D: The WHY of Creativity

This article describes the “why” of creativity, outlining the benefits and “burning platform” for the application of creative approaches and tools at the organizational, professional and personal levels.

The following two articles in the series describe the “what” and “how” respectively of putting these creative approaches and tools in place, and getting the benefits of doing so.

This triplet of articles on creativity are an extract from longer working papers for a course and book to be published next year (2024), and also to highlight some of the ideas I’m already using in 1-on-1 creative/leadership coaching. You’ll get an idea of how I see things, and what it might be like working together in the organizational or personal context.

Rather than wait for the next book, I wanted to get the ideas to you as soon as possible, and provoke some valuable discussion and feedback too.

If you find this article useful please like and comment below, ideally with and specific areas you liked/found useful or didn’t! Remember to follow along my LinkedIn and return for the other two articles, and for creative/leadership interviews and other video content in 2024.

Key Takeaways, the “why” of creativity:

1. Creativity enables you, and the organization, to do and be things you couldn’t or wouldn’t otherwise
2. There are significant organizational, professional and personal benefits of creativity, financial and non-financial, and including the management of risks, increased proactivity and agility, and the creation of new positive possibilities/optionality for the future. Market changes mean creativity is now more a question of “how” rather than “if”
3. Creativity is today still a good place to invest time and energy, and a relative differentiator, since there are common but knowable and overcome-able blockers that prevent people and organizations from reaping full creative benefits, or even starting. Thus, the domain remains attractive and relatively untapped with a quick/cheap onramp

“I will learn more as a man than as a pilot (driver), because my career as a pilot may only last a few years. I hope that my life, however, last very long. Maybe I’m only half-of my existence. So I still have much to learn and do in life. I reach true happiness when I feel complete something that does not prove at present. But I still have so much time in front of me to succeed.” — Ayrton Senna, Legendary Racing Driver

There are significant organizational, professional and personal benefits of creativity, with a recent survey by consulting firm BCG showing that 79% of companies are ranking innovation among their top 3 goals. Among the already successful leaders that I interview and/or coach, being more creative almost always comes up as a top wish for the future (or even already a partial regret), not only in the work context but in the broader sense of lifestyle and life goals.

However, there can be obstacles to engaging with and developing creative capability (instrumental in, but broader than innovation), and reaping the benefits of any investment of time and resources in doing so.

These blockers can be as fundamental as not having a clear enough definition and productive scope for creativity, and failing to get started in the right way to build momentum.

For both organizations and individuals, there is the danger or piecemeal efforts that peter out, or hitting a plateau, not getting the full benefits of creativity, and giving up/moving on.

So how do we get and sustain the full potential benefits of creativity at the organizational, professional and personal levels?

We begin with why.

The why of creativity, in a nutshell, is about the things that creativity enables or equips us to do, not creativity for its own sake per se.

Thus, to tackle this topic systematically, we should start look at:

• Why — what you want from creativity, and what’s possible (menu of benefits)
• What — which aspects of creativity deliver the benefits of creativity? What are the commonalities, differences and interdependencies between applying creative tools and approaches at organizational, professional and personal levels?
• How — how do I/we get started. Given positive interdependencies, what is the fastest and best onramp to getting the benefits of creative approaches and tools (and which ones)?

This article covers the first bullet, and the next two the second and third bullets respectively.

Although we’ll dig into “what” much more in the next article, a working definition of creativity is useful as a stake in the ground, so to speak:

Creativity is the discovery or generation of new and useful ideas, and selectively putting those ideas into practice in the organizational, professional, personal and/or social context.

An implemented business strategy is an idea, as is a new market segmentation, a finished movie at a cinema, the kernel of the concept for that same movie, a vision, New York, a new perspective, and so on. As I’ve noted, creativity, as we’ll discuss it here, is a means to an end, a tool, process, system and so on.

To meet the “useful” aspect of the working definition of creativity, ideas must/should necessarily be in service of an ultimate objective.

So, let’s always start with the end in mind and ensure that, in a topic as expansive as creativity, we’re pulling out the bits directly relevant to achieving our objectives (and discovering new ones).

I’d like follow the lead of academics Puccio, Mance and Murdock in their book Creative Leadership, of relating the ideas of creativity, leadership and change. Creativity is about what leaders do, and the outcomes of leadership.

I’ll represent the idea and the link to value and outcomes using the Venn diagram below:

Leadership, Creativity and Change work together to creative value — Brett Cowell

Leadership is creativity and change. Creativity helps leadership respond to and implement change to drive value and outcomes.

I feel that pinning creativity to leadership and outcomes works even with my artist “hat” on.

Firstly, many artists are or aspire to be thought leaders, to influence and shape, to be original and not follow the crowd, instead following their own compass. In practical terms, artists of all stripes have become brands / products / businesses and some have extensive teams supporting them and relying on them as well. Leadership is ultimately about integrity and an authentic voice, as is the path of the artist.

In terms of whether art has objectives, although art might be a way of life, a habit or compulsion or so on, there are still a range of objectives or drivers even if unarticulated, such as: personal expression, ego/pride, curiosity, to move people, fame/recognition, to change society, to be able to live financially, and so on. How these objectives are achieved also differs creatively with the why of the individual artist.

Creativity certainly isn’t only about the money, it’s about the magic too, but it’s not not about money either! Creativity is about Inspiration, Problem Solving and Actualization (bringing ideas into reality) whatever and whyever you pursue it.

For readers discovering me as part of this article series it’s probably work briefly answering “why me and why now?”

My career, as covered on LinkedIn, broadly has three chapters (so far). At college in the early 1990’s in Sydney, I volunteered on an electronic music show at the public radio station atop the university I was doing a Computer Systems Engineering degree at. I became a professional electronic music DJ and founded an event promotion business, I even produced and/or contributed to a few tracks that were played on the radio.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that there was more out there for me and decided to “get serious”, switched universities and finished a Business / Computing degree. That is chapter one.

The second chapter is almost two decades in corporate management consulting in IT and then Supply Chain working with huge companies, literally all around the world. This is the chapter where I met and worked with most of you on LinkedIn (at least most of you at the time of writing). I had long held a vision for a new kind of work/lifestyle business aimed at leaders and professionals and I left consulting to pursue that idea.

Although the consulting work environments didn’t have the look and feel you’d most readily associate with creativity, the work I did (and many of us do), I’ve come to understand, was without doubt creative at the least in a craft sense.

That is, tailoring a solution based on a body of knowledge and a situation for a client. And, looking back, I was a pretty good and effective strategic analyst and diagnostician because of my creative skills, being able to synthesize diverse inputs, find connections and interdependencies, and I cared about the problem and the work. And I listened a lot too, not always a defining characteristic for a management consultant.

It’s an interesting sidenote that I do remember that at more than one internal training session it was myself and another guy who were the “expressives” in a big room full of “drivers” and “analytics”. That will mean something to some of you reading! Just like any predominant tendency it doesn’t mean you can’t be a good analyst or driver for example, we were, it’s just how you predominantly see and engage with the world.

That brings me to the third chapter. The vision was to help you, via my business Total Life Complete, across various (a comprehensive, Total, set of) life stages and priorities (work, home) to live a “Complete” life.

I wanted to live a complete and creative life myself, but didn’t see any resources or businesses I could enlist to help achieve that while I stayed in the safety net / mental comfort zone of my familiar consulting career, so I had to try to start it myself. I hope my work will help you get further in your comfort zone, until you’re ready to launch!

After going on my own personal artistic journey, I had the insight to embrace rather run away or try to escape from my corporate history, and instead to return there and try to spread the gospel of creativity. There are many benefits to you, and the world of doing so, I felt. Therefore, I reframed the business at the overlap of Creativity, Leadership and Lifestyle, recognizing that creativity was the secret sauce or superpower to turn your vision into a reality, and hopefully in the process I would actualize my own vision too

The answer to why now is that it’s something we all need now more than ever, given ongoing seismic market and environmental disruptions and continuing uncertainty. If we’re to deal with mega issues such as climate change or the future of work post AI, for example, then we need creativity, to do different things and things differently. I also wanted to focus down on how I spent my time and interacted with you. For the next long period I’ll be working creatively on my own projects, or teaching and helping leaders and organizations be more creative. Creativity is the golden thread.

To optimize work-life balance requires creativity. To live the life of your dreams also. To be the disruptor rather than the disrupted requires creativity. To leave a legacy, too.

OK, so let’s dive into the why of creativity in line with the three take aways that opened this article.

1. Creativity enables you, and the organization, to do and be things you couldn’t or wouldn’t otherwise

If we look broadly at the activities that creativity helps you with, it includes things such as: vision, purpose, strategy, challenging assumptions and constraints, bringing fresh perspectives and ideas to the table, flexibility, agility, empathy, communication, problem solving, vulnerability, resilience, implementation and so on.

This comprises a fairly comprehensive list of tools in the toolkit for getting things, any things, done. Without the right tools we often find ourselves stuck unable to progress, to finish and move on to what’s next.

I’d wager that almost all of you are reading this article because there’s a thing that you want that you don’t have already, but you believe creativity might or will help you get.

Let’s dig into that a bit more and it’s important we do it now.

Why are you reading this article?

Why do you want more creativity?

What do you hope creativity will deliver to your organization, your career or your life?

What acute problems are you currently experiencing that you hope creativity will help you tackle?

Try to form an answer and speak it and write it down.

The big general why of creativity, in a nutshell, is about the things that creativity enables or equips us to do, not creativity for its own sake per se. We see creativity as the only way, or at least a better, faster, cheaper, lower risk way to reach what we want.

Like any journey it’s important to start with the end in mind, and your why is that initial end or “North Star”. After you reach it, or even on the way there, you’ll have a much clearer idea of where you want to go, and new possibilities will emerge.

Creativity is not only a way to get to a destination, but to visit more exotic destinations along the way. You set out your own itinerary rather than following someone else’s, and have increasing self-determination around where to go, how, and when.

In the organizational sense with creativity, I often call the set of abilities related to reaching important objectives i.e., “what you want”, a “creative capability”.

A capability (people, process, technology etc.) is the ability to consistently and repeatably do something (grow, respond, innovate, change…) over time. In an organizational sense, only being able to do something once, sometimes, or “perhaps” is roughly the equivalent of not being able to do that thing at all!

If you can’t count on it, depend on it, then you can’t commit to it, you can’t or won’t do it.

Since creativity is linked with and defined by outcomes, that means you if you can’t consistently do the things you need to, you also can’t consistently: grow, change, gain, be responsive, retain, at all or at least to the same level you would if you’d invested in creative capability: at the organizational, professional, and/or personal levels.

Picture a firm that has plateaued in its results, or an individual that has plateaued in their career, or feels stuck in life for that matter. Without new thinking you can’t consistently, repeatably, reliably get unstuck and move forward, whether to the next step or next chapter.

The idea of creativity helping you do things you wouldn’t have otherwise is a fascinating one too, since it includes the discovery or generation of possibilities you might not even be able to see or envisage right now.

The first part is that if you have a constrained or limited view of the future and your own/organization’s capabilities, it’s unlikely that you’d even define or attempt certain goals. You might not even raise those objectives as a possibility, never mind try to achieve them.

Would you try to jump to be a market leader if you couldn’t even deliver a minority of your products on time right now?

Many or most wouldn’t because that goal might seem absurd, but some actually would pursue the market leader goal, and that level of stretch and that’s where creativity comes in, as the role of the visionary leader.

Developing vision enables to you set a compelling direction, without getting caught up in the realities and minutiae of today. Instead of those minutiae being the central problem, the key problem is how to bridge the gap between where you are today and the vision.

Creative skill involves not only having inspiration or discovering an idea, but moving that inspiration into being a felt problem, something our brains (and organizations) are wired to act upon.

There is also the concept of “Creative Confidence” popularized by Tom and David Kelley, and based on the work on self-efficacy by American psychologist Albert Bandura. In short, completing small steps gives you the confidence that you’ll be able to take bigger steps, and over time this leads to breakthroughs.

Following a breakthrough, The Kelleys and Bandura described how participants demonstrated a generalized confidence and drive to tackle bigger and unrelated problems at work, in life, and in society. I’ve experienced this effect too both in myself, and in observing what those I’ve coached have gone on to do. Creativity is getting the ball rolling.

The second part of “wouldn’t have otherwise” is the stepping-stone or journey aspect. Taking steps forward means you move to a different, new, place and from there, new possibilities become visible.

Your vision ascends to higher and different levels.

Many of us get stuck and don’t even start towards a desirable goal because we can’t yet see every single step in detail to get to our vision.

But that’s not how you’ll hear that visions work, you must set the vision and move to the next stepping stone. Imperfect action beats perfect inaction every time. And a vision doesn’t prescribe every step, only the direction, and there are many paths to that destination, which is where creativity comes in again.

We can also look at stepping stones as “platforms”.

Often, we hear about this term in the media sense, somebody has creatively developed a following on social media, and then is monetizing this, or using that platform or asset to creative other opportunities, such as selling an energy drink, bringing attention to a cause, and so on.

Of course, the idea of a platform is well known in organizational and innovation circles too, creatively building the platform (a brand, competency, technology, relationship and so on) pays off over time being the foundation for many and different future opportunities.

There are many common examples from the search and social media platforms themselves getting into advertising, to companies like 3M, Honda (engine design and deployment), and the Apple ID content and devices ecosystem.

We can deliberately set out to build platforms in the organizational and professional / personal sense, or we can take stock in retrospect and find that we have a strength/platform or asset that we didn’t see, then reorganize our efforts to fully exploit that platform!

In a sense the latter is what has happened with my business and myself recently. I found that after pursuing all these creative projects for other ends, I actually had a valuable stock of know-how that could form a platform to help others, and to build on in future.

Creativity and the components that make it up (inspiration, problem solving, actualization/implementation) are “skill platforms” or capabilities in themselves, you invest in building them and they pay off again and again over time. This is part of the why of creativity compared to other specific skills we could learn or develop. Creative skills can be broadly and continually applied over a career or lifetime.

Finally, engaging in creativity in a systematic, or at least repeated way, begins who you think you are, and what’s possible as an organization, or individual. Creativity and the outcomes you produce begin to change your identity, and the culture in the organizational dimension.

If you become to believe you are a creative person or organization as part of your identity, it becomes a virtuous cycle, you invest more in developing and doing in that area, reaching further heights.

For example, in the personal or professional sense many people dream of writing a book, but few do, even though the advent of self-publishing means the barriers to getting a physical product in a market where people can buy from around the world are lower than ever.

You might write for work, I did, mostly PowerPoint presentations! But eking out that first poem or article, particularly if you publish it or present it to a group, changes who you are a bit.

Instead of only being an accountant or lawyer, for example, you are now that and a writer. You have the power of an additional identity. If you already believe or know (backed up by evidence of writing poems or articles) that you’re a writer, then the mental gap to writing a book is smaller, and the likelihood you’ll do it goes way up, even though the effort to do so hasn’t changed! It becomes the next logical thing to do. And after you’ve done it a new world of possibilities open up.

For me, one of the next logical things to do is to make a short film I’ve written en route to filming a feature that I’ve also already outlined. I’m in no way an expert in making narrative films (I never have), but I’ve done all the work in camera operation, screenwriting, editing and so on, I’ve even written some of the music already. I’m in the position where there’s no excuse not to just do it, it (filming a short) is the next logical thing.

I’m trying to impress upon you here a certain feeling or point of view that is along the lines of small steps lead to bigger things, but more existential than that, you realize that you’re a person for who becoming a CEO, a filmmaker, an entrepreneur, or whatever it is is the next step, the possibilities are right there in front of you.

A strong organizational identity is often seen as a good thing, yet as is the case with a professional or personal identity that same strength can become a limitation or weakness in times of change.

An example that we talked about a lot in the writing of Ascending Growth was a B2B services organization that was known for serving the construction sector. This firm knew the sector and the key players well. Except there was a downturn and growth in that sector flatlined.

All of a sudden, the firm was out of step with the broader market and its sales force and even culture didn’t immediately match up with other sectors which had good potential (they’d had good potential for a while but the firm had been comfortable with what it knew and how it defined itself).

The sales force consisted mostly of “farmers” rather than “hunters” and since the last economic cycle there had been the long progression of digital transformation moving the balance of the sales funnel towards (online) marketing. The firm was grasping, and this is the start of a case study of what to do next to turn things around by doing different things, and things differently.

In summary, any strength is also a weakness, and firms are increasingly adding “agile”, “creative” or “innovative” to their identity (at least internally), and creatively rebalancing their strengths and weaknesses to focus on a range of different markets and customer groups as appropriate.

Having worked a long time in the alcoholic beverage sector in the past, I can envisage how the changing consumption patterns among younger demographics, and the rise of non-alcoholic beverages (and ones with other active ingredients) is also a challenge / opportunity to the traditional positioning and identity of “we make the best alcohol around” for example. Firms had already begun responding by considering the market in terms of occasions rather than the product itself. This is another example of a broader transition from product, to (service) bundles, to overall customer experience (and physical to digital or hybrid), something we’ll need creativity to navigate successfully.

How is your professional identity helping of hindering your creative and broader life and career goals? What needs to change in how you see yourself and how you position yourself to others?

2. There are significant organizational, professional and personal benefits of creativity

My objective in this article series is to help you, the readers and leaders, to get started on and/or go further in your application of creative approaches and tools, to your organization, career and personal life.

Any kind of forward progress inevitably involves change, and where change is present so is the inherent resistance to change, even about something that is obviously good for us and good for others.

Anticipating and dealing with this resistance to change is a hallmark of successful progress, and a laundry list of objective facts about why something is good is not enough.

It’s often found that we make decisions based on feelings, and justify them with logic (even in B2B). Given this we need to “start with the end in mind” and ensure we have both a vision for change (what the future looks like, and how it differs from today), and a case for change (the vision, plus the rational and emotional benefits, the story of the change and why we need it).

Knowing this, in this article we have already begun to rehearse the story of the why of creativity from the start. This is also why I’ve structured and explained the material in this way, switching between personal, professional and organizational benefits.

Along the way you’ll have to make the case for change related to creativity to a range of stakeholders, not least yourself, your team, other leadership, the market, future clients and collaborators and so on. You have to be convinced yourself too, hearts and minds.

I’m also comfortable switching between personal, professional and organizational levels of creativity because I know that they’re connected. Becoming adept at personal creativity and change spills over positively into your career and organization through your role as a leader in your specific area and beyond (through indirect influence).

You’ll hear in the next article about how creativity is linked to motivation, the more intrinsically motivated you are the more creative, all other things being equal, and adding more money to the equation to make you more creative doesn’t actually make you more creative, generally speaking.

If your “why” for creativity that you answered in the first section is a personal one then please don’t lose sight of that, particularly given all the discussion of strategy and organizational change.

Part of the creative journey, at least the way I teach it, is being able to live the life you want, including in your career. Don’t feel that your personal drivers of creativity are any less legitimate because there may not be an immediate dollar value attached to them, or because they’re not the “serious” objectives that you think you should have.

For example, one of the key reasons why I’m writing this article series is not at all related to my gain at all. Early on after leaving consulting and in the process of writing my first book, I had the experience of presenting at an outplacement firm to a room of leaders that had been recently let go from their organizations, many of those organizations are household names, and many of those no doubt are already into or through another cycle of layoffs, years later.

That experience affected me deeply me deeply and I was reminded of that feeling last week in a conversation with an executive who, talking about current conditions, said a line that jumped out “long term leaders are losing their jobs.”

While it is easy to be cynical and cold and say “that’s business”, these are real people, some with families, and their identities had been fully invested in their jobs.

Since the time of that original presentation, some 7 years ago, I’m still putting materials out there that help people take stock of their work and lives before there is a crisis. Further seismic changes in the world of work are looming, so here again are some materials to help be proactive about that. I will help make the case for change to you and for you and provide you an approach and some guidance to get started. But you have to make the decision to get started, and do the work.

Given all of that, let’s have a look at the broader menu of options or benefits or creativity, and we’ll close this section with a look to see if there is a burning platform for you (a compelling reason to change).

Again, also remember that in many contexts you’ll be dealing with a range of stakeholders, and they at a minimum will want to know a WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) from their perspective, if not also a formal business case. We’ll return to the Return on Investment (ROI) of creativity further down the track since that’s best assessed when looking at specific initiatives, interventions and projects.

a. Organizational Benefits

If we searched for global companies with the highest market capitalization, we’d end up with a familiar list of organizations that are often seen or held up as inherently innovative, creative and/or disruptive firms: Apple, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and so on.

I feel that I might be pushing on an open door, that it’s redundant, to make the case for why creativity is a value driver in business overall. We know of, and can see these examples.

Even if you’re not in the same industries, the examples from the firms listed above are directional, and there are specific processes and practices that we can all learn from.

In the next article we’ll cast creativity as being a broader concept than solely innovation.

We’ll talk about creativity as it applies to business model (including marketing, pricing), end to end processes (including new product development, but also supply chain, service, applying “leading” practices), revenue generating processes (e.g. Customer Acquisition, Retention, Expansion), different functional strategies and objectives, and in various operating model parts of the company: strategy, technology, measures, culture and so on. Thus, we’ll cast a much wider net, and have a larger benefit pool for creative ideas, approaches, and tools.

The promise of creativity is both ongoing incremental and transformational improvement in specific areas and across the organization.

For example, in the last book Ascending Growth (2022), we introduced a valuable new idea and framework “GX” or Growth Experience as it applies to the overlap of organizational, customer and people growth.

We also introduced the concept of “orbits” to replace or at least supplement the traditional sales funnel, and fix some of its well-known limitations. And we talked about how to target improvement of core revenue-generating processes. Knowledge is an integral part of creativity, so things such as curiosity, lifelong learning, and continuing professional development are part and parcel of it.

This underscores the point that creativity is more than solely ideas that are generated by you or in-house. Creativity, in any pragmatic business or personal discussion, is the ongoing search for value adding ideas, wherever their source, and the ability to triage and selectively apply those ideas.

Since creativity is and is part of leadership then we can ask ourselves what are the benefits of improved leadership, across all of the areas that leadership touches upon. What are the benefits of improved culture? What are the benefits of improved strategy, or execution?

We don’t have to call a creative intervention or capability development by those exact names. We can call exactly the same interventions a growth initiative, strategic refresh, bringing new ideas to the table and so on.

One reason for this is that, as you’ll hear towards the end of this article, some people have a mental block around the word “creativity” so calling it for the benefits you’re seeking or which processes you’re applying the ideas to, for example, can help you avoid getting blocked.

To avoid creativity being “anything and everything” to do with ideas we will, in practice, put some other defining characteristics into the mix. It’s creativity if it includes one or more of the three stages of Inspiration, Problem Solving and Actualization, but again call it what you need to get the job done. Call it business, call it life, call it leadership.

There must be some benefits of leadership development itself (another umbrella for creative development) given a $14BN market. You’d think so, at least!

Many traditional leadership development efforts fail to deliver benefits however, or fail to stick, and there are many reasons for this, a primary one is that the materials and frameworks are not easily applicable to the real-world work situation of the leader. A positive aspect of creativity for leadership development, at least the way I teach it, is that it is hands on, about building the competence and confidence in new ways of tacking problems and opportunities across the board, and it’s taught by doing it, and having productive new first-hand experiences.

Consulting firm McKinsey finds “strong correlation between creativity and financial performance” in terms of both total returns to stakeholders (70% had above average returns to shareholders/TRS), and organic revenue growth (67% had above average growth). Their study looked at creative industries, and sought to extract practices from those firms that can be applied to a broader range of organizations. They found that creative leaders were also more innovating, scoring 16% higher on McKinsey’s Innovation Performance Score.

We’ll get into a synthesis of the “hows” of creativity in a couple of articles time, but for the sake of grounding some of the McKinsey numbers, they found that the most creative firms:

1. Hardwire creativity and innovation in daily practices
2. Become customer fanatics
3. Feed the need for speed (translate insights into actions quicker)
4. Adapt or die (learn from early market signals and adapt approach)

In Ascending Growth, we quote a stat from Forrester that “B2B organizations with well-aligned product, marketing, and sales functions experience 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability than those that are misaligned.” The ideas and frameworks in the book represent a creative and/or transformative approach to building alignment, among other things, and promoting growth, through new paradigms, processes, and behaviors.

Innovation is not purely as the result of implementation of new technology, but creatively and collaboratively designing and adapting new processes, relationships and ways of working that cut across traditional silos, and improve communication, promoting better results.

Returning to the BCG study we quoted at the start of this article, they found that the “portfolio of the 50 most innovative companies has outpaced the broader market in shareholder returns by a significant margin — an average of 3.3 percentage points per year”, and note that “Traditional markets have plateaued, and growth, which accounts for 60% to 70% of shareholder returns in the medium term, is found primarily in new markets, including those created by technology disruption.” The message, get creative in your search and plans for future growth.

It’s worth noting that there are significant non-financial benefits for organizations from creative tools and approaches as well, including employee engagement and retention, better culture, and employee and 360-degree feedback results, reputational improvements and so on. These non-financial benefits help become a platform in themselves supporting a virtuous cycle, of a firm being able to push into new and different areas, because the baseline trust and open communication is there, for example, as well as the openness to try new things.

Taking a creative approach also helps manage and mitigate risks at many and different levels. Strategically, a creative firm is inevitably well plugged into customer and market insights, reducing the risk of being blindsided, or neglecting important trends or important customer ideas and feedback. I worked on many projects implementing Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)/Integrated Business Planning (IBP), and a focus of those initiatives was better leadership decision making and joint problem solving. This problem solving ended being quite creative, because having cross-functional involvement allowed a broader and more holistic perspective and knowledge to be brought to the table. It was much better than one part of the organization trying to guess what the other part was doing, and often guessing wrong.

Communication and alignment tend to improve positively in creative firms, which also helps agility and responsiveness, particularly when combined with improved problem solving. Creative firms can be proactive and not only reactive.

Needless to say, leadership, you, have a key role to play in shaping and guiding the creative performance improvement and value creation agenda in your organization. Better organizational outcomes can naturally translate into better professional outcomes, which is what we’ll talk about now.

Professional benefits

“In growing companies, there is a surge of personal and collective energy. People live the intoxicating experience of being on a winning team.” — The Alchemy of Growth

There are material financial and non-financial benefits to your career related to creativity. As I’ve said, some of these flow on naturally from guiding the overarching creative agenda in the organization that we’ve just discussed.

For ambitious people, developing creative tools and approaches often represent an “edge”, competitive advantage or differentiator in their careers.

“Only” being able to execute well or hold people accountable, core aspects of leadership, are important but no longer a differentiator among the tranche of other candidates who’ve climbed the ladder precisely for having those abilities. They become a given or “table stakes” for the next step up.

So, the question becomes how “complete” a leader are you? Do you have the ability to excel in different market conditions, across business units and functions, and geographies and so on? Do you proactively bring new ideas to the table and resolve problems, rather than perpetuating them?

The financial benefits of taking a creative approach to your career, including salary and benefits, are often realized by moving up, out or across. That is, getting promoted, moving to a different firm for more money and/or benefits, or crossing the line from employee to consultant or owner/entrepreneur or vice versa.

You’ll hear in the next article how creativity maps onto and enhances core aspects of what good leadership good is including strategic thinking, communications and problem solving. All other things being equal, better leadership skills mean better outcomes and more rewards.

Creativity also helps with other aspects of moving up or out in terms of your personal brand, marketing, and using creativity for positioning yourself as an expert in terms of books, articles, podcasts, speaking engagements and so on.

Obviously, creativity and entrepreneurship go hand in hand, for a founder in terms of the initial insights and innovation, that the new business is built upon. Then later, in terms of iterating to find a scalable market fit, and also marketing in the broadest sense (how to define and position the product and get it to market).

No doubt I wish I knew what I now know about creativity back then when I launched my business. It’s not that I wasn’t already creative, or knowledgeable in business. But entrepreneurship, particularly solopreneurship, is a very specific case, and has the need for: much more speed of iteration, much clearer and impactful value propositions/marketing and sales efforts, and often the need to take much larger calculated risks earlier that hit at the heart of what you’re trying to do. These are all things that come from experience, but also from a more highly developed creative capability.

I found that while jumping from a corporate career to start a business is a somewhat risky option, it is a legitimate one. I had a harder time initially in legitimizing my own creative pursuits, and being clear on what I really wanted to achieve beyond replacing one “job” with another.

I regret not getting on to my own creative case much earlier, after working in Hong Kong in 2001 and having the idea to write about some of the cool experiences I had there, which I eventually did 15 years later, and turned into the basis of a screenplay. It’s never too late to start, but it’s never too soon either.

Recognize that creativity, particularly in the personal sense, grows out of feelings, and what’s deep inside you…and legitimize that in your mind, because often those deep drives and tendencies don’t go away, they only intensify.

This brings up an important general point! Start working on creativity sooner than you are fully comfortable doing so. You don’t have to wait for permission to start learning the basics and getting your hands dirty with creativity.

The non-financial benefits of using a creative approach to your career can include a greater sense of purpose and fulfilment in terms of growth, community (working with people) and contribution.

Often, we come to the creative domain because we feel the need to change things up to a greater or lesser degree. This could be as simple as finding a creative outlet, project or pastime. It could be a pet project or strategic initiative you want to lead at your organization. Or it could be laying the foundation of a new chapter.

For me, fulfillment, variety, enjoying your work, making a difference, new opportunities, increased flexibility to work on your own terms, and access different kinds of experiences are the primary drivers of wanting to add creativity to work.

Much of the research of creativity and innovation has focused on the financial benefits to the organization. Quantifying the precise financial benefits of increased creativity to leaders themselves, beyond enabling a promotion, for example, takes a little more triangulation and, yes, creativity.

As a starting point, the Adobe State of Create research found that Creators reported, on average, earning 13% more than those not describing themselves as creative. While not a groundbreaking figure (but definitely better than nothing, or the opposite), we also need to remember that this difference can essentially be in “perpetuity” over the course of a career, perhaps amounting to hundreds of thousands or even millions of incremental dollars over an extended period. Also in the same survey, 70% of respondents said that creativity made them better leaders, and also said it made them better problem solvers, and more confident. All of these things enable the next step in a career.

All other things being equal, leaders in firms that are delivering above average results (utilizing creativity and innovation, as we heard from BCG and McKinsey research) will differentiate themselves and, intuitively, also receive above-average compensation and career opportunities, and/or be protected from the downsides of firms that are less able to change and thrive in challenging market conditions.

I feel that, both in my own experience, and with any number of leaders that I know, the Adobe numbers greatly underestimate the potential financial upsides of improved confidence and can-do attitude that can result from a track record built on creative risks and the ability to deliver change/transformation. Doubling your salary, or more, in a short period is not uncommon.

What has also been studied more extensively is returns on leadership development in the form of completing an MBA, with salary jumps of up to double or more, and very typical ranges of 35–65% salary increases reported when compared to pre-MBA.

I want to unpack this example as it gives us some valuable clues to how increased creativity has a significant financial impact, particularly since some say “creativity is the new MBA.” Why do MBAs get paid more? Firstly, the mechanism for getting paid more usually involves changing roles and/or organizations post-MBA, and in cases via joining or founding a business. It’s worth noting also that research has shown that, even for non-MBAs, those who change jobs earn more than those who stay put over a 2-year increment.

Clearly there is more to work than salary, as I’ve already alluded to, but since we’re talking financials let’s continue. MBAs you’d expect would have the skills, particularly analytical and financial skills, to hit the ground running in leadership, and have personal traits such as being a self-starter, meaning that certain jobs will require or at least prefer an MBA or similar.

People often undertake an MBA ahead of a desired change or inflection point, thus are typically all-in on making a success of a new opportunity. MBAs tend to be highly confident, often annoyingly so, and have a high degree of self-belief, and research has shown that confident people tend to get paid more! Remember the work of The Kelleys and Bandura here linking successive creative steps and a generalized confidence to tackle bigger challenges.

Incidentally, I’ve found that developing creative skills has definitely opened up new networking possibilities. We all know that we need to network more, and that it can help advance our careers, but I like many of you don’t enjoy it or haven’t seen benefits coming from general networking.

In a very real sense, learning to produce written, video and/or audio content is a way to reach a broader audience, position yourself as an expert, create inbound leads, and meet other leaders doing great things and so on. It’s all the best parts of networking, without all the awkwardness of having to pump hands with strangers, while drinking cheap wine, wearing an adhesive sticker with your name and an “interesting” fact on it.

I feel that the ability to get creative projects done, and a track record of actually doing so (which becomes a portfolio of sorts), puts you in the same arena as a different group of people in a positive way, the changemakers.

When I meet people now there are a range of different ways we can take that meeting forward, a podcast or video interview or some other content being some of them. I love talking people and hearing their stories in the context of passing through my normal work and life, and I love having the opportunity to share those experiences and insights with you. In that context, meeting people has more purpose than only selling more widgets, or yourself for that matter.

The World Economic Forum (yes, I recognize not everyone loves them) in their future of jobs 2020 report (published in Jan 2016) identified creativity as the number 3 skill, up from 10th place in the skills for 2015 report. In the latest 2025 report published this year creativity is now in number 2 position behind analytical thinking, and ahead of resilience, flexibility and agility which I’d argue are all connected with creativity anyway.

Several others in the WEF top ten such as Complex Problem Solving, Active Learning, and Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation are creative too! It’s telling that of the Top 10 skills, half are about problem solving, two are about dealing with change, one is about dealing with people (!), and two are about technology.

Creativity doesn’t have to be about completely transforming who you are, rather adding another string to your bow, making you a more complete leader, professional or changemaker. We always used to value being “well rounded” as a characteristic for promotion to the executive suite, and I definitely see knowledge and experience in creative tools and approaches as we’ve been discussing them here as fitting into any current discussion of being well rounded.

In a Harvard Business Review article “The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most”, the authors observe that “More than ever, companies need leaders who are good with people.” Remember, if you’re trying to cross reference this with the WEF, is that the WEF report was more aimed at describing skills for workers, the broader workforce.

The premise of the HBR article, based on analyzing 5000 c-suite job descriptions, is that industry and financial skills (as well as a track record of technical expertise and administrative skills) are becoming less important, in favor of finding candidates who are adept communicators, relationship builders and people-oriented problem solvers.

And the article goes on “the capabilities required of top leaders include new and often “softer” skills that are rarely explicitly recognized or fostered in the corporate world. Simply put, it’s getting harder and less prudent to rely on traditional indicators of managerial potential.”

They continue “They also have to spend a significant amount of time interacting with others and enabling coordination — by communicating information, facilitating the exchange of ideas, building and overseeing teams, and identifying and solving problems.”

So, all of this is broadly aligned with what we’ve been talking about in terms of the creative aspects of leadership. One additional thing that jumps out to me from the article from a creativity point of view is around communication.

It is relevant to remind ourselves again before digging further into communication that we often make a decision using emotions and then justify the decision with facts (rather than the other way around), even in business and B2B situations.

Thus, influencing people (as a leader) cannot ignore the emotional aspects, and these emotional aspects are precisely those we work on and study through creativity, and business communication for impact using story structure and techniques (a.k.a. the often-confusing term “storytelling”).

Communication is a two-way street too, the other half being listening, which is often the neglected half. Creative people simply listen better and differently.

Listening is a specific skill that we teach when helping people and teams improve creativity. How to listen without judgement and let ideas emerge, and how to build on other’s ideas (even using techniques from improv comedy sometime). You also learn to listen and see differently in a more general sense of interacting with and responding to various contexts and environments.

I’ve read more than one article about lessons corporate leadership can learn from leaders such as Movie Directors and Producers in the creative professions who must necessarily straddle a broad cross section of different technical, financial and creative teams. Part of the why of creativity is being open to learning, and to the evolution of leadership itself.

Earlier this year I read Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz by Frank Barrett. It’s a somewhat laborious read, in my experience, with a simple message: the MBA school of leadership has left leaders woefully unprepared to improvise and collaborate/jam with other specialists to come up with innovative ideas and approaches. And that corporate leaders can learn from jazz bandleaders, in terms of how they communicate and work.

Whether you love this idea or not, I think that the premise that corporate leaders need to learn to be agile, to respond to changing markets, and even improvise given various market shocks, is a solid one, as well as the principle that good ideas can come from anywhere, even (particularly) from outside the traditional channels.

We’re in another period of economic downturn in some sectors and uncertainty. Even long tenured leaders are being let go from their firms. Some leaders have adapted better to changing market conditions by changing their and their teams focus to other sectors, products, and offerings, or at least have been able to articulate their value and vision better than the others who were eventually let go.

In consulting we often use the term “burning platform” to described a felt/articulated and compelling reason to change, and that not changing is not an option.

For organizations, for leaders at work and in their home lives these burning platforms can exist even if we don’t see them initially. You might simply be looking out to the market and sensing that something should probably be done, you could let this intuition pass by, or digging in to a bit more analysis you could rapidly come to the conclusion that the need to change is urgent.

The creative approaches that we’ll talk about in the next couple of articles are a good starting point to analyze and respond to these changes. Better to be proactive than be sorry.

Personal Benefits of Creativity

What is your personal why for creativity? Is it different from what you answered earlier? If so, how and why?

There are personal financial benefits of creativity in addition to those professional ones we’ve already discussed related both to the creation of other income streams, and the “how” of income.

Apart from salary and benefits, full time business income, or income from rental properties and the like, creativity opens up the door to income streams based on intellectual property such as royalties, licensing, access fees, subscription fees and so on.

There is also the possibility of creative (non-full-time) endeavors like side hustles, craft shopfronts (e.g. Etsy, Shopify etc.), or even doing ad-hoc “gig” work on Fiverr, for example, and many others. There’s the common-sense matter here of diversifying your income, and how you earn the income. In a sense the individual income related to each creative project is not the whole picture, since trying to do a small project for money (outside the normal realm of your core work) changes the way you see yourself and builds skills in a way that can contribute to must larger income and fulfilment possibilities down the track.

This also comes to the “how” of income. How to use creativity to be able to earn sufficient income without having to work 40–80 hours a week in a place, or your own business for that matter. I think the pandemic has brought widespread acknowledgement and understanding that 8 hours work at home (or, better, some exotic location) is often much more preferable to those same 8 hours in a corporate office, for example.

Flexibility of where the work can be performed is valuable to you. Flexibility about when the work is produced is an additional dimension of value. Flexibility about who is another dimension and there are many others.

As many workplaces are trying to accelerate “return to office” many employees (including senior leaders) are reacting to this by looking for alternatives to this eventuality. Finding or generating those options necessitates getting creative. Achieving work-life balance in general is a creative exercise since you have to create your own playbook for it, trying different things.

One of the major drivers in how I strategize about my own business is looking for income streams that don’t require me to be tied to a certain location for an extended period, be in person at all, and where income is not linked to the need to put in continuous full-time hours to keep that income stream alive (like a traditional job).

Needless to say, pursuing a creative journey of any kind has non-financial benefits, it is most often deeply fulfilling, changes who you think you are and what you can do in a positive way, makes you more of a complete, authentic and feeling person.

And it’s about benefits to others too.

There’s rarely a day that goes by where I don’t think about how I’m going to pass on to and instill a creative capability in my children, for example, who are currently 7 and 9 years old.

You probably have heard of that book from a while back Rich Dad, Poor Dad, right? I wondered if there was a version Creative Parent, Rich Parent, or even Creative Advice to Your Younger Self might work. I came out of a squarely working-class background, where education and hard work was seen as the only path to a better life. And it was a path to a different life, but it’s not the only path, and although it can make you “rich” at least in terms of the income distribution curve, the traditional knowledge based professions don’t necessarily make a healthy, happy and fulfilled life.

How many of you would want your kids or a younger person you know to follow your path exactly? Sure, I want my kids to have the grades that give them options, and having been a professional that could be a professional that could be an option.

But I’m absolutely encouraging their creativity too, and that’s mandatory.

To end this section on personal benefits on a personal note, I have a fairly pessimistic view on the future of traditional jobs, not only traditional entry level office, professional and leadership jobs, but creative/design ones too. I turn this pessimism into a drive to help change the future of work for the positive.

I keep coming back to the McKinsey “C” level article, and also the concept of leader more akin to a movie director (working to coordinate across creative, technical and financial/business specialists, and in the near future AI powered technologies), and of course to the fact that businesses who offer services and/or experiences that are not or not easily replicable by technology, will likely flourish, or at least continue to be viable.

In a sense investment in creative development is about future-proofing yourself/your organization, through your capability to adapt and find and exploit new sources of value, or exploit old ones in new ways.

3. Creativity is today still a good place to invest time and energy, and a relative differentiator even though there a known blockers

This might seem like a paradox at first, but it is precisely because there are blockers to realizing the full potential of creativity that it remains a good place to invest in as a differentiator. Particularly since if you do it right the on ramp can be short and relatively cheap i.e. many “quick wins” are possible, that can help build momentum towards larger changes and benefits.

Why are organizations still, in 2023 as per the BCG study quoted above, listing creativity as a top 3 priority, when the oft-quoted IBM study back in 2010 said, as per the press release: “According to a major new IBM (NYSE: IBM) survey of more than 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, chief executives believe that — more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision — successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity.”

A short answer is that things continue to change. Change has become a constant (it probably always was), and creativity/innovation is required in order to adapt to and keep pace with change. Creativity is still a good place to invest because we need it now and into the foreseeable future.

That’s true but I believe it’s only part of the story.

Returning to BCG’s 2023 Innovation report, only around one in four respondents were “innovation ready”, with the others lacking in areas such as leadership, teaming, process and so on.

Thus, another reason that creativity is still on the agenda is that we yet haven’t completely tackled creativity in a systematic way — what I call developing a sustainable creative capability. There is still much work to do.

It’s not a trivial effort to get all the pieces in place, aligned and working together well, but if you have a blueprint or playbook then progress becomes less problematic and time intensive, whether at the organizational, professional or personal levels. This is what I’m aiming to help introduce you to over this article series.

I’ve seen individuals, and many well publicized CEOs make a career out of running a transformational playbook at different organizations, hopefully to get predictable results. And then they typically move on to the next organization, and reap the rewards of doing so. Whether you move up, out or across, getting that playbook for creativity/innovation enables you to drive better outcomes, to do things that others can’t, and to capture the benefits of doing son.

Another blocker is that there is a generalized lack of clarity around what creativity is.

We’ve begun to address that in this article, and will take a deeper dive next time.

Creativity is more than product innovation or art for that matter. It is the application of new and useful ideas, and the three mega processes of Inspiration, Problem Solving and Actualization, to any process, business model, career, objective. problem or domain.

Once you learn and master the intrinsic elements and applications of creativity, you’ll see them everywhere. For some reason I keep coming back to the example of cats. A domestic tabby and a lion, are both part of the same family, having similar hallmark characteristics, and you can recognize other cats too, even if you haven’t seen that particular kind before.

With creativity, you inevitably say “oh that’s problem solving” or “oh, we need to inject some inspiration there”, it’s all creativity even though it looks different superficially, there are infinite varieties and applications.

There are 40–70 breeds of cats incidentally, as I’m just reading. Maybe ducks are a better analogy, “if it walks like a duck”, there are around 174 breeds of them too apparently. Anyway, moving on…

The final blocker I want to discuss here is that there are several unhelpful and often incorrect assumptions or perceptions about creativity that can hinder any kind of investment in developing the use of creative approaches and tools:

i. Creativity will compromise real business

ii. Creativity is risky

iii. The market (or other group of stakeholders) will react negatively

i. Creativity will compromise real business

There is a lingering perception that creativity is not “real business.” We’ve all heard the disaster stories about pet projects/vanity projects and flights of fancy, and how these sometimes distract from the core business. In fairness though we’ve also heard horror stories about firms trying to merge with or buy out other firms in the same industry! It’s not that creativity is the only thing that is inherently risky, but doing anything in pursuit of growth can include an element of risk.

We also must recognize though that there is an ongoing tension in business between efficiency (the default) and change. Businesses, by definition, are set up to scale an idea, then to repeat the production of that idea at the highest volume and lowest cost, like a machine.

Business haven’t traditionally been great at navigating change, so there’s often a skepticism and resistance to anything more than incremental improvement. We often see the role of transformational leaders and/or consultants in helping organizations to change.

Even in the more accepted case of product innovation, many fail, and I’ve seen through experience companies are much better at introducing new products (and the complexity and cost they bring) than cleaning up the product portfolio afterwards for products that didn’t work commercially beyond an initial trial period. Companies can also get fixated on product features and miss larger changes in what customers really value.

Leaders sometimes worry that creativity will change them and they’ll lose their skills that got them this far i.e. the ability to execute and hold people accountable.

Perhaps that they’ll turn into some “beret wearing poor artist!”

I’d answer this firstly by saying that developing capability in creative approaches and tools makes you more of yourself not less, and certainly puts you on course to address your full potential rather than less. Creativity lets you see and realize the bigger picture of who you are and can be, and make that happen.

I think that we all get the concept of adapting leadership styles to situations, some will require traditional approaches, but increasingly there are other situations in the changing environment that will require new capabilities. This is what the McKinsey article I quoted drives at, so the question isn’t whether leaders need to adapt or not, but how best to. Not changing is increasingly not an option. Your “strengths” can easily become weaknesses if you’re inflexible, as things change, and as you progress up, out, and across in your career.

As long as you’re always aligning creativity with (business) value, you’ll be fine!

ii. Creativity is risky

Inherent in creativity is the idea of trying different things to see what works. Knowing that you won’t hit it out of the park every time comes with the territory, but people seem to forget that.

Often organizations ask for fresh thinking but punish failure severely, and inevitably in those cultures, creativity trends towards zero.

There’s also a tendency to try to make every idea work because of sunk cost, sticking with something for too long instead of changing tack or pivoting, which is the critical other part of the creative equation from the initial idea.

On a micro scale people get hung up on their own perfectionism, never publishing an article, for example, in their area of expertise, because of fear of how it will be received, and generally, fear of failure.

Professionals in particular struggle with this, their careers are built around being right, and being consistent, and the oracle for certain types of knowledge and expertise. They don’t want to try something that they’re not already good at.

The other side of the coin is that not being creative, and not taking calculated risks is also risky, often riskier than not taking them or doing nothing at all.

Unfortunately, people and organizations often have an “ignorance is bliss” approach to risk management, that is if they can’t see them then those risks don’t exist or can’t hurt them.

I say that if we’re to spend time worrying about abstract risks then let’s instead take a systematic approach to risk and bring these out into the open and deal with them, and the opportunities that often accompany risk areas. Creative leaders often have a better understanding of risk, and can better use risk for opportunity, than those leaders who are constantly waving the red flags (or white ones for that matter) because anything different from the norm is present.

iii. Stakeholders will react negatively

We’ve already mentioned the fact that some work cultures want innovation but punish failure. It’s actually similar with a broader range of stakeholders. The market wants growth but values consistency as much. Some organizations have a seemingly opposite issue, the market is pricing in new innovations and if they don’t come or underwhelm then share price is affected.

The central point here is that engaging in creative approaches or any kind of change for that matter necessitates thinking about and managing a stakeholder group and their expectations too.

This even applies at home. Many report that their spouse or other family and friends might react negatively to creative ideas or possibilities because of their own personal fears and insecurities. Groups that surround you also often want stability, and this can limit your ability to make change if you let it.

We’ll get into stakeholder management again in a couple of articles time. The point for this section is that the blockers to forward progress in applying creative approaches and tools are known, and the workarounds to these are also known, if you’re willing to put in the effort.

This includes having a playbook or systematic approach and/or a knowledgeable guide to help you through, and having the right expectations, under promising and over delivering rather than the other way around.

If you do this a landscape of opportunities will become visible that is not accessible in the same way to those who do not engage in seeking out those opportunities. Start small and quickly build up.

To that point, if you make a breakthrough in your personal creative confidence positive ripples move through the other areas, and lay the foundation for bringing that creativity to your career and organization. This approach further de-risks creativity in a sense, because leaders can get familiar and their hands dirty in the sandbox of their personal creativity, before taking on larger creative challenges in their career and organization.

This connectivity is why I’ve chosen to focus on leadership and the “win-win-win” across organizational, professional/career and personal domains. The onramp to building your personal/professional creative capability in particular is short and relatively cheap since we learn by experiences and stories of other experiences so it’s possible to share case studies in a group setting to accelerate learning.

For example, there is a measurement of creativity called the Torrance test which measures fluency (number of ideas), flexibility (variety of ideas), elaboration (ability to add more details to ideas you come up with), and originality.

I’ve used this test as the basis of developing various group exercises that help drive up the Torrance measures within a short 10–15-minute session through peer pressure / observation / gamification. How you work on creativity can help reduce the risk to the negligible level for initial steps.

There’s a truism in creativity that the first idea often isn’t the best. For various reasons, including expediency, many of us stop at the first workable idea we come up with or from our personal data bank.

In a volume of cases at work and in life this is a workable approach, it’s more important that a decision is made rather than necessarily being the best or an optimal path.

But it’s also inherently risky to expect the same historic or sub-optimal ideas to be what you rely on all the time! In this sense it’s less risky to be creative, since creativity inherently involves responding to a particular or current situation, and generating a range of options.

This is why even some basic creativity training moves you forward quickly since it brings attention to when and how to add creative value as you go through your day to day, as well as in bigger set-piece events such as strategy offsites, for example. Bake in time to challenge and update your assumptions.

Wrapping Up

There are significant benefits to the application of creative approaches and tools in the organization, your career, and personally.

Creativity quite simply lets you do and be things you couldn’t or wouldn’t do otherwise.

If this is the so called “carrot” of creativity, then the “stick” is that market changes are beginning to necessitate increased creativity as part of your leadership toolset, and as insurance for your career.

Really, it’s up to you to be proactive, while nobody might be demanding creativity from you by name, they are demanding growth, diversity, responses to competitive threats, more agility and better management of risks and so on.

You might already be at the stage where you’re wanting more from your career and life, and for most of us creativity is an easy supplement with few downsides, particularly if we start small, early and with ourselves, then quickly build up as our creative confidence and competence increases.

Although I’ve already given a preview here, the next article will take a much deeper dive into the “what” of creativity, and where you can use the injection of new ideas, perspectives and approaches across the organization, your career and personal life. Remember to like and comment, and to follow along on my LinkedIn for much more.

What will the benefits of increased creativity bring you?