The Creativity Bind: Part 1
Many organizations seem to know they need to be more creative.
And they are, of course, right. The acceleration of ideas that technology has enabled means that every industry, every organization, has to survive in an environment that is changing more quickly (in trend terms) than at any time in history. It is rare indeed these days that you can find a great solution to a problem, patent or simply implement it, and sit back while you grow. If the world you move in is changing constantly, then to maintain a stable relation to it you have to change just as quickly. And the only way to do that is to adapt. Constantly. And there are fewer better definitions of creativity than “the capacity to adapt to whatever changes come your way.”
The question is how to achieve that increased creativity. I will look at various models of how organizations can attempt this in the next post in this series, but for now I want to sow some seeds for thought.
“What got you here won’t get you there” has become a cliché because it is true, and nowhere is it truer than when the landscape is evolving around you. It sounds somewhat banal to say that if you want to be different you need to do things differently. But when it comes to creativity, a lot of organizations, naturally enough, struggle to grasp what that means.
However these organizations decide to become more creative, they implement that plan from within their existing way of operating. Nowhere is it easier to illustrate the problem than when it comes to hiring creative people those who have the soft skills to help you flex and pivot, experiment, iterate, and adapt. If your current hiring practice was working for hiring this kind of person, you wouldn’t need to hire them. But without having those people on board already, you are unlikely to understand how to modify your hiring practice to not only find them but also to offer them jobs. It’s that catch (“you know you need creative people but because you don’t already have them you don’t know how to get them”) I am calling the creativity bind.
Let me give an example. You are looking to hire someone to be part of a new team looking at developing products to meet a new market you have realised is strategically important for you, although you are not sure how to reach them or what their real needs are. How do you advertise for the role? What do you include in your job description? Specifically, what do you include in your selection criteria? Maybe you have an established way of recruiting — maybe you place a high value on experience and qualification.
The problem is that if you keep going back to the well with this same bucket, you’ll keep drawing the same water. There are very good reasons for recruiting based on experience and qualification, but when it comes to creativity these are unreliable guides — you will likely end up with the same lack of real creativity you began with, whatever the job titles now say.
The reason why hiring for creativity based on these lines of someone’s CV doesn’t work is down to the difference between hard skills and soft skills. I’m not going to get into a discussion of “g”, or the existence of some kind of innate general talent that can be shaped at will. Soft skills require as much of the right kind of practise as any other kind of skill if you want to develop them. It is rather a question of which skills you prioritise when hiring, and if you want to prioritise creativity that means prioritising soft skills.
But soft skills don’t show up the same way hard skills do. If you want to hire a coder, you can compile a pretty good shortlist by looking at applicants’ coding history. If you want a tax accountant, you can do likewise by ticking off the qualifications that mean they won’t leave you at massive risk of non-compliance fines. But creativity doesn’t show up by creativity exams. Nor does it necessarily show up in he projects someone has worked on — in a world where most employers don’t know how to use creative people, many creative people will come from backgrounds where they didn’t get to show off their skills on that kind of project.
So if you really do want to hire for soft skills, you need to use a recruitment method that is geared to identifying them, not one that is geared to finding hard skills. At this point, I’ll add a comment on the counter point that it may be as straightforward to hire for specific hard skills then train a soft skill as it is to hire for soft skills then train a specific skill. If that were the case, and I’m not necessarily saying it isn’t, the obvious first action would be to do just that — with your existing team. What we’re talking about is what you are hiring for, what need you are seeking to satisfy — and that need is for creativity. So you should hire for that.
I think there are two reasons organizations are unwilling to hire for soft skills, and they are the flip side of each other.
1. I think many people genuinely don’t believe that soft skills require as much training as more specific ones. Ironically, it is those people who linger closer to a residual belief in “g”. They feel that the claim creativity can be learned, practised, refined, is somehow flummery. Or, if it’s not flummery, then we mean “learned” in the “in a course at college” sense, rather than the “endless hours of deep practice” sense. The truth is that creativity must be learned every bit as much as Python must be learned. The reason I do not advocate looking for it on a CV is simply that evidence it has been learned is not as efficiently demonstrated there as it is for Python.
2. Sadly, I think that lots of us still like to believe that what we do is disproportionately hard compared to what everyone else does. When I was starting out writing copy, my first client, who sold expensive furniture, really liked the piece I’d produced for him. But he still said it felt weird paying me for it, because the words seemed “so natural” — they were, he explained, the same words everyone else uses and not put together according to any particularly esoteric pattern. I pointed out that he had come to me because he’d spent weeks trying to use those exact same words to do that simple thing, and hadn’t got too far with it. He still seemed to think I’d done some kind of Derren Brown number on him (well, he didn’t, because this was before Derren Brown was a thing, but you know what I mean).
What I mean is this. People know they need creativity. They know they don’t have it within their organization. They know what they do have is really complex and skilful and demonstrated by many accolades. Therefore creativity must be something that we demonstrate by even more accolades.
In other words, as I said back at the start, because they lack creativity, they lack the skills that would enable to see them how to recruit for it (next time we’ll look at how to get it right).
If you would like to know how I can help your organization be more creative, catch up over at Rogue Interrobang.
