be able to demonstrate a repeatable creative capability.

Remembering:

Creative capability at its core is about creating value through being able to generate (or recognize) and put into practice (as an individual, team or organization) new, useful and beautiful ideas in the context of a particular a situation or problem, and in a repeatable way.

Of course it is also possible to have an established innovation process and also not to have a generalized creative capability across the organization too, a generalized capability that would likely have enabled the organization to better deal with the level of disruptive change we've seen recently.

As I’ve mentioned there are roadblocks to the ability to put into practice new ideas, and to be able to do that in a repeatable way. We’ll discuss those in future articles, and how to actualize creative capability in the real world.

It has become popular to subjugate creativity under innovation. To reinforce the idea that creativity is little more than whimsy or brainstorming. Something to do with post it notes. As you can tell I think that that line of thought is a bit silly. I see innovation as being an application of creativity to a specific goal, and within certain parameters. To believe that innovation is the only game in town misses the benefits of a generalized creative capability in building engagement, resilience (as I've just mentioned), responsiveness, teamwork and strategy and execution.

As you might also expect, there are increasing levels of sophistication and maturity possible within creative capability. I support a tailored approach that includes a generalized creative capability across the organization, and a narrow and deep and specific capability in some parts. What I’m most interested in though for this article is talking about the overall generalized concept of creative capability.

Creative Capability as a Black Box

Before diving into more detail, I’d like you to first imagine creative capability as a black box. It’s unlikely that you’ve never heard of, thought about or been involved in creativity and/or innovation. It's great that you've had some exposure to the creative process, but you, like most of us, also likely have unhelpful prejudices and preconceived notions of what creativity is. I want to put those aside for a second by treating creative capability as a so-called black box.

In a black box, we don’t know what the inner workings are. We only know the inputs and the outputs of a thing.

A car is a familiar example of a black box. We don’t necessarily know how all of the engineering that goes into a car works, but we know how to use it (which inputs produce which outputs) to get the benefits it offers.

Thinking of creative capability as a black box is useful since it lets us focus on the inputs, the environment the box sits in, and particularly the outputs and outcomes of the box/capability, without getting hung up on what we think creativity should look like, feel like, or be.

Imagine I wheeled in a box of creativity and plugged it in. Let me ask you the following questions:

• Why do you want a creative capability?
• Why do you need it?
• What will you get if you develop a creative capability, and what will you lose if you don’t?

These are not rhetorical questions. I actually want you to write down an answer to them. I’ve purposely not started this article with facts and figures (i.e. the business case for creativity), because I want your personal vision, what this means to you emotionally.

If you’re onboard emotionally, we can do the numbers all day and night to make the economic and social case for creativity (it has been done many times already, and the problem is not lack of a business case), and for developing creative capability.

This black box exercise is also a useful illustration because it is often a good practice before starting something (anything) to really think about the outcomes you’re looking for. Be clear on those outcomes but flexible when thinking about how you get there. This is same type of principle in how to create and use a vision statement.

You might want to invest in creative capability to boost revenue and/or employee engagement, for example. Be clear on those outcomes and your vision of future success, as these will provide a focal point for the creative capability development process, making it more effective. As the capability starts working, you'll also remember to collect all ideas and seeds of ideas that come up that might help the outcomes you seek, rather than just checking the boxes of project milestones.

Being clear on outcomes helps you stay on track and adjust to ensure that the outputs of the creative process (i.e. ideas, implemented ideas, projects) actually give you the overall outcomes you’re seeking. And if you’re not getting those outcomes, you can ask why not, and adjust course.

A quirk, or you might call it a feature of using creative capability is that inevitably you’ll end up redefining or reframing the problem that you think you’re solving when you start the process. You might also see new possibilities for outcomes along the way too. This is all part of the process (and part of the process will deal with those new inputs) and, for want of a better expression; you’ll become accomplished at switching modes between left and right brain thinking, as an individual, team and organization (e.g. potentially having different people and parameters for idea generation, and idea commercialization).

Be flexible.

We're going to get to the detailed model in a second, but one more thing.

So what’s inside the box (what is the user experience of being creative “capability”)?

Adults learn most effectively from experience and from stories about experience.

That is the case with creativity, and with building and deploying creative capability.

Given this, if I were to send you a box of creative capability you’d more than likely find inside a tailored program of experiences, a set of activities/exercises and some story-based content (video, audio, some text). This is the individual user experience of creative capability.

I’m a big fan of experiential learning, and even of “hiding” or wrapping up learning activities into other experiences. I wanted to get that point out there too just in case you were thinking that creative capability was another of those situations where an author is expecting you to "do a PhD" in detailed materials before you get any benefits. Not this time.

From a planning and strategy perspective here is a framework that I use to both examine the state of creative capability in an organization (can use for individuals and teams too) and to design/implement the future.

Creative Capability Framework

I’ve developed a “nine dot” creative capability framework to help assess, analyze and develop creativity in individuals, teams and organizations. Roughly speaking, one can start at the top level when thinking about creativity at the individual level, and at the bottom row of the model when assessing organizational creativity.

Here is the framework:

Each of the nine dots are an essential component of creativity, so much so that you could say that creativity IS any one of the dots. For example, creativity is a habit (Twyla Tharp says so anyway, and I agree). Creativity is about physical and social environments, and so on.

Putting these dots together gives us a fairly exhaustive way to think about and to develop creativity and creative capability within the organization. If your intuition is moving ahead, you might recognize that by treating creativity as a capability, it should logically be made up of trainable competencies and sub competencies. That's correct!

As a backstory, I kind of got frustrated at reading through so many research papers and books on creativity that only gave pieces of the whole creativity puzzle as I’d experienced it both in business and art. I tried to fill in the blanks, and to synthesize the most useful models and perspectives I’d seen into a single model of creative capability, and a single creative process.

Therefor an additional benefit of this type of creative capability model (and the process model) is that it allows us to triage and assimilate both existing and new research and developments in the field of creativity into a, hopefully, fairly stable and future proofed framework.

Creativity happens in different contexts and with different objectives and outcomes all over the organization. As I've said, it is easy to get fixated on the important area of product and service innovation, for example, and neglect other creative drivers of value in the organization e.g. around customer success, continuous improvement, cross-functional collaboration, strategy development and execution, resilience, market responsiveness and so on. This creative capability model works across the organization, e.g. to create the slightly more amorphous but still useful idea of a "creative culture".

Jumping ahead, I want to give you a small example of why a generalized creative capability might have spill over positive benefits in the organization. As part of creative capability development, I might likely get you involved in an experience that illustrates empathy. Sure, empathy is actually key in developing new products and services, and in developing solutions to societal problems. But, it is also key in being a good employee, leader and colleague. This small example is why building creative capability also helps the organization team better on business and interpersonal issues. Another example is getting teams to learn and apply the storytelling model of business communication, which can be used for marketing, product and service design, strategy, corporate and interpersonal communication (and knowledge sharing) and so on.

There are many of these examples of "thinking different and working better together".

We're now going to look at the creative capability model, recognizing that to put all of this into practice you'll also need a concept of "capability maturity" (Basic --> Sophisticated), and also a roadmap that outlines and sequences the tangible steps to take (and perhaps some tips and tricks, hacks and lessons learned etc etc.). Those will both follow in future articles.

Lets take a look at each component “dot” in more detail.

Habits

A lot has been written in popular literature about the power of habit in work, life and creativity. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (e.g. morning pages, artist dates) are three well-known books that quickly come to mind.

The importance of routines in creativity is often surprising to creative capability novices. Routine seems like the antithesis of what we believe creativity is.

Yet routines and habits automate behavior, and we’ll begin to develop and reinforce habits that contribute to creativity. My unique path to and around creativity has shown me that creativity is good for work and life. So while we’ll be in and around that tricky holy grail of personal change i.e. positive and lasting individual behavior change, it is helpful to know that what we'll be asking people to change, benefits the individual as much as the organization.

Developing creative capability is about more than individual changes, the organization will also have to make changes around structures, measures and culture/leadership for example that support individual behavior changes, but we’ll get into that in a later article.

Mental Emotional States

What I’ve called Mental Emotional States refers to the mindset and feeling disposition of the individual (or group, or organization…when we consider things like “tone at the top”), and the habits and processes to get into, out of, or to fully utilize these states.

For example, confidence is related to creativity (and change). This was described by Albert Bandura in his concept of self-efficacy, and building on that idea, in the popular creativity book Creative Confidence by David and Tom Kelley. Teresa Amabile from HBS found that motivation is correlated with creativity.

Conversely, we also recognize that an ongoing background level of fear and anxiety can often make us less likely to be creative and to change (unless a do-or-die situation forces us into action, and that is not a sustainable business strategy).

It is overly simplistic (and incorrect) to say that positive emotions help creativity and negative emotions inhibit creativity. Comfort can breed complacency, and a near death experience could be the trigger for personal and professional change, for example. Also see many of the love songs ever written, for example.

Given all of this it becomes key to consider the user (employee) experience in the organization and associated mental and emotional states. This also includes other factors like goal setting, deadlines, measurement and performance management, habits, meeting design etc. in order to ensure a productive creative environment.

As a slight aside, I’ve found the work by Russell and others around the circumplex model of emotion (valence and arousal) fascinating and something I think about sometimes when designing the “mood arc” of learning experiences, DJ sets, and musical scoring/compositions (and in organizational setting thinking about business change). I also want to make the connection here to the wider body of literature around managing energy and work and in life. This brings us full circle to ideas around work design (that applies to virtual work too) and productivity. How do you help employees get into productive creative states when they're not in the office, and so on.

Traits

It is fascinating, but a potential rabbit hole, to think about inherent (nature and nurture) characteristics of creative people, such as examining the brain structure of famous artists, scientists and inventors and so on. Or by looking at their specific life histories, families and relationships.

One of the roadblocks to creativity is that individuals don’t believe that they are creative. One contributor to that belief of non-creativity, is the mythical status of the creative genius in society. Yet, the question in developing creativity and creative capability is not how can you be Albert Einstein (or fill your organization with clones of A.E.), but rather how can you as an individual, team or organization become more creative than you are at present (and you can).

Not seeing yourself as creative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since you won’t get the confidence, adopt the habits, or put in the work, for example, that will lead you to be more creative. One advantage of treating creativity as a capability is that it gets away from the unhelpful creativity-as-genius idea, and reframes that into creativity and a systematic, structured, learnable, improvable capability.

There are traits associated with creativity, and I'll mention a couple below, but for now the point is that habits and ways-of-working can somewhat take the place of the need for genetic nature/nurture traits, and we might be able to reveal "latent" positive creative traits that even the individual might have, and of course that creativity is often a team pursuit so that it might not be essential that everyone in the team has all of the traits, and so on.

Some examples:

Most of us are curious as children but "lose" that to an extent in adult life. In creative capability development, we’re not necessarily trying to "make" you curious, continuing the example, but to let you be curious, expect you to be curious, welcome your curiosity.

Punctuality is a simple example of a learned habit. You might not be naturally punctual but you can train yourself to be (perhaps as the result of a bad late experience), such that the habit of punctuality becomes almost indistinguishable from a “nature and nurture” trait.

You might be able to “fake” another positive creative trait openness to experience, in the context of a safe space learning experience, when openness had been deemphasized by your life path. I’ve seen again and again how a habit around trying new things can be nurtured even over the course of a couple of hour seminar. Sometimes I bump into people weeks or months later, and they've kept up with that level of openness, with positive results.

In the organizational context, I've often been in the situation of helping to prototype new (more creative/problem solving) meeting formats by running a real business meeting in "facilitated mode" and coaching (senior) personnel in real time around tone, language, and what and how to discuss. This might seem trivial, but because the situation is real and live it allows for direct and timely feedback on traits and predispositions and habits that are not helpful to the situation, and modeling of those that are. The learning is experiential, and tends to not only stick but can be transformational.

Processes

Given my computing and process improvement consulting background (and personal traits about wanting to improve), it is natural for me to want to think of creativity as a process.

As with creative capability, I’ve done some work to synthesize a generic 10 step creative process that works for both art, commerce, society... Here’s a picture of the process, which I’ll discuss in detail in the next article.

While no process can be completely applicable and correct in all situations, I believe that the 10 step process is useful to help identify the broad steps and learnable sub-competencies associated with creativity. This process enables the development of assessment and development tools and a roadmap for creativity improvement, and for developing an overall creative capability.

Like all processes, the creative process has inputs and outputs, and exists within a context. While the process can be read in a linear fashion (left column of blue blocks top to bottom, then right column of blue blocks top to bottom), the process is typically iterative, steps might be skipped, or done in with lighter or heavier emphasis. Don't worry about what all the blocks and inputs and outputs are, I'll explain these in the next article.

At the organizational level, there will be a whole set of processes associated with creativity to a greater or lesser degree. You might develop, for example, a creativity or innovation system with a host of workflows, components, resources etc.

Creative capability development might also include revisiting and upgrading a wide range of operational, planning and strategic processes so to embed creativity. A simple example is looking at all the customer facing processes that already receive or could harvest customer feedback and are part of the overall customer experience (not only the ones with “customer” in the name, but marketing, operations/logistics, finance, procurement/supplier management and so on).

Does a new idea have to come from an internal "skunk works" lab to count as being creative? Does an idea have to be completely new to the world and never seen before in order to be creative?

No, and no!

This is why I've found it useful to frame creative capability around "creating value" through generating or recognizing...ideas.

Ideas can come from inside and outside the organization, can come as a kernel or a fully formed idea...from an employee, partner, customer, supplier...a competitor, or non-competitor in a different industry.

What's often rolled up into the idea of "benchmarking" is an example of this, where an organization compares themselves in terms of process and performance to other leading or so called "best" practice organizations from both inside and outside the industry. In order to recognize this type of creativity whether elsewhere, or within your organization or network, you first have to have a culture and process where you ask and look, and the also selectively listen to and act upon what you see and hear.

You can also probably intuit that it might be a good idea to have a portfolio of "generating" and "recognizing" type creativity in an organization, and that this is part of a broader process of understanding how and where value is created within the organization, network, industry, and so on.

Experiences and Knowledge

Knowledge and experience provide fuel for creativity.

There is an element of creativity that is about accessing, repackaging and repurposing existing (internal and external) knowledge, and finding novel connections between points, and synthesis of knowledge.

At the individual level, there are many familiar examples of this process of taking in and using that to influence or provide fuel for outputs. Writers tend to be avid readers. Musicians tend to have great taste in music. Research has shown that scientists who develop breakthrough ideas are often polymaths, and have one or more (artistic) creative hobbies.

Diverse knowledge (from different fields or domains) is often essential for coming up with insights that lead breakthroughs, whether your field is fashion or physics.

There is a mountain of information on the relationship between knowledge/experience and creativity that I won’t attempt to recap here. Suffice to say that in assessing and developing creativity, we’ll look at how the organization takes in, codifies and shares tacit and explicit knowledge and insights, in formal and informal ways, for example.

Stories play an important role in communication, motivation and learning/knowledge sharing, as well as in building, changing and sustaining culture. Storytelling is another learnable sub-competency of creative capability development.

I want to close this section with a "meta" example where the "journey is the destination". Even though they can be tough and tedious, a successful project (to do almost anything) can sometimes have more spillover benefits in increased trust and relationships, for example, within the organization than the benefits from what the project set out to do in the first place.

Sometimes projects are the only time that people from different parts of the organization get to meet and work together. So, when thinking about deploying a creative capability project or program, don't lose sight of the benefits of shared experiences from the project to the project team, and to the organization.

Skills

“You increase impact with skill” – Twyla Tharp

Skills in the framework refers to both 1) creative process skills and 2) craft or domain skills.

Creative process skills are the familiarity of individuals, teams and organizations with creative thinking tools and techniques. These can be a simple as de Bono’s Thinking Hats, or as involved as Design Thinking, or even as broad as an organizations innovation “platform”. These skills can be applied to many different problems and domains. The better the skills, generally speaking, the better the quality and quantity of creative output, and creative (process) skills are trainable.

A second group of skills are those related to the craft or domain. If you’re a musician then these skills might include things like composition and arrangement, application of musical theory, as well as skills in playing an instrument or instruments and so on. Working on these component skills will, all other things being equal, leads to increased creative ability in the domain of music. Writers talk a lot about “craft development” and go on retreats, for example, to work on specific aspects of the overall craft of writing, such as dialogue for example.

If you’re an organic chemist, then lab work, design of experiments, and understanding reactivity, might be skills that you need to hone. If you’re a doctor or a pro-athlete, then there are the “basics” and “esoteric” skills that you need to practice and drill in order to be creative on the “field”. Most professions have ongoing professional education requirements to try to ensure that skills are kept up to date.

I can almost feel the collective groan from readers when the topic of continuing professional education (CPE) comes up. Good idea, often poorly implemented. There, I said it.

You’ve probably heard how deliberate practice is key to skill mastery. It is, but I’d also like to acknowledge jamming and play as a means to developing creative outputs.

You could call these creative tools, techniques, or simple just part of the creative process. I want to highlight jamming and play for two reasons. First, they kind of cross over between creative skills and domain skills since play, for example, can end up not only creating innovative outputs, but also challenging and changing and extending the understanding and limits of what the domain ("playing field") is.

Secondly, another obstacle to organizational creative capability development is having an inflexible attitude to how work should look and feel at both the leader and the individual level.

Many of us have been taught to stay on task and on topic, and feel uncomfortable branching out. We might have taught ourselves not to get distracted, and to ignore tangents. Yet tangents might well represent much new valuable territory. That is not to say that all work will become play. Just that we’ll get more familiar with and adept at switching between modes as the situation demands.

A saw a fascinating microcosm of this yesterday in a seemingly unlikely place, a standup comedy pitch session. I sat in with three up-and-coming comedians in Dallas as they pitched each other their ideas for bits and sketches (I was there in the context of trying to help eventually direct some of those ideas and performances onto film, but wanted to see if this type of creativity could be compatible with creative capability. It can).

Far from the free-for-all you might expect this pitch session was quite a structured and ritualized event.

Ideas were either fleshed out, discarded when they didn’t take, or tangents or riffs would emerge, some were fun to follow along, but ended up nowhere (at least for now), and others had the seed of something that could be fleshed out. All three participants were generous with their efforts to build on or flesh out the ideas of others. At the end ideas were ranked in terms of laughs and also the potential for the idea to turn into a world or ongoing series of sketches. A lot was achieved in a fairly short amount of time, and then they switched into logistics and planning mode.

I might have belabored this story and point, but I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has sat in corporate meetings previously and thought about, pondered or even fantasized about how great it would be if those meetings worked better and we got more done. Looking at and improving meetings and forums is part of improving creative capability within the organization.

Structures, Systems and Measures

Particularly when looking at organizational creativity, it is the structures, systems and measures that represent the most visible obstacles or enablers to developing a creative capability, and thus priority areas to address in order to unlock creativity.

Structures are formal hierarchies and reporting lines, as well as forums/meetings and other planned and ad-hoc interactions.

I spent quite a few years of my corporate consulting career building structures and forums for cross-functional collaboration and problem solving (e.g. sales and operations planning, customer service improvement), and doing the same in the context of projects and multi-day offsite strategy sessions.

All of that informed my point of view that creative capability is a generalized capability in the organization that also can be tailored and deepened for specific cases such as product and service innovation (rather that solely being part of a “skunk works” type R&D department).

So that point of view informs how to analyze and design structures that support creativity in the organization (broad and deep, what’s often called a “T”, but there might be several different verticals at different depths that work slightly differently).

Systems related to creative capability might be creativity specific (e.g. innovation funnel/process) but also include communication systems (messaging and collaboration, social media), and useful stores of organizational, customer and supplier knowledge, information and data (ERP, CRM, MAS, BI and other acronyms etc. etc.)

Of course, an innovation “system”, for example, could also refer to the people, process, technology (IT, tooling and so on) associated with the objective of a specific type of innovation.

Measures refer to the metrics, goals and objectives that impact creative capability in the organization. As you might imagine from what you’ve read so far, creativity in different contexts and places in the organization will require some different measures (and objectives, and resources etc.). How to measure the value of innovation, and how to measure the effectiveness of the innovation process as specific topics have received a lot of attention and study, and continues to evolve so I’ll leave that for a future article.

For now, given the way I’ve framed creative capability, I'll ask why wouldn’t employee engagement be a measure for creative capability? I see that we need to get creative in where we look for value and how we direct and measure creative capability in the organization.

Environments

In the organizational content, environments refer to both physical and social environments, including things like workplace design and culture. There is an interdependent relationship between creative capability and culture, for example. Culture and leadership provide the context and foundation for creativity of all kinds in the organization, and developing creative capability tends to create a positive culture in the organization and engaged employees.

In the macro sense, we can talk about environments outside the direct control of the organization, in terms of things like PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal) context. Contextual analysis might seem abstract, but through the ages creativity and artistry have responded to these factors.

In a macro sense again, creative capability is about the organization being resilient in and responsive to the environment, and better able to generate and capitalize on opportunities that changes represent (remember, think different and work together).

Tools

Tools supporting creative capability can range from technological devices, applications and systems, to checklists, techniques and frameworks and so on.

There has always been a situation where technology creates new possibilities in creativity, whether that is the tin paint tube, the electric guitar, DJ turntable, or gene sequencing.

However, as you’ve seen so far, creative capability is about much more than investment in new technology, and there will be some benefits purely from getting more from your existing technologies and investments.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was to introduce a capability based framework for examining and developing creativity in individuals, teams and organizations.

You’ve seen hopefully that developing creative capability is about more than improving product and service innovation. It is about helping the organization “work better” and for employees to “think different and work together”, and to create incremental value as a result. Whether that value is revenue, or profit, or engagement or resilience, or a host of other measures. Part of the creative capability journey is understanding the drivers and places in the organization where value is created, and secondly how creative capability can be most effective in improving performance in those areas.

The Creative Capability framework is composed of nine components. Focusing on any one of these nine will help improve creativity, but looking across all nine is essential for developing a sustainable creative capability, which delivers repeatable results. As I said earlier, the framework is useful for assessing the maturity of creative capability in an organization (i.e. diagnostics), and thus for developing a roadmap for improvement.

I introduced an overarching 10 step creative process, which I’ll detail in the next article.

I don’t know about you, but having a creative capability model and process is really useful in being able to visualize and plan the development of creativity within the organization.

What do you think?

I also use the framework and process model to think about my own creative development. Creative capability is engaging because it is also empowering, and can be used to get results at work and in life.

Until next time.