The creativity multiplier
Scaling impact and creating world value
Why don’t we have more creative solutions for scaled social impact? And why don’t we have more creativity being applied to scaling existing solutions? We live in an era with a relative abundance of capital, with more venture capital than ever before, and a generation of philanthrocapitalists and mega foundations focused on social impact. We also have an abundance of technology, with exponential increases in devices, processing power, storage cost and bandwidth. Technologists and entrepreneurs have heeded the call to arms.
But to realize our potential, we need to unite capital, technology and mission-driven creativity.
Mission-driven creativity is what sparks and scales bold, transformative new solutions to the world’s big challenges. If you were to sum the total of humanity’s existing creativity, how much of it would be purpose-oriented? And how much of humanity’s potential creativity is purpose-oriented?
Larry Page’s answer to that question is quite striking:
I now have a very simple metric I use:
are you working on something that can change the world?Yes or no?
The answer for 99.99999 percent of people is ‘no.’
What would happen if we went from 0.00001% to 1%? — or 100%?
Culture has prioritized STEM-focused education, and capital has focused on technology (about 75% of total venture dollars) — but should culture put a greater emphasis on the creativity that can spark and scale social impact?
Incentive prizes like X Prize and the Gates Foundation’s Toilet Challenge seek to encourage more mission-driven creativity, yet we need a broader culture of purpose-oriented creative solutions, across all disciplines—graphic design, industrial design, user experience design, advertising, storytelling, etc. This could start in schools, and take flight in companies.
If we can unlock the creativity of the world and point it towards meaning, everyone wins, because mission-driven creativity:
- drives innovation:
have a mission that matters is the first of Google’s eight principles of innovation, and Google has found that meaning is core to effective teams; - engages employees:
a Deloitte study found 73 percent of people who work for a company with a strong sense of purpose say they are fully engaged, versus 23 percent at organizations without a strong sense of purpose; - drives better business outcomes:
engaged employees drive many dimensions of business success, from productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, and profit; - makes us happier:
living with meaning is central to concepts of living well, from Aristotle’s eudaimonia to positive psychology (see Dr. Martin Seligman, Flourish); - makes us care:
we’re wired to be more motivated by the why than the what
(see, Simon Sinek); - builds our future:
from learning to fly, to landing on the Moon, exploring Mars, inventing the web, defeating dictators, creating microfinance solutions and harnessing the power of the sun — mission-driven creativity is at the core; as Kennedy said about the original moonshot, “because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…”; - is an urgent imperative:
the challenges we face are too pressing and too great to have so much of humanity’s potential sitting latent.
In other words, mission-driven creativity leads to happier, motivated, engaged people, which leads to better business, social and environmental outcomes — which leads to happier, motivated, engaged people, and so on.
Despite this alignment of interests, under 1/3 of people feel engaged in their work and most industries, especially the creative industries, are far from mission-driven.
This is a giant opportunity cost for people and the world.
MIT Technology Review identified this gap when looking at Why we can’t solve big problems:
It’s not true that we can’t solve big problems through technology; we can. We must. But all these elements must be present: political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem, our institutions must support its solution, it must really be a technological problem…
What would happen if the best of our creative talent worked on mission-driven assignments? What if the minds behind Nike’s marketing were applied to propelling renewables? Or for that matter, what if all of the thousands of creative minds behind this years’ Superbowl commercials were able to work towards purpose-oriented objectives? And what if the world’s best user experience designers built apps for learning and healthcare rather than yet another spin on social gaming and home delivery, or what if the biggest studio films propelled global empathy rather than gun culture?
That’s the world we’d like to see. We’d like mission-driven creativity to be at the heart of every company, and every career—leading to exponentially greater impact. As a culture, if we can unite this era’s abundant capital and technology with creativity inspired by creating value for the world, we can rise to our challenges and create a virtuous cycle of prosperity. In service of that world, enso envisions a being a portal for the best creative talent in the world to work on the world’s biggest challenges in partnership with like-minded organizations. We plan to connect the fountainheads of capital and technology with top creativity, in service of impact.
Thanks to Carla Fernandez, Niklas Lilja, Brian Hardwick, Kirk Souder
enso is a creative impact agency.
We work with innovative companies and organizations to create positive impact at scale through shared missions. Learn more at enso.co.
