How To Cultivate Your Creative Confidence As A Planner

Are you currently studying strategic planning? Just getting started in the field of advertising as a planner? Or are you an experienced Communications Planner? If your answer is “Yes” to the following questions, here are a few tips on how to discover and sustain your creative confidence in your current role.

Please be advised that all tips are in reference to the book, Creative Confidence, by David M. Kelley and Tom Kelley.

1. Design Thinking into Creative Confidence

Take a human-centered approach when coming up with ideas for innovative work.

Have conversations with users of existing products (who may be your fellow colleagues and friends), observe the user’s behavior with these products (if applicable) and collect data driven research to support these observations in behavior.

Human centered design helps to better understand the desires and needs of the consumer.

2. Look Beyond the Status Quo

Going above and beyond in your creative ideas will allow you to refrain from accepting the status quo.

Think outside of the box. Just because something has not been done, does not mean that it can not be done. Those who utilize their imagination to think about “future” are those same individuals who “believe they have the ability to improve on existing ideas and positively impact the world around them while doing it”.

3. Have Empathy Toward the Target Audience

Use empathy at the start of a creative problem solve

Keeping empathy in mind allows for new creative ideas and innovative opportunities to come about. These innovations can include, brand positioning, platform updates, user experience and ways to story tell a creative idea.

As you think empathetically towards the wants/need of the consumer, find the equal medium between the following:

Feasibility — the technical factors of a new product or technology

Economic Viability — the business factors in how the new product or technology will be produced and distributed to the public

Desirability — the human factors; deeply understanding the needs of the people past their behaviors and more into their personal motivations and beliefs.

“An empathic approach fuels our process by ensuring we never forget we’re designing for real people.”

As a result we unleash new insights and new opportunities for full on creative solutions.

4. Design-Driven Innovation For Self

• Inspire human centered innovation by using empathy. Observing the motivations behind why people do what they do introduces new ideas. Observing human behavior can assist planners in better understanding the “factors at play and trigger new insights to fuel our innovation efforts”
• Synthesize and make sense of these observations and how they play a part. Identify if their are any patterns or obvious themes in the consumer’s behavior. Once this has been done, translate these findings into actionable frameworks - where the problem will be reframed and decisions will be made on where to focus ideas on the most.

• Ideation and Experimentation can be done by generating endless ideas that have divergent options to go along with them. This can be done with a blueprint, which allows the comms planner to not become too invested in only one idea (especially when ideas and plans change) and gives the client the opportunity to see the breakdown of the comms planners idea and roll out plan.

5. Make Your Mark in the Creative Process

Every creative idea or decision is made with intention.

Be a part of the creative decisions being made; from the start. Act with intention and seek opportunities (or seize them as they arise) to make things better with design thinking and innovation.

6. Move Forward with “Urgent Optimism”

Go confidently in the direction of your creative idea(s).

Urgent optimism is “the ability/desire to act immediately on tackling an obstacle, motivated and backed up by the belief that you have a reasonable hope of success”.

As the creative/briefing process progresses, there will be moments of trial and error — and having minimal success can cause one to think defeatedly. However, you must continue to think positive, back your creative idea and keep the mind in a state of creative confidence.

7. Allow Permission to Fail

Do not be afraid to fail.

There will be moments where our creative ideas and thoughts do not work out as we would have thought. In allowing yourself permission to fail, it subconsciously lowers the expectations of others during the process and leads more towards being a learning opportunity to go about solving the problem a different way.

8. Embrace Failure

Welcome your personal failures.

In allowing yourself permission to fail, you must also be able to embrace (own up to) when failure happens. Acknowledge the mistakes you have made during the creative process and learn from them. This gives you the opportunity to apply these new findings, key learnings and solutions to future work that may be in relation.

If not, it is likely that moments like this will come again in future briefings.

9. Cultivate a Creative Spark

Creative spark is something you have to cultivate when coming up with new solutions for an idea. Take the strategic route in going from blank page to insight.

• Choose creativity by redefining problems in new ways in order to seek out solutions.
• Think Like a Traveler by staying up to date with what is going on in the agency in regards to new trends, ideas and designs. Keep your thinking fresh and constantly seek out new sources for information. Browse Adweek, read up on updates sent via e-newsletters or department/ company email updates, stay up to speed with social platform updates and etc. Share the information you acquire to your clients, this way they see you are forward thinking and have ideas on how they can possibly implement the new information to their products.
• Engage relaxed attention by allowing the mind to be relaxed in order to make new connections for insights. At times, new connects sprout from seemingly unrelated ideas.
• Ask questions starting with “Why?” in order to brush past the obvious and get down to the real heart/chunk of what the problem is that you are trying to solve. This is also very useful when brainstorming an idea.
• Reframe Challenges by reframing the question to a problem in order to get to a great solution. Starting from a different POV than the standard POV will help you get to the essence of the problem.

10. Share Strategic Knowledge Through Experience

“You don’t know what you don’t know”.

Take your personal skill and niche (outside of your role as a planner) and apply it to your position. Through thought leadership projects, share your findings and ideas with others on the team. Allow yourself to be a resource for others as they are a resource for you and together you will learn from one another through the collective experiences shared.

Source: Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, 2013

by Tom Kelley; Bestselling Author of The Art os Innovation & David Kelley; Founder, IDEO & Stanford D. School