Some topics have a knack of coming up in any conversation. One such topic these days is how to build a culture of creativity and innovation. And never has it been more relevant than today when innovation has become the magic mantra in just about any walk of life. Over the years, there have been many false starts with a single magical tool for the purpose. Personally I think that it is a puzzle that involves many pieces. And part of the puzzle will always remain unsolved. On the other hand, today we’re far clearer about some of the issues involved than we ever have been in the past. In this article, I cover some of them.

The central driver of creativity is talent. Some people drive better than others, some dance better, some paint better and some cook better. Accepting that some people think more innovatively or see more engaging pictures in their mind to describe any concept is probably the first step in this endeavour.

And just as talent sets a person apart in the eyes of others, it changes his own expectations. There’s nothing like knowledge of one’s creative talent to drive a person on to push his limits. There are enough instances of creative geniuses from various fields surviving more moments of self-doubt and mistakes than a normal man would be able to take. Thomas Edison’s more than 10,000 failed attempts before he invented the light bulb is a sterling example of this. His belief that the final successful attempt would have the power to change the world was obviously strong enough to survive all failures. Part of a creative man’s assets is his sense of boredom with the tried and tested. It’s an almost primitive call of creative talent to assert itself in a way no one else has ever done before. Creativity demands motivation to topple over the precedent, however well established it might be and chart out a fresh course. All the creativity tools – brainstorming, whack pack and mind-surfing can extract some fresh ideas out of minds that in an ordinary environment would stick with the tried and tested. However, we are still a long way off from being able to re-engineer people’s motivations and being able to implant this drive.

Assuming that one has good talent at hand, supervising and managing creative talent is a delicate task. Done well, it can nurture the talent and see it to its full bloom. If mishandled, it can upset the sensitivities that so often run beneath and destroy the motivation. In my experience of running an advertising agency for half a decade, creative people come with their unique set of talents, expectations and often, idiosyncrasies. Supervisors and bosses, who unwittingly seek to stamp out the differences, leash the creative instincts to an acceptable perimeter, which deflates the talent’s enthusiasm. Over sustained periods, they even confuse and destroy the talent. A flat organization structure, flexibility and open-door policy help in creating the atmosphere for creativity to flourish. On a day-to-day level, thoughts and ideas are triggered by all kinds of random stimuli- remember Archimedes! So the physical ambience can also help or hinder. A warm, informal atmosphere with fresh, witty, engaging visual stimuli actually makes a difference. Beyond the physical ambience, an over-all playful atmosphere of a place can be a major contributor to a state of mind that encourages free exploration.

Softer aspects of the top management team’s style count even more than the physical ambience. Far more important than management’s open door is its open mind. It calls for setting goals with a gauntlet to discover the means. Complete clarity of goals, teamed with an expectation of a new unexpected way of reaching these, forces even those who would ordinarily have chosen to follow a set path, to explore the issue on hand and come up with an innovative solution. And once these new solutions are on the table, the management team is under a very real test. Will it judge these solutions in their own right or will it run to the safety of the tried and tested? Working with experimentative seniors and clients can bring out the best in creative talent.

Exposure and diversity also help in developing talented creative people. Exposure to different places, people and their views and ideas provokes thought and sets up new challenges in the their minds.

By their very nature, new creative solutions are unproven and seem risky at first. So the odds are stacked against them. Creating an organization-wide culture that supports genuinely fresh creative ideas and puts them on a pedestal calls for leadership with vision. Culture in any society or social group is driven by stories of greatness. Stories that have a penchant for capturing the human imagination and making the impossible seem attractive. In the creative context, good stories peg the standards of excellence at such exemplary levels that the other creatives are driven to explore widely and delve into the depths of their talent to better the extraordinary precedents. With management support, such powerful stories get captured and they travel far and wide and thrive over the decades in organizations. Stories of Newton’s apple, Archimedes’ bathtub, Picasso’s doodles which sold as priceless masterpieces, Birbal’s wit and ingenuity and Michelangelo’s ceaseless working on the statue of David without a thought to food or sleep are all legends that find enthusiastic believers among the creative people who long to leave their own thumbprint for posterity. Stories of how Marlboro, Cheer and McDonald’s were built continue to echo in Leo Burnett offices worldwide and inspire young creative blood.
Despite the questions that constantly keep getting raised against creative awards they too play a vital role within creative fraternities and organizations in this context. For the winners, they are the fruit which make all those sleepless nights spent getting the perfect idea or execution worth the while. More important than the heroes they create are the stories of heroism they help perpetuate. These nourish the creative culture and drive creative talent to push constantly and push farther. By nature, most creative people are competitive and thrive in an atmosphere where they need to put in a good fight to win. An environment, where winning awards connotes emerging as the first among equals, fortifies the belief in innovation and creativity as the differentiator. It also set standards for the future so that in addition to competing with others, each man starts competing with himself- his last year and the year before. Like anywhere this competitiveness needs to be balanced with a nurturing and healthy organizational climate where people enjoy warm personal relations and want to continue to work for sustained periods.

It is a challenge to get all of these aspects going together - a leadership deeply committed to creativity, a good creative talent-base, skills to manage the talent well, ambience that stimulates and triggers creativity and culture that does not just expect, reward and celebrate creativity but indeed makes folk-tales out of it. But once you have it, you are into a self-perpetuating virtuous cycle and the rewards can be well worth all the sweat and toil..