Take advantage: Making the most of a creative mindset
1. Nurturing creativity
1.1. Creativity vs. organisation Creativity needs to be nurtured. The tension between the classical bureaucratic organisation and creativity is well-known. Modern, learning organisations are safe places where ideas are valued and constructively challenged. Mobilising resources around innovative practices is a key component, as are high domain-specific skills, diverse employee base, and creating a ‘community of practice’ (like minded professionals, that engage in exploration and discovery).
1.2. Finance professionals as creativity connectors
In some respects, left unchecked and without appropriate forms of human intervention, this creativity-based system may well make some of the problems worse.17
Freedom and flexibility facilitate creativity, but structures are needed to link those resources and teams. These structures ensure the transfer of knowledge and that solutions are scaled up.18 In addition, making connections across ‘seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas’ is a powerful driver of innovation.19 Here, the role of finance professionals is critical. By seeking structure, we support processes. By interacting with and coordinating all parts of the organisation, we break ‘silo thinking’ and encourage ‘big picture thinking’. Therefore, we are well positioned to contribute to the creative organisation, which thrives on the symbiosis of processes and practices.
1.3. Creativity and leadership
To ensure a constant stream of high-quality ideas, managers need to help employees recognize that creativity is an acquired skill and provide opportunities for learning from creative experiences.20
As humans, we have trouble abandoning our deeply held views. The antidote to this is immersing oneself in new roles, environments, and experiences. Leaders need to enable such exchanges. Visionary leaders unite people by setting powerful strategies and identities. The leadership challenge here is to provide conditions that foster creativity and, at the same time, impose organisational and cultural mechanisms that incentivise creative people to leave their intellectual comfort zones, engage in iterations and learn by failing fast.21
1.4. Motivating creative people
The place where I’d want to work would support my creative endeavours and the kind of creative things I did on the side and would recognize the fact that I was continually building my skills with my own stuff, it would also benefit the company.22
Creative people value flexibility, challenge, and responsibility. Being intrinsically motivated, they aspire for peer respect, intellectual diversity, and making a difference. Therefore, it is important for them to work on projects that are progressing and not delayed by what may be seen as unnecessary procedures. Thriving on ambiguity, they prefer to create their roles in organisations, as well as their learning experiences.23 This poses a challenge to the conventional processes of recruitment, appraisal, reward, and risk management. Once again, finance professionals are in a position to mediate — communicating the rationale behind procedures and flexing them where possible.
2. Developing your creativity
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Everyone can be creative, but we differ when it comes to initiative, focus, targeting, and implementing creativity. It's important that we can all learn and improve. When it comes to learning, creativity is connected to a number of competencies — digital, entrepreneurship, personal, social, and learning to learn, as well as cultural awareness and expression. These can all be practiced and continuously enhanced.24
A creativity improvement model neuroscientists offer is based on three practices — bending, breaking, and blending.25
Bending is a variation on a theme. It is similar to what musicians do when they improvise or remake and revive a song in a different style than its original. Breaking is disintegrating something to its components and then assembling something new from its fragments. Blending is when you marry two or more ideas together. We can apply all these in all spheres of our lives.
Creativity is about developing, testing, and refining ideas, then transforming them into solutions that create value for others. Below are some of the competencies linked with creativity.
Creativity is about value creation with others and for others. Turn to the next page for some tips.
Creativity requires agency, courage and bold action. Creative people care deeply about what they do. Here are some tips on how you can reflect on what is meaningful to you and take action.28
Creative people are also visionary. Here are some tips on how to work with novelty — envision, claim and organise the new.29
3. Creativity in the digital age
The digital reality develops our creative potential, by offering a vivid medium, where the cognitive and social processes of creativity can be unleashed. The opportunity for co-creation lies in the accessibility and ease of connecting, reflecting, generating and sharing ideas, combining thoughts, shifting perspectives and visualising imaginative solutions. Such communities of practice support self-discovery, mentorship and encouragement, but results are dependent on digital, collaborative and communication skills required to harness the power of technologies and foster creativity. The added challenge is the information overload and related mental blockages that can sabotage integration and combination of divergent ideas. The way search engines standardise and display information may hinder the variety and divergency of ideas. In addition, the ease with which we access information may inhibit creativity. It often encourages us to just scan information and seek ‘quick fixes’ rather than think deeply and critically. What is more, we are getting less patient and less determined, giving up on perseverance and avoiding iterations and learning from failure, which are all critical ingredients of the creativity process. Yet, all these disadvantages do not undermine the power of technologies and how we can use them. They simply steer us in the direction of effective and meaningful learning and educational experiences.
