3 Reasons Creativity Is No Longer A Luxury At Work
Nir Bashan for FORBES Magazine
Today our workplace is more complex than ever. It seems that everything is fighting for our time. Emails, slack, text messages, voicemails, chats and so on compete for our attention. Add to this the addition of AI which seems to be everywhere, our attention is being pulled into ever increasing areas. Our concentration ever diminishing. As a result, time has become our greatest commodity.
And that is why creativity is no longer a luxury at work.
Most people think that they don’t have time for creativity at work. Or that creativity is a luxury for people that have plenty of time to partake in it. But I argue that creativity and innovation can solve some of the most pressing problems of our time in a way that only they can solve them. Here are three amazing tools that will help you inject creativity in your day to day making it part of your long term solution mindset, uncovering that no issue at work is unsolvable with creativity.
Efficiency Alone Does Not Create Growth
For many years the ski business was stagnant. It was funded by selling lift tickets that people would buy on the day that they wanted to ski. That made the industry highly volatile and subject to large cash flow swings. So they got efficient. The lifts were engineered with the least amount of downtime as possible. The tickets were sold quickly to skiers. But no matter what the industry tried, efficiency alone couldn’t get them the growth they so desperately needed.
The industry needed something new and fresh. A creative idea. They came up with a highly discounted pass that people would buy at the beginning of the season that would last for the entire season. Not a single day lift ticket, but an entire season’s worth of skiing. This was a revolutionary idea in the ski resort business. And it caught on like wildfire. This technique transformed the industry and gave the business capital to invest in all kinds of experience driven auxiliary activities for skiers that lead to even more unprecedented growth.
One thing we can try today is to lessen the drive for efficiency which can only get us so far and instead harvest ideas for the goals we are trying to achieve. If we don’t get creative and rethink efficiency, we will seldom get the growth we are looking for.
Customers Expect More
It is no longer enough to provide a particular product or service in a satisfactory way. The world has changed from the simple transactions of yesteryear where someone buys a said product or service and the transaction is complete. Today the experience and the stories and the meaning of a transaction live far beyond a transaction. And these experiences, stories and meanings tend to be more valuable, in the long run, than the sale itself.
Chewy used to sell pet food and treats. But they realized that customers could get food for their pets or toys or medicines at a variety of places. So they got creative. They went above and beyond: they knew that customers expect more. They created a team called, “The Wow Team” that was in charge of making the relationship with customers far more than just a transaction. They added empathy to the day-to-day interactions with customers and created extraordinary experiences like sending flowers after a pet died and even sending pet portraits to customers. This built brand loyalty and a sense of more happening than just a transaction that lives long beyond the initial sale.
One thing we can do now is to think of our product or service as a gateway to a customer’s heart. The portal of trust we have developed after a sale is only the beginning of a potentially long and prosperous relationship if we choose to invest in the long run of that engagement and allow our customers to expect more from us.
Competitive Advantages Can Be Short-Lived
Today technology acts as the great equalizer. Things that just a few years ago took a team of developers can now be done in 10 minutes by one person.
So, we need to get creative. We need to think beyond the standard constructs of our day to day lives and think about how to create transformation that solves problems and drives measurable results. This comes from creatively thinking about problems in our day-to-day business. One of the ways we can get more creative is to step away from technology. While it is true that the tech can act as the great equalizer, it cannot produce creative ideas like a human can.
For instance, a computer can’t decide to send someone a portrait of their pet so that they can enjoy it or even come up with the idea to generate a seasonal pass for a ski resort. One thing we can do today is to lessen our dependance on technology that seemingly makes our lives easier and instead think through an issue without the assistance of a machine. If we can do that even on one or two problems a day instead of relegating that to technology, we are sure to come up with competitive advantages that are not easily replicated by the next great technology.
Creativity is no longer a luxury at the workplace because in order to thrive we need new, fresh and novel ideas at every touchpoint of our day. We depend on creativity to generate more revenue, we depend on it to come up with new ideas to make the customer experience more vivid and we depend on it for a competitive advantage. Harnessing creativity in our day to day lives is an investment that will pay dividends if we continually place it at the forefront of our efforts.
