Creative Decisions: Why Leaders Need An Inventive Brain

Michael Bloomfield
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

If leaders do one thing, it’s decide things. They make judgements and direct the actions of others. Mostly, this does not, and should not, involve creativity. But some of the very biggest and most consequential decisions you take as a leader can rely on a capacity to be creative.

It’s vital to note that when I say “creative decisions” I don’t mean decisions about creativity (like making a call on whether to use new marketing content A or B). I’m talking about decisions that are creative.

How can a decision be creative?

You first need to understand what creativity is. Strictly speaking, it’s got zero to do with art. As I’ve said before , most art is not creative and most creativity happens outside of art. Let’s use an enhanced version of the scientific definition of creativity. A creative idea is one which is both new (or novel) and valuable (or useful or adaptive). There’s a third criterion, though, which is sometimes thought of as surprise, unexpectedness, counterintuitiveness or, in the case of the US patent office when judging whether something merits a patent, the non-obvious.

It becomes immediately obvious that this very technical set of criteria — new, valuable and non-obvious — can be applied to pretty much any idea generated by a human being. And it’s just as crucial to understand that “ideas” aren’t just images or concepts like designs or inventions. A joke is an idea. A tactic is an idea. So is a lie, a put-down and a tenet. And so is a decision.

Decisions you take as a leader are always meant to be valuable. Often, they need to be new — a new set of information, new people, new circumstances and a conclusion you hadn’t come to before. But sometimes the very best decisions also need to be counterintuitive, surprising — non-obvious.

Take Henry Ford. He is known as a technological and industrial innovator; that’s where his creativity seems to firmly lie. But in actual fact his creativity extended to his ability to make decisions. One in particular has been dubbed one of “The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time”. In 1914 Ford stunned the world when he announced he was doubling all his workers’ salaries overnight from $2.50 to $5. His “Five-Dollar Day” was meant to improve morale, staff retention and productivity, and he wanted those who worked on his cars to be able to actually buy one. It worked: within a year, annual labour turnover fell from 370% to 16%, use of replacement workers hired fell from 53,000 to 2,000, and productivity rose 40% to 70%. Oh, and between 1914 and 1916, Ford’s profits doubled from $30m to $60m. This was valuable in every sense of the word.

What’s crucial to understand is that his decision was viewed as virtual sacrilege by the business community. It wasn’t just valuable and new, it was thoroughly counterintuitive. No less an authority than the Wall Street Journal declared in an editorial: “To inject ten millions into a company’s factory, and to double the minimum wage, without regard to length of service, is to apply Biblical or Spiritual principles into a field where they do not belong. [Ford] in his social endeavour has committed economic blunders, if not crimes”. Crimes! Biblical and Spiritual principles! The language of heresy tells you all you need to know about how remarkably creative Ford’s administrative move was. (Just over a hundred years later in 2015, when CEO Dan Price took a wage cut and implemented a minimum wage of $70,000 for all at his company Gravity Payments, reactions were almost as astonished.)

What was seen as a cost-increasing decision by most was seen by Ford as a way of reducing costs. As he put it: “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made”.

That’s creativity. To be able to defy not just convention but also apparent logic. What Ford showed was that by challenging an assumption and deciding to move in a new, non-obvious and ultimately extremely valuable direction, he proved himself to be an extraordinarily creative thinker on more than one level. He changed not only the course of his company’s fortunes but laid the foundations for the “high wage doctrine” which led to the minimum wage act of 1938 in the US, and which transformed work in the western world forever.

As a leader, you may only need to make a few big decisions every month, or even every year. Usually, good judgement and sufficient knowledge is all that you need. But to be able to decide creatively as Ford, Price and many other great influencers have, is one of the most powerful attributes you can possess and one that can set you apart — especially in today’s world of increasing data and its interpretation through AI.

Michael Bloomfield

Written by

Founder of Creative Being app

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