Creativity is a superpower for business success

Organisations seeking growth in 2023 must embrace creative thinking and diversity in every corner of the business, or risk lagging behind.

Mark Green is chairman of the Advertising Council Australia

“The shift to a more innovation-driven economy has been abrupt. Today, execution capabilities are widely shared and the life cycles of new offerings are short.”

An apt description of the world we face in 2023.

Yet this quote is not about 2023. It’s about the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 when Harvard Business Review invited corporate leaders, academics, and researchers to discuss creativity. Today we face a social and business landscape with even more abrupt shifts; changing customer needs, behaviours and buying patterns; fractured supply chains; continuous technological reinvention; new attitudes to work; value-driven employees re-evaluating employers; softening economies worldwide; central banks aggressively curbing demand in the face of inflation; and ever-weakening levels of trust and unity in societies worldwide.

More than ever, businesses must find and retain sustainable customer advantage. Yet growth will be ever more difficult to attain.

How can you improve your organisation’s growth and success?

What will differentiate your company, your products or services, and your brand to fuel your growth when your competitors have access to the same resources, when technology empowers every firm equally, when capital is freely available, and when business processes are standardised?

By inspiring, instigating and influencing all aspects of your organisation with a sustainable, free, readily available, and deeply human capability. Creativity.

Many leaders will immediately react to this with the limiting belief that “creativity is owned by our marketing team” or “that’s for our innovation group or product development”.

Cordoning off creativity with a velvet rope misses the invaluable, diverse perspectives and ideas brewing under the surface across your functional teams. Creativity is a growth superpower and it is found in every corner of business – throughout customer service and operations, your legal team and even in your finance group.

To remove such blinkered thinking, this can be more helpfully framed as “thinking creatively”.

Thinking creatively ensures organisations are open to trying new things, exploring new angles.

Thinking creatively enables organisations to embrace positive change, be more adaptable, and be better problem-solvers.

Thinking creatively has the potential to unleash global growth by making organisations more effective and more innovative.

And thinking creatively pays off. A Forrester report found companies that identified as creative leaders grew 2.6 times faster than creative laggards.

The growth superpower of thinking creatively was also highlighted in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report predicting creativity, innovation and ideation will be key skills for the workforce of the future. The business I lead in Australia is helmed by fellow Aussie David Droga, who also champions the power of creativity as a driver of growth globally.

Creativity can mean many things, such as embracing new technology and automation tools, delighting customers with new experiences, or fostering an internal culture that makes the organisation resilient and agile.

By thinking creatively Nike improved the customer sales experience in-store. It also enhanced its mobile app. Inside any Nike store, instead of waiting to be served by an assistant customers can “skip the line” and use the Nike App to make self-serve, in-store purchases. Customers can scan bar codes to see product availability and receive access to exclusive perks such as location-specific rewards or discounts. All to simply “pay in app, drop the hanger, grab a bag and go”.

By thinking creatively mRNA pharmaceuticals were able to develop an entire supply chain for an unimagined product. Scaling an entire industry that went from having produced only enough mRNA to dose 2000 patients prior to Covid-19 to enough mRNA for hundreds of millions today.

By thinking creatively AB InBev has upcycled supply chain waste into a sustainable new ingredient, barley protein. A remnant of the beer-brewing process previously discarded during beer making AB Inbev launched EverGrain to capture barley protein to create novel, nutrient-rich products used in milks, flour, and meat alternatives. This in turn created new growth opportunities as an ingredient supplier to companies including Birds Eye.

And by thinking creatively, Netflix grew from a video postal delivery start-up to the $160bn market leader, pioneering an entirely new way households are entertained.

So, what do they do differently? Our brains are wired to make new connections from disparate data. If our data feed isn’t diverse, we tend to get more of the same. Therein lies the case for greater diversity and inclusion to strengthen thinking creatively.

As Steve Jobs famously observed, creative thinking is “just connecting things”.

Creativity is a resource that is readily available and accessible to leaders and their teams. However to put creativity to work, organisations need to bring different perspectives to the decision-making table.

How can your organisation be a creative leader and not a laggard?

Develop structures and processes that encourage co-operative, cross-functional working that brings divergent parts of the organisation together.

Embrace curiosity and healthy tension. Foster a culture that encourages diverse thinking, gives permission to try things out, and considers failures invaluable learning opportunities for future success and growth.

Your employees will feel more invested when they’re encouraged to think, problem-solve, and share ideas. This in turn helps them stay, grow and develop into your future leaders or top performers. And use a clear purpose and metrics every team member can contribute to and improve on.

As we face ever more abrupt shifts in 2023 if your organisation is desperately seeking growth, the answer is to think creatively.

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Mark Green is chairman of the Advertising Council Australia.