3 - Uncreative Strategy
Before considering the value of creativity, the author wishes to explore the reasons that some firms have failed to employ it (or have intentionally rejected it) in the past. In most instances, it is not that creativity damages strategy, but what presently passes for strategy is inherently flawed.
Creativity Can't Be Planned
Creativity results in a deviation from standard and familiar practices - because you do not know what might be discovered, it frustrates the ability to lay detailed plans. Obviously, the problem is with what passes for planning in many organizations:
- Plans are operational rather than strategic. An operation plan consists of following established practices and merely adjusting for capacity - just being organization wide does not make it strategic
- Plans are too inflexible. A plan is an inspirational statement about an uncertain future, and if it has not tolerance for change or adaptation, it is doomed to failure.
- Plans are unrealistic. A plan based on past results is based on the premise that the future will be exactly the same, which in the present day is almost never the case.
But in terms of creativity itself, it is not accurate to suggest that it cannot be planned. Properly executed, creative strategy involves a deliberate process (identifying the problem, exploring alternatives, evaluating them, etc.). it is only when "creativity" is meant to imply a spontaneous and random process, without structure or a sense of direction, that it becomes unpredictable.
It's also suggested that planning and execution should be well separated: just because you have come up with a new idea doesn't mean that you need to act on it immediately. In that sense, creativity shapes strategy, but implementation can and should be done through a more controlled and deliberate process.
Creativity Defies Order and Organization
Strategic management is assumed to begin with a process of defining a singular certainty and a common vision, whereas creativity deals in the grey areas where things "are and are not" at the same time.
This, too, suffers from a misunderstanding of the strategic process. Strategy is high-level and defines the goal that the organization wishes to achieve - to dabble in the nuts-and-bolts details of how the goal will be achieved is tactical, not strategic, and may be counterproductive as it may require a number of different approaches to fully solve a problem.
Not only this, but it is a poor application of strategy to be dictated from the ivory tower without consideration of the reality of the trenches. At the same time that strategic management is too divorced from the ground-level employees, it seeks to be too involve in a one-sided manner.
For example, strategy for sales tends to amalgamate all customers into a single profile, dictating a fixed process that should be applied to all, whereas the front-line employee must react to customers as individuals, realizing that they are all the same, and that a singular solution for all is not the best approach for most, or any.
The greatest value of creativity is in embracing paradoxes rather than attempting to resolve or ignore them - and this sense of flexibility should be part of strategic thinking if it is to be successful in an organic and messy world.
Creativity Requires a Multidisciplinary Approach
The theory of the specialization of labor has been taken a step too far, to create silos that do not communicate or share information - and worse, to create a "management" silo that has formal authority over them all, without the knowledge or expertise of any.
To make matters worse, those specializations that most often matriculate into management are law, engineering, and accounting - all of which are concerned with compliance, precedents, standards, and common practices, and none of which are particularly creative or inventive fields.
Creative though requires cooperation among people of different perspectives and areas of expertise who must envision what may be possible by changing current practices rather than by adhering to them.
The complaint that a company is "run by the accountants" who squelch any new ideas is common among young managers, but they quickly become inured and institutionalized to a culture that is numbers-driven and risk-averse.
Creativity Requires Mistakes and Accidents
The larger and more established an organization, the more fearful it is of taking risks, and the less tolerant it is of failure. To think creativity requires doing things differently, in hope of effecting improvement but with the admitted risk that things will not go as well as planned. The leader who tries something new and fails jeopardizes his career, whereas the leader who simply does what his predecessor did is safe, even if he fails.
It's commonly said that without risk there is no reward, and that a person who makes no mistakes has learned nothing from their experience - but in the corporate environment, there is greater respect for safe mediocrity ... so long as things have not eroded to the point where the firm is unsustainable. The authors provide examples of firms that took the lead in their industry by taking risks, whereas others who sought to avoid risk crumbled.
They also suggest that strategic management has adopted a risk-averse "follower" mentality, which crept into even the creative industries in the 1980s and 1990s, in which entertainment firms (television, music, and motion pictures) underwent a dramatic change in the US, becoming focused on delivering what the audience wanted rather than being novel, artistic, or entertaining. AS a result, television has been reduced to a few basic formats, music reduced to a few proven genres, and motion pictures focused on sequels or remakes. As a result, the entertainment business is stuck in a rut: if a label or studio requires a 75% positive rating in test screenings, then it follows that their products will follow the patterns that are already popular with the mass market - and nothing new or innovative would be done.
(EN: It's also worth noting that this is the same timeframe in which "independent" film studios and record labels began to appear as incubators of talent - the problem being that if anything happened to catch on with a larger audience, the major studios would leap on it and often poison it, such that independent producers remain small and financially unsuccessful.)
The consequence of this, to the market, is commoditization - where no producer, entertainment or otherwise, is willing to take the risk of doing something differently, then the products of various firms become standardized on the lowest common denominator.
Creativity is Wasteful
Companies focus on operational efficiency, whether to offer a lower price to the customer to increase their market share, or to maintain a higher profit margin to benefit of their investors. As such, they see creativity as wasteful: paying people to think about the future rather than to do things that have a financial return in the current fiscal quarter, funding experiments that may now work out at all, and the like make the firm less efficient.
Paraphrasing Carl Jung, the authors suggest that some degree of "slack" is required to think creatively - stepping away from activity, considering it on a higher level, and spending time to contemplate alternatives are necessary.
It's mentioned that the 3M corporation's most profitable line, the Post-it note, was created when the firm allowed researchers to spend 15% of their time to think about their own ideas and projects. Google has co-opted the idea in giving their own employees one day a week, based on the same philosophy. It's also noted that many people have "eureka" moments when they are away from the workplace and engaged in things that have nothing to do with work.
Admittedly, creative inspiration requires stepping away from the daily routine and spending time - but considering that the ideas generated can catapult companies ahead of their competition, it's a worthwhile investment.
Only "Creative Types" Can Be Creative
There is the notion that creativity is innate, and that a certain personality type (right-brained people) are capable of being creative but cannot be practical, whereas other types are capable of being practical but cannot be creative.
The authors suggest that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, used as an excuse so that business people don't need to be creative, nor pay much heed to what the "creative types" have to say about practical matters. The same is true of "traditional and conservative" companies that balk at opportunities to be creative because it doesn't fit their self-image.
In the last decade or so, creativity has been recognized as having strategic value, but firms have mimicked some of the superficial trappings of smaller firms (casual attire, espresso machines, and bring your dog to work) without actually adopting creative processes.
Other firms hire contractors and agencies to provide creative input, figuring that they do not need creativity very often, and then discover that the creative input of people who don't understand the business model or the market provides no value to the organization.
Others still have created positions, even departments, for "innovation" that are separate from the rest of the company - deepening the gulf between creativity and productivity and giving their regular employees even more of an excuse not to be creative, and to hold creativity in contempt.
Ultimately, all of these behaviors show a complete lack of understanding of what creativity is and how it should be evoked and applied in a business organization.
Creativity is Visual
The concept of creativity is often limited to things that can be seen. Given that strategy is document in words and numbers, it is considered to be non-creative.
However, pictures are just another method of conveying information that, in some instances, can be more efficient than words or numbers. In fact, reports are an attempt to convey a "mental picture."
In that sense, the author suggests that strategy might be more understandable if it expressed itself in images, and creativity need not be banished from an idea expressed in text.
Competition is Necessary to be Creative
In an external sense, some companies are motivated to "get creative" when they are being trounced by their competitors. However, if they had been truly creative, they would likely not find themselves in such a desperate position in the first place.
In the internal sense, some firms stir up contention within their own ranks in order to encourage people to be creative. This is highly destructive to the organizational culture, and results in ideas that are stilted to the interests of their originators, and often to the detriment of the organization as a whole.
Creativity need not be contentious, and achieves the best results when it is collaborative: people of various skills, representing various departments, working together to achieve a common goal can be creative.
It's also noted that a creative culture inspires creativity. In the arts, we find that writers, musicians, and painters feed off one another's creativity. In business, we find that innovative companies tend to be clustered in certain geographic locations - and this is less often companies with the same market that are competing to outdo one another, and more often with companies that have business relationships (supplier-customer or partnership).
Diversity does seem to foster creativity - as people who think exactly the same things more often reinforce one another than inspire one another - but this does not mean diversity must be contentious.
Creativity is Heroic
There was a sense that businesses were built by the heroic vision of a single individual - but are then maintained by lesser mortals who simply manage the mundane tasks necessary to making that vision a reality. In effect, once a business becomes "established" it has no further need of creativity, unless it needs to significantly reinvent itself or launch a new product line.
Sadly, this does seem to be the case that many businesses focus on the mundane and cease being creative, and the result is many years of slow decline until the firm has reached a crisis and needs to be completely overhauled. Even at this, there are heroes such as Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch, and Richard Branson who ride in and save the day when companies are teetering on the brink of disaster.
Less attention is paid to firms that are in a constant state of innovation, and less glamour accrues to the managers, often well below the C-suite, who keep their firms healthy, such that they do not need a life-saving procedure by a superstar surgeon - but they do exist, working under the radar to stave off crises.
All things considered, is it not better to treat creativity as a daily vitamin supplement than a life-saving procedure? There would seem to be no logical argument to the contrary - yet neither are firms inspired by less-than-heroic acts of creativity.
Innovation Doesn't Require Creativity
Innovation and creativity are indeed different things which can coincide, but do not necessarily. "Innovation" is focused on the new, simply doing things differently than they were done before, with little consideration as to the reason or benefits. A company that adopts a practice that is common to several competitors is doing something innovative - the practice is new to the firm, though not created by the firm.
It's somewhat depressing that corporate management lacks vision or inspiration, and executives often behave like teenagers who seek to imitate what others are doing, simply because they admire or envy the popularity of the firms, and don't pause to consider whether there is any connection between the thing they see (and see in a superficial way) and the results that the object of their envy is achieving. Entire industries follow fads and jump on bandwagons with very little consideration.
A key difference between innovation and creativity is that creativity understands the reason why the "new way" is preferable - it is not merely fancy or fashion, but can be connected to real results in more direct and logical manner than the monkey-see-monkey-do approach to innovation.
Creativity is harder, and requires a great deal more intelligence and effort, which is why many firms settle for innovation. Unfortunately, innovation is less likely to achieve positive results than creativity: if anything good comes of innovation, it is likely by coincidence.