Reimagining creativity for the future
Kate Spencer, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Sally McNamara, Inder Singh, Helen Babb Delia, Daniel Bluzer-Fry and Courtney Guilliatt about creativity as a future skillset.
Creativity is consistently ranked as one of the most critical skills for the future.
In the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs Report 2020, creativity, originality and initiative was listed as the fifth most important skillset. And in LinkedIn’s global surveys of L&D professionals, creativity took the top spot on the list of in-demand soft skills.
In Australia, too, there is a consistent and growing demand for creativity as a skill. In 2016 the Foundation for Young Australians revealed that the demand for the proportion of jobs requiring creativity increased by 65% in the three years to 2015, second only to critical thinking.
It seems there is a consensus that in a future where human skills exist alongside technical skills, creativity is not only key to navigating a highly volatile and increasingly complex business environment, but it is also an important foundation for innovation and will help us resiliently navigate a future where automation is accelerating. As McKinsey say, “work that requires a high degree of imagination, creative analysis, and strategic thinking is harder to automate.”
However, despite decades of research from psychological, neuroscientific and even organisational change perspectives, the nature of creativity as a skill remains elusive. Where it comes from, who has it, how it manifests itself and does everyone have it (or could get it) are all questions debated by academic researchers, business gurus and by creative practitioners.
Whether you subscribe to Steve Jobs’ definition, “Creativity is just connecting things” or T. S. Eliot’s “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”, creativity is hard to pin down.
Recruiting for creativity, nurturing it and harnessing it at scale is proving difficult. A 2017 PwC survey found CEOs said that innovation was the top priority for their businesses but that 77% of those businesses struggled to find employees with creativity and innovation skills.
Even those people that are in more typically ‘creative’ roles may feel that they are unable to utilise their creativity at work: Adobe’s 2016 State of Create Report, which surveyed both ‘creators’ and ‘non-creators’ showed that only 31% of people felt they were living up to their creative potential.
And the pipeline for creative talent in young people appears to be in trouble too. Research by Future Anything, working with 10,000+ young people in Australia, found that creative confidence is at an all-time low, with only around 60% of students stating they feel confident in this skill, compared to 70% + in other future capabilities such as critical thinking and communication.
It’s a critical time for creativity.
If we look at the future of work— defined as how, where, when and why we will work — where does creativity fit in? Is it something that exists in every workforce, in everyone, and all we need to do is scratch at the surface and reveal it? Or can we reskill or upskill for creativity? Who can we upskill and reskill? What would the outcome be? And it is worth it?
As part of our work at FORWARD, RMIT’s Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation, we are unpacking creativity to understand the creative skills ecosystem that can empower creative talent to thrive. It’s a big challenge — and one not to be taken lightly as it can potentially have far-ranging consequences. Here are some of our observations so far.
We’re not right. We’re not wrong. We’re just getting started thinking about it.
Rebranding ‘creativity’
Part of defining what creativity as a skill means for the future might be developing a more consistent language around what creativity is.
According to one interpretation, creativity is synonymous with inventiveness, imagination and innovation. This definition spans sectors, industries, disciplines and jobs.
Yet in popular culture, creativity has become synonymous with the type of work and roles associated with the so-called ‘creative industries’.
In the 1990s, terms like ‘creative industries’ and the ‘creative economy’ emerged and replaced what had previously been referred to as the ‘cultural industries’. These new terms referred to a broad range of industries and businesses spanning the arts and cultural sectors including architecture, design, publishing, screen media, music, advertising and marketing, amongst others.
‘Creative’ took on another dimension when Richard Florida released The Rise of the Creative Class.
Florida argued that creativity, or rather attracting creatives and creative firms (defined as roles and businesses associated with the creative industries), was key to the economic development and the future prosperity of cities. Metrics like the Creative Capital Index followed, and more and more, the term ‘creative’ then became embedded in policies and public discourse that referenced the arts and broader creative industries and was linked to city-making and shaping. Government agencies, too, renamed and rebranded and incorporated the creative industries into arts and cultural portfolios. And so ‘creativity’ took hold.
Creativity, as expressed in the creative industries, is without doubt of enormous value to society and the economy — and I am not suggesting otherwise, especially as I have personally spent my entire career working in the creative industries.
There are many insights we can draw from the creative industries that highlight the diversity of ‘creative practise’ and provide clues to how we might identify and nurture creative skills in other industries.
However, the dominance of the term creative in popular discourse, and with it, creativity, has helped to create a divide between ‘the creatives’ and the ‘non-creatives’, between ‘creative work’ and ‘non-creative work’ and in doing so concealed the broad skilful nature of creativity.
As Nathalie Nixon observed in her recent book The Creativity Leap:
“Creativity has been ghettoized and siloed in the arts. This is not fair to artists, and it isn’t beneficial to our society at large.”
The dominant narrative about creativity and the use of creative industries as a proxy for creativity also underlies discussions around the role of creativity in business and innovation.
In 2017 McKinsey published Creativity’s bottom line: How winning companies turn creativity into business value and growth. It outlined the results of their Award Creativity Score (ACS), which looked at the link between creativity and business performance. They said:
“We found that the most creative companies, based on their ACS, did better than peer firms on two key business metrics: financial performance and McKinsey’s Innovation Score.”
In 2014, Adobe commissioned Forrester to investigate how creativity influences business outcomes and if those companies that cultivate creativity get a “creative dividend.” The report, ‘The Creative Dividend: How Creativity Impacts Business Results’, said companies that:
“…embrace creativity outperform peers and competitors on key business performance indicators, including revenue growth, market share, and talent acquisition”.
At first glance, these studies appear to support the case for nurturing creativity. But there are problems with both of them.
The Award Creativity Score (ACS), the index created by McKinsey to measure the creativity of companies, was based on the prestigious Cannes Lions awards given annually for advertising and marketing excellence; and the respondents in the Adobe study were “creative leaders and creative software decision-makers” with a dominance of people in more traditionally described ‘creative’ departments such as creative/media, advertising and marketing and communications and PR.
Studies like these undermine the role and perceptions of creativity by focusing on narrow definitions. It’s more than just semantics. The dominant narrative undermines our connection to our own creative abilities. Critics of educational systems, such as the late Sir Ken Robinson, argue that our education systems squash creativity resulting in our ability to see ourselves as creative. As Mykel Dixon says in The Everyday Creative:
“We don’t have a creativity crisis, we have an identity crisis.”
So perhaps we need a new narrative to describe creativity. A narrative that moves away from defining creativity by industry, department, role or output. One that can be applied across all industries, across all roles, regardless of who you are and what you do.
A narrative that sees creativity as a skill.
The future creative skillset
One of the problems when talking about creativity as a skill is that while everyone agrees there is a growing demand for it, there is almost no consensus on exactly what it is. It certainly doesn't fit neatly into standard skills taxonomies.
For example, in the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Skills Taxonomy, creativity is bundled with ‘innovation’ and defined as “thinking of novel ideas, improvements and solutions by combining ideas or information and making connections between different fields and perspectives”. This is then further broken down into different types of problem-solving capabilities: creative thinking, analytical thinking, critical thinking and systems thinking.
Or take a look at McKinsey’s 56 foundational skills, or Deltas, that are “a mix of skills and attitudes” where “creativity and imagination” are listed as a component of “mental flexibility”, within the cognitive category.
The 2022 Australian Skills Classification doesn't seem to include creativity at all, although one might assume it sits in the ‘initiative and innovation core competencies’ which are about “Taking on responsibilities and challenges, being able to start up and carry out projects and generating options to cope with changes) or problem-solving (Identifying complex problems and reviewing related information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions).
And, as we pointed out in a previous story The Gap, creativity, like imagination:
“…doesn’t fit neatly into the rational/emotional distinction we are used to. Just like ‘hard’ job-related skills are ‘logical’ and ‘soft’ human or durable skills are ‘emotional’, so we have the distinction between STEM and the arts, which have been treated so far as separate. It’s more likely that imagination is a different category of thing — it’s partly rational, partly irrational; cognitive but embodied; both action and reflection-oriented; partly intangible but situational…”
Just as for imagination, maybe we need to expand our lens on creativity and bring into focus the complementary skills we need for creativity to thrive, and reframe our thinking about what we want creativity to look like in the future, not the past and focus on the future creative skillset.
Let’s start by looking at creativity as the ability to come up with original and novel ideas, often referred to as creative (or divergent) thinking.
In this HBR piece, Theodore Levitt calls creativity “a uniquely barren form of individual behaviour” because people routinely
“…confuse the getting of ideas with their implementation — that is, confuse creativity in the abstract with practical innovation; not understand the operating executive’s day-to-day problems; and underestimate the intricate complexity of business organizations […] advocates have generally failed to distinguish between the relatively easy process of being creative in the abstract and the infinitely more difficult process of being innovationist in the concrete.”
So perhaps it’s not just novel ideas but doing something with them that is part of the future creative skillset.
Nesta’s Creativity and the Future of Skills report also provides some insight into the relationship between creative and complementary skills. They say:
“..our analysis suggests that strong project management and organisational skills, when combined with creativity, will be a particularly potent mix in the future.”
Add to the mix Stephen T Asma’s argument about imagination, perhaps we also need to focus on process, not just output. Creativity and imagination exist as much in facilitation, co-design, curation and production as they do in an artefact.
So now we have not just coming up with and implementing novel ideas, but doing so in an organised, methodical yet imaginative and creative way.
By expanding our thinking about creativity in this way, we are starting to map out the future creative skillset. Here are some of the sub-skills and attributes we are seeing emerge:
- ability to switch between divergent and convergent thinking
- playfulness, exploration and experimentation
- curiosity and learning agility
- collaborators who can work with people not like themselves
- an Agile approach to project management
- facilitation and negotiation skills
- intrinsic motivation and a growth mindset
- a cross- and interdisciplinary mindset
- entrepreneurship
- being comfortable with ambiguity
- resilience, grit and courage
As we dig deeper into what the future creative skillset might look like we should also look at how this mix overlaps, intersects and changes along with technical skills and industry knowledge and depending on the industry context.
Like the future of work, the future creative skillset needs to be dynamic and adaptable.
The future creative
Given this broader definition of creativity and an emerging future creative skillset, who is a ‘future creative’? Who are these people, what do they do, how do they do it, what do would they need to know to do it, and how would they learn it?
Our view is that in many industries, in many jobs and in many workplaces, future creatives already exist: we just to identify them differently and create the conditions for them to thrive.
By rebranding creativity with a more inclusive narrative, there is an opportunity to uncover hidden or under-utilised talent within organisations — and empower workforces to connect with their creativity.
Looking at the way we define and describe roles across sectors, and seeing the combination of skills that make up the future creative skillset could also reveal a new cohort of future creatives.
One example we have identified to explore is the practice of ‘creative producing’, which draws on many of the attributes and skills of the future creative skillset to facilitate a process, and sometimes also an ‘output’, in a ‘creative’ way. The title ‘creative producer’ and ‘curator’ has predominantly been used in the creative industries, but as a core skillset it is used to facilitate a creative process across other industries — even if it is called something else. By identifying these ‘creative practitioners’ and ‘curators of the future’ and unpacking how and what they do, we could unite a new community of practice around the future creative skillset.
A broader definition of the future creative skillset and rebranding creativity, could also lead to greater transferability of talent between industries, and opportunities for otherwise ‘overlooked’ workers to be considered for roles where recruitment is often focused on technical skills and industry knowledge.
The pandemic has highlighted many examples where people and entire workforces have pivoted and utilised their skills in new contexts. Had it not been for the unprecedented circumstances, their skills wouldn't have been recognised and seen.
One interesting example is People Powered UK, which was set up at the start of the pandemic by two lighting designers, Katharine Williams and Jono Kenyon. Drawing on the skills and ingenuity honed in building festival infrastructure and producing live shows, out-of-work freelancers from the entertainment industry worked with the UK’s NHS to set up emergency structures and spaces and source equipment from outside the NHS’s usual supply chains.
There are many things we can learn from pandemic pivots in terms of skills transferability, and the language needed to manage the transition of boundary-spanning skills such as the future creative skillset.
Let’s go back to the conditions needed to enable future creatives to thrive, and what supports the future creative skillset to be learnt and nurtured.
Starting first with the skill of creative thinking, as the foundation of the future creative skillset, many argue that our environments hinder creativity.
As George Land and Beth Jarman argued in their groundbreaking research measuring the changes in our creativity over time, by the time most of us are adults, our capacity for ‘creative genius’ is undermined.
Using a creativity test Land devised in 1968 to help NASA select the most innovative engineers and scientists, they tested the creativity of 1,600 children over a 15-year period. The study found that 98% of 5 year olds demonstrated the creativity of a creative genius. By age 10, the figure dropped to 30%, and then to 12% by age 15. The same test was given to over 280,000 adults, where only 2% demonstrated that same level of creativity. Their conclusion? “Non-creative behavior is learned”.
Decades of research since have continued to investigate the role that our environment plays in supporting, or undermining, creativity to thrive at work. Back in 1998, in her Harvard Business Review article ‘How to kill creativity’ Teresa M. Amabile wrote:
“creativity is undermined unintentionally every day in work environments that were established — for entirely good reasons — to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity, and control.”
Today, neuroscientists such as Daniel Levitin argue that the busyness of work and life, and in particular information overload, undermine our ability to think creatively. As Stanford’s Emma Seppälä says:
The idea is to balance linear thinking — which requires intense focus — with creative thinking, which is borne out of idleness. Switching between the two modes seems to be the optimal way to do good, inventive work.
So perhaps one of the keys to support future creatives to thrive is about rethinking the way we design roles and workplaces in the future, as much as it is about upskilling and reskilling.
With an expanded view of who future creatives are, where we might find them (anywhere), and some clues around the type of conditions they need to foster creativity, what else can we do to nurture and teach the future creative skillset?
Perhaps one of the benefits of seeing creativity for the future as a set of skills, rather than a standalone ‘magic skill’ we need to unleash, is that we can tailor learning approaches and environments to focus on the system of skills that are needed to enable future creativity.
As Sally McNamara touched on in her recent story about applying a more holistic approach to learning:
“Taking a systems worldview allows us to appreciate the interconnectedness of all things including how incentives must be aligned to desired outcomes.
In 2016, in the ‘Skills and capabilities for Australian enterprise innovation’ report by ACOLA (the Australian Council of Learned Academies) argued that:
“We need to move from dominant focus on technical skills, and look at “bundles” of skills to support innovation, at individual, team/organisation and network level (networks, supply and value chains). Highly innovative organisations develop employees with broad knowledge bases and strong integrative skills (beyond a single discipline). The bundles of required skills vary across the innovation cycle and include technical skills (science, technology, engineering, mathematical, digital) and non-technical business skills (business, management, financial, marketing) as well as creative, design, interpersonal and entrepreneurial skills. Highly innovative organisations use sophisticated recruitment and retention practices, internal training and development, incentive systems, strong cultures and engagement. They typically take a longterm approach to investing in and building skills bundles that support their innovation strategy.
So, where in the system might be the best place to start to kick start an ecosystem of creativity for the future? What are the key skills and conditions that underpin the future creative skillset, and are they enablers to foreground other skills?
New thinking around creativity rebranded, the future creative skillset, and the future creative is, in our view, long overdue.
But these are all open questions. And we know that we are not alone in asking them. Many organisations — from governments, through creative and civic institutions to community organisations of all kinds — are working through questions just like these and thinking about how to foster creativity in their work.
One of our goals is to ignite discussion, open up new perspectives and gather in and combine or create tensions between different viewpoints.
We’d like to invite you to the discussion.
We want to hear your views and encourage you to join us in events, research and practical interventions to transform workforces by reimagining creativity for the future.
To continue the discussion, contact kate.spencer@rmit.edu.au
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
