Well, these are two words you do not often see side by side! What on earth does Creativity have to do with corporate or organizational Strategy?
Creativity is the fifth of our five Strategic Drivers of organizations, and it refers to one of the biggest impact areas of an organization’s place in the world. What is the organization’s approach to change?
Think about how your company both reacts to change that is forced on it and to internal plans for change. You will be changing, after all! Remember W. Edwards Deming’s words on change: “No one has to change. Survival is optional.” The best change is one that you plan and undertake yourself, which is why Creativity is on our list. You must actively, deliberately consider your own and your employees’ responses to change when you determine that your organization selects a new strategy.
As always, we will consider an infinite sliding scale for this driver, this time between Better and Different. And as always, there is no “correct” place to be on this scale. But it is important to understand that the opposite of Better is not “Worse.” It is “Different” because changing course is the only other way to succeed.
Most companies, and most of us, in fact, act as if we think that we should always be getting better. Nothing is perfect, after all, so there are always things we can do to improve. Good employees want to improve their own performances as well as their company’s performance. We want to be better leaders and businesspeople so we can make this year better than last year, even if last year’s results were outstanding.
But is this the only direction we can go? What if we deliberately try something different, something “outside the box?” Where can that lead? Well, if you’re the rain-soaked people who gave up looking for a cab and invented Uber, it can lead to a whole new category of business. These people didn’t decide to start another taxi company or buy an existing one, in hopes of finding better ways to service customers. Rainy days require more available cabs to meet demand, but hiring more cabbies just for rainy days will do little for company performance without purchasing additional vehicles that won’t be needed on warm, sunny days when it’s too nice not to walk a few blocks. Their creative thinking led to an expandable network of available cabs and cabbies.
Where are you on the Creativity continuum? Or where do you want to be? If you know the answers to these questions, you are already ahead of most of your competitors. You know what training your people need to succeed and what kind of people you have to look for to bring into your organization. You know your firm’s strengths in improvement, and you know your abilities to think differently. All of this lets you know the mindsets of your people which in turn lets you predict and understand their behaviors. Are they on board? This is important regardless of your chosen spot on the continuum because you need their support to succeed. Sound strategy is merely the blueprint. Employees’ behavior determines success or failure of the strategy.
So, better or different? What is best for your organization? You get to decide! Incremental improvement makes the organization better and leads to better performance. Completely new approaches may be riskier, but the rewards may be correspondingly higher. Either way, the choices are yours to make and execute.