In-house Essays: Creativity Will Emerge

It took me awhile to figure out that most people really don’t think about Creativity the way I do.

I worked in advertising as a Creative Director and naturally everything I did was focused on being Creative.

We thought Creativity could solve any of the world’s problems. You just needed a big enough idea.

Unfortunately, that’s not what the world thinks.  

When I left advertising with the idea of helping companies become more creative, I found it was a very hard sell.

Creativity wasn’t seen as business critical, or even vaguely important, it was a fun team building exercise, or some design stuff that the marketing team dealt with.

It turns out that most industry leaders think “Creativity” is for someone else to do.

Research (by George Land) shows we are all born with imaginative problem-solving skills and life teaches us to be uncreative. We lose our skills as we grow up due to rules and regulations, judgement, fear, criticism, and even brain development.

As you get to adulthood, being labelled as “creative” implies you aren’t realistic or responsible.

You need a thick skin to be creative in public.

This means the vast majority people in organisations don’t have the confidence or space to innovate and share their thinking.

Once you’ve had a few nice ideas shot down in flames you learn not to offer them up again.

It’s such a waste.

Like every major business consultancy out there, I know that organisations that are more creative are more valuable. The short version is that they return more revenue to their investors because they adapt and innovate consistently.

Luckily, while we were taught to be uncreative, we can also learn to be creative again by doing it.

Creativity is the most generally applied of human traits: we improve our communities, tell motivating stories, express the world in mathematical formulas, fix dinner with improvised ingredients, and anything else you could think of. It’s wonderful.

Just don’t mention Creativity at work.

When I joined what3words it was still a startup, and I had the belief that creativity could add a huge amount of value to the business. Otherwise, what was I doing here?

Part of our strategy to fit into the business culture was to avoid the C-word wherever possible.

Which may be self-defeating since I’m the Chief Creative Officer.

Another thing we’ve always done is explain the what3words brand in the context of building value for the business.

We also invite everyone to help create the brand experience, and we give them the tools to do it.

To learn to be creative, we must practise.

I’ve found that by being as broad as possible with the definition of who and what is creative, and not having a creative department, more people at what3words are involved in building a great brand experience with their own skills.

Our CEO was a musician, our CMO studied Industrial Design, our COO writes quiz questions, not to mention the coders, designers, linguists, writers, editors, economists, and marketing managers who all solve interesting problems every day.

By quietly building out a Create Function (which is just like a Finance or Sales Function) by applying good processes and practices, and by inviting everyone in, we seem to have positively influenced the business culture of what3words.

It’s hard to tease out individual strands that make an organisation’s culture successful, but I think avoiding the C-word has helped us all be more open to innovating, sharing, and listening to ideas that will help us achieve our mission.

It seems, with space and encouragement, Creativity will emerge.

It’s funny that way.