Creativity is the driving force behind innovation, problem-solving, and setting yourself apart in a competitive world. But how can you go beyond the obvious and unlock ideas that truly resonate?
In this blog post, which is based on a webinar hosted January 2025, you'll discover the tools and insights to elevate your creative thinking and take your organization to new creative heights. With practical examples and inspiring guidance, you'll learn how to create an environment where groundbreaking ideas thrive. If you're looking to empower your team and retain valuable talent, this text will provide you with five actionable keys to transform how you approach creativity. "85% of executives agree that creativity is critical for driving business success, yet only 30% believe their organization is truly creative. Why is there such a gap?" Source: Adobe Creativity Study
How do you unlock creativity in your organization? Let me give you the five keys to fostering creativity that lead to high-quality ideas and groundbreaking solutions. But first, let’s take a moment to understand what creativity truly means…”
It can be described in many ways. Often, it’s about seeing things from multiple perspectives, identifying patterns and synergies, and creating something new out of that.
It is often artistic expressions that communicate and speak to our emotions that are considered being creative. But it doesn’t have to be.
It’s about innovating, creating something unique, or solving problems—not just solving them efficiently, but doing so in unconventional and innovative ways. That is creativity.
WHY?
Why do we need to be creative? Why do organisations want to be creative and talk about themselves as creative?
Well it's about managing competition which is of a big business interest. To come up with ways of delivering value and to communicate in a way that differentiates and sets you apart from your competitors. To be able to do that you need to foster creative thinking.
Companies also often want to be seen as creative to attract talent. But you can’t call your self creative just because you have a community table or table tennis at the office.
You can hire creative people, but you need to deliver the right conditions for them to deliver what you ask of them. This talk is about guiding you to create those conditions and processes to make sure you can get the most out of your investment of time and talent.
How do you achieve creative excellence? What does an organization need to have in place to call itself creative? I am going to guide you through five parameters you need to succeed.
Insights for focus
Time to explore
Psychological safety
Creative processes
Fruitful Collaboration
1. Insights for focus
Art is creative ideas sprung out of an individual, and their perception of life and areas of engagement. This can be very creative, but is this relevant for someone else? For a specific target audience? When running a business or consulting for clients with a specific user in mind you need to frame the boundaries for the ideas so that you will create meaning and relevant solutions.
To create something, you need to start somewhere. If you aim to innovate, you need a clear starting point and frames to challenge. To view things from new and varied perspectives, you must understand what users expect and what competitors are doing.
What is the problem? What question do you want to address? Who is the audience? The more clearly defined, the easier it is to get started. A solid understanding and well-defined perspectives provide a foundation to focus and come up with ideas that challenge the norm and are highly creative.
Putting the effort into finding new insights is unfortunately often something that gets down prioritized, to cut out of the process for budget reasons. This will not be beneficial for resonating with your target audience, stand out against competition and creative innovative solutions. Because if you don’t put in the time for the strategic foundation you are not sure you are creating your ideas based on the right things.
If you still don’t have the possibility to do a solid insight phase before the creation starts…make sure to create some boundaries based on hypotheses that you and the team agree on, or the client accepts. Because you need to have a stepping stone for the ideas and know what problem they should solve.
2. Time to Explore
If your organization aspires to be progressive, it must allocate time to test new approaches and techniques. If projects are planned solely based on past timelines, there’s no room to try untested methods, fail, and learn from mistakes. You need to plan for exploration and allow time to test different paths.
Creative professionals need this time to develop their skills and satisfy their creative curiosity. You need to have this in place to attract the best talent. Without the opportunity to explore, an organization risks being a production house rather than a creative player.
Time is also necessary for gathering inspiration, reflecting, and testing ideas on others. And you want to be able to “sleep in it”.
However, having time doesn’t mean passively waiting for ideas to strike. Creative processes like Design Thinking provide structured steps to navigate the innovation journey with control. It’s about focusing on the right things at the right stages—remaining open-minded in the beginning, then evaluating, testing, and refining based on established strategies.
Project management and creative direction play vital roles here.
3. Psychological Safety
Psychological safety can be defined as "an employee's perception of being able to show and be their true self without fear of negative consequences for their self-image, status, or career ("Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work", William A. Kahn's 1990).
You need to create an environment where employees feel free to think openly. They should feel safe sharing even the most obvious ideas, when you're in an ideation session and expressing their thoughts without fear of sounding foolish. Quirky, irrational ideas often serve as a spark for brilliant ones. So you want to welcome that and create that feeling of safety.
To innovate, people need the space to play with ideas, conduct tests, and share failures as learning opportunities for others. Many organizations struggle here, as employees may hesitate to admit mistakes or ideas that didn’t work out. Instead of prioritizing speed, organizations should foster innovation and encourage initiative. So, Openess, attentiveness, and processes that give everyone a voice create this sense of safety.
You can practice supporting colleagues' ideas and opinions with phrases like: "Thank you for sharing." "That’s a great point—I hadn’t thought of it that way. Let me add to that..."
You can for example set a rule in meetings to always say “yes, and…”, and forbid the words “no, but…”. This helps you get flow and come up with more idéas, than if you would find problems with ideas before you have all on the table. When prioritizing based on feasibility, strategy etc the problematic or difficult idéas will be put aside anyway. This will create an atmosphere and foster a culture of everyone feeling comfortable to share ideas and brainstorm freely.
When you foster an organizations like that your team dare to air the most twisted ideas like this one for Burger King. Those ideas might be the once that give you the most attention.
What we are seeing here is the Moldy Whopper, to demonstrate that Burger kings burger don’t contain any artificial preservatives. It gained a lot of attention when it was released.
4. Creative Processes
The word Process may sound dull and uncreative, but there are processes designed to foster creativity.
Processes allow us to enter the right mental state and focus on one thing at a time. We have talked about the insight phase. Dive into the strategic material at hand. Understand and get to know who you are targeting. That´s the steppingstone. Get inspiration from related fields or services used by the audience to benchmark.
When entering the creative phase. Make sure you go in with an open mindset, here is where psychological safety is of big impotence and help up tremendously. Plan your brainstorming sessions. Each ideation session is like a process in itself. You should have a plan for the outcome of the meeting, and lead your participants through different focus stages.
(In the recording of this webinar there are some examples of this process. You will find the link at the bottom of this blog.)
When you have gone through the open creative process the next step you need to have is the review, feedback and refinement. If you follow the process the ideas should be connected and based on insights of the target audience and the brand strategy. But you need to incorporate a phase to make sure this is not lost in the process.
Some people feel anxious in the beginning of the process, not feeling certain that they will end up with a creative or innovative solution. But if they learn to trust the process, they will feel more calm and have the ability to use their creative minds.
Successful creative processes often surprises you looking back at the end result.
Proper planning and good leadership through the process build a feeling of trust and enables exploration, failures and lead to creative breakthroughs.
Have you ever been invited to a room for an ideation session to brainstorm without any structure? You enter wondering if you will come up with any good ideas. You might feel a bit stressed and anxious about it.
But it you enter a session when a facilitator takes you through the different steps of what drives the audience, what makes them feel a certain way, the way we strategically want them to feel. How do we do that and at the same time deliver on our brand attributes? Having a well planned ideation session will ensure you to come up with ideas from different perspectives that are still connected to the strategy. And the participants can relax and trust the process.
To practice this, there are good facilitating tips and tools to search for on the internet or you can take help from an experienced facilitator. Because structured work sessions are more effective than entering meetings without a clear agenda, that's for sure.
5. Fruitful Collaboration
Perspectives arise from diverse experiences. The more varied the backgrounds of the individuals involved, the better the foundation for innovation. Collaboration and feedback generate new insights and perspectives. Discussing ideas with others and hearing their input helps develop and refine creative concepts. By building on each other's ideas—embracing the “yes, and...” approach—you create stronger outcomes.
We have talked about this already. But there is one important thing that I want to address: Most organizations recognize the importance of collaboration but a common pitfall is that only the loudest voices dominate discussions.
Research shows that groups perform worse when one person monopolizes speaking time. People that are extroverts or senior individuals feel comfortable to share their thoughts, and often take the lead. This is not wrong or anything to criticise. We need these people, but we need to be aware of this and ensure that speaking opportunities are distributed evenly among all contributions. Again, facilitators and structured meeting processes can help balance input and amplify all voices in the room.
Some individuals may naturally generate more ideas than others. But these ideas, from the creative ones, can be refined, expanded, and prioritized with input from the group.
If these idea generators are smart enough, they don't dominate or try to shine with their ideas; instead, they remain open and interested about what others in the room have to contribute. In other words, humble and curious creative leadership is essential for being a truly creative organization.
My primary point of Fruitful collaboration is that you need to ensure multiple perspectives and that everyone in the team gets their thoughts heard.
And I want to give you a tip on how to gain even more perspectives, extending the team you have allocated for the task. Generative AI is now an extra voice. Prompt the question, the problem you are trying to solve, and see what AI responds. Put those ideas into the open part of the process.
You should start off by letting all humans ideate and come up with their initial ideas. But then present the input from Chat GPT/Co Pilot and try to build from it or let it spark your ideas on those inputs.
To make sure AI is relevant to your strategy I want to refer back to the importance of the insight phase. If you have defined drivers of importance for your audience, and formulated the questions you are searching for the answers to, feed this information to the generative AI-tool to get answers that will be useful.
Same as for us humans really.
Take a moment to reflect:
Does your organization or team have these elements in place? How will you transform your organization into a hub of innovation and creativity?
If you have questions or need support, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to help you plan workshops or design processes that elevate creativity in your organization.
