Why Winning Strategies Need Creativity
If you're in a creative role, you know it's common to be seen as the dreamy, whimsical type, detached from business realities. Strategists on the other hand are often stereotyped as spreadsheet-obsessed and unimaginative.
Oil and water, right? Wrong. To us they’re like Bert and Ernie. Bacon and Eggs. Netflix and chilling.
Creativity is the throughline that connects the dreaming, deciding, and doing of a successful strategy.
Creativity’s importance in…
DREAMING UP STRATEGY
Tracking the competition, market changes, and what customers want is important, but it’s not everything. Using these inputs alone can lead to a narrow set of short-sighted visions for what you should do next.
Applying creativity can help you both spot and create more potential strategies to initially consider through:
FORESIGHT - Expansively making leaps from what is to what might be in the future.
CROSS-POLLINATION - Incorporating diverse data and cross-industry principles to create new connections in your sector.
REVOLUTION - Challenging conventions and norms that have become perceived rules of your industry.
Creativity’s importance in…
DECIDING ON STRATEGY
Choosing a strategic path is a high-stakes activity. So, it’s understandable that metrics like feasibility, right to win, and profit / savings are useful criteria to prioritize what strategy to move forward with.
But creativity can add more context and color through:
EMPATHY - Understanding and even inviting in multiple perspectives keeps various stakeholders’ needs and impact in the decision equation.
RESOURCEFULNESS - Limitations often inspire great outcomes. By reimagining constraints as opportunities, we keep challenging strategies viable and uncover innovative ways to achieve them.
Creativity’s importance in…
DOING THE STRATEGY
A set strategy provides the blueprint to focus everyone on the team. But making that strategy happen requires both the right kind of thinking and the right kind of doing.
A results-oriented mindset and decisive execution skills ensure progress on the strategy is made and measured. But guess what’s also critical? Yep, creativity.
Because creativity is not just about producing ideas or selecting them, it’s also the creation of them. After all, it’s right there in their shared etymology (“to make”) – creativity is to make up and creation is to make real!
Creative makers help bring the strategy to life by treating implementation as experimentation - learning and adjusting as needed along the way – and finding the right ways to rally everyone on the team around the strategy.
So, strategy and creativity make strange, but effective bedfellows, great! But how can you embody both? Like being right- or left-handed, it’s natural for one side to be more dominant.
But it doesn’t mean you can’t train yourself to be more creatively-strategically ambidextrous!
Stay tuned for our upcoming piece on how to effectively toggle between creative and strategic thinking…
References:
Harvard Business Review. “Strategy Needs Creativity.” HBR.org
Forbes India. “Why Creativity is Important for Success in Business.” Forbes India
