The Point of Creativity (in business)

What is creativity’s place in business? How we misunderstand it and what really is the point of it.

Businesses and corporate leaderships love to hype up creativity and innovation in their organizations. “Creativity atmosphere,” “innovative culture,” and “challenging problems” are recruitment buzzwords that were nice to have before, but today, where free laundry and indoor slides have lost their charm, they have become almost the most persistent keywords in job postings.

Creativity-boosting apps are raking in downloads by the millions and earning an equivalent amount through their “guided” meditation subscriptions. 10-minute mindfulness sessions that put your inner creative twin into overdrive, served by gurus straight from their sandalwood scented yoga studios in Bali.

What is the point of creativity, though? Too often is creativity packaged and sold in postmodern gift boxes without any context. Why would we want to be more creative? Why work so hard at creating the right atmosphere and support infrastructure for creativity? Why wake up and blast your face with the morning sunlight? Why get high? Or play LoFi playlists on your favourite music streaming service?

Abusing creativity to generate bottom-line dollars.

It’s simple — businesses are here to make money. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Whatever a company invests in has to have a positive ROI. It’s simple profit and loss, demand and supply, increasing the revenue margins. The unspoken drive behind any initiative backed by economic machinery is to gain a competitive advantage toward increased revenue.

Creativity, however, blossoms when there is freedom of outcome. Otherwise, we don’t want creativity; it’s calibrated experimentation, split testing, and funnel optimisation. Unfortunately, when managers ask employees to flex those creative muscles, it is too often to find a “creative solution” to a problem that requires analytical thinking, not creativity.

The conversion rate on checkout is down 2%; think outside the box, people! We need a creative way to generate an extra $3 million in EBITDA or kiss your bonuses goodbye. So let’s get creative, people!

Poor Joe and Jane, with their creative alter egos trying to find solutions to a stated problem by knocking on an utterly wrong door. What if the manager instead asked Joe and Jane to analyse the checkout page from a user experience perspective? Or asked them to see if they feel there’s a better place to surface the shipping fees? Or if the department heads sat down over the week and identified areas of improvement in different areas of their business machinery to find that elusive $3 Million? These are exciting analytical problems. Not creative ones.

We missed the entire point of creativity by using the wrong words and incorrectly understanding what is needed to solve a given set of problems.

The point of creativity

Dan Pallotta is an entrepreneur, author, and humanitarian activist who invented the multi-day charitable event industry, which inspired nearly a quarter of a million people to raise more than half a billion dollars in nine years. Dan says, “the best creativity comes from a much deeper place than the desire to win.” Dan lives in a world of driving charitable action.

Without going into the question of whether or not all businesses should have a charitable arm, Dan’s point on creativity is still as effective in the business context.

Creativity thrives when there is freedom of outcome. When the results of a creative exercise are not measured in immediate monetary upsides. In the business context, creativity blossoms when individuals are given the elbow room to freely mix their brains’ left and right-hand sides.

Where creativity is the right tool in the box

What then is the point of creativity in a business context? When is creativity the tool in the box? We must first accept that creativity is a very human construct to answer this. Math would exist without humans, and by conjuncture, would the laws of physics. Money is nothing other than a construct of value, measured in numbers, a mathematics variable.

Creativity is abstract; it is a function of human nature, not easily measurable in numbers but not impossible to either (more on that in a bit). Therefore, creativity is best put to work where expressions of humanity are the primary desired outcome.

In business, a good number of such creative wheelhouses exist in specific verticles of marketing. I call it “Creative marketing” — looking at common marketing principles and applying human appeal to them. At its most fundamental level, business is about providing value in return for fair compensation. This value is most captivatingly expressed in almost every scenario through human storytelling.

Customer success stories are a great example of creative marketing. One version is a lifeless interview usually done over email and signed off by legal teams. Another is where a business makes an effort to know the person behind the word “customer”. The creative marketer puts aside, for the moment, the desire to market a product or service and instead applies a genuine desire to know the other human and her story. What comes out is a relatable story that others can connect with, empathise with, and trust the storyteller because of it.

The creative deadlock

Today’s businesses are either absolutely oblivious to creativity or embracing it. In the former, I see telltale signs of creativity choked through without context such that the outcome isn’t creative anymore but a desperate attempt to look different at any cost. In the latter, I see careful and deliberate humanised storytelling. The outcomes are also equally easy to spot. You either have yet another ad in your face that you become increasingly blind to or an authentic message that you want to hear more of.

The creative deadlock comes when instead of wanting to drive sincere human enthusiasm, a business is machine-like and focused solely on driving clicks, impression shares and pageviews.

So the question we have to ask ourselves in business is this: Why be creative? Is it a buzzword we have forgotten the true meaning of? Are we confusing creativity with tactical outcomes from analytical thinking? Is your business in it for the short-term gratification, or are you here to create a legacy formed on top of generating human value?

Have a think and go make a difference.