Creative Thinking in the Business World

JOHN BURNS ponders the relevance of creativity in the hard-nosed world of business.

RECENTLY I was sitting in a Royal Bank of Scotland seminar about creativity in business when my mind travelled back to an incident with my grandfather many years ago. 

I was about seventeen, still living at home with my parents on Merseyside, when I was coming out of the Library one day and met my Granddad going in.  He wasn’t a big man – in thick-soled shoes, if the weather was warm, he could just about reach five foot four.  Size, of course, isn’t everything and what he lacked in height he always made up for in impact.

He had the build of a flyweight boxer and is one of the toughest men I’ve ever met, having spent most of his working life swinging a sledgehammer in Camel Laird’s shipyard in Birkenhead.  A boilermaker by trade, a lifetime’s hammering had robbed him of his hearing, and the only conversation possible with him was at maximum volume.

“Been to the library have you?” he enquired, in a voice that rattled the library windows, “Technical books are they?”, he asked, glancing at the bundle of books under my arm.  When I explained that they were D H Lawrence and Dylan Thomas he made no effort to disguise his contempt: “You don’t need fiction,” he told me, “stick to facts, facts are what will get you on in life.” And with that he charged off into the library, living life at his usual frenetic pace.

Looking back I can understand how the harshness of the life he had lived had left him with little time for fantasy.  In the 1930s, when the depression struck, he had sought work anywhere he could find it and had sailed to China where he spent several years working in the dockyards of Shanghai. 
 

The business community would be well served if it could find a way to break down its contempt for creativity and harness it rather than crushing it.

A teetotaller and a non-smoker, he had a work ethic that impressed even the Chinese, a race not normally noted for its indolence.  You could calculate the dates of Granddad’s visits home by working backwards nine months from the birthdays of my father and each of his three sisters, so he was clearly not a man to waste an opportunity. 

With the money he earned he bought a small semi-detached palace that my Granny almost wore away with her cleaning.  I wonder how many rivets he drove home for each brick? 

It is easy to see why he saw no place for creativity in the work place.  His reverence for technical knowledge is understandable – he had seen how it could liberate men from the brutal labour of the shipyard to positions where they could make a living safe from the falling steel and crushing hammer blows that were an everyday hazard for the labouring men.

To return to the seminar on creativity and business, what surprised me most was that many of the assembled people from the business community also seemed to find the concept that creativity could have a role in the workforce a new and innovative one.  

Why is it that we set such hard barriers between what could be described as the rational business mind and the creative mind? 

A few years ago I was at a different meeting, one that involved the “Creative Industries”. There the division between these two species of thinkers was tangible.  Those on the business side were very clearly ‘the suits’ and obviously lived encased in what is perhaps paradoxically described as a lounge suit.  (Well, it’s not for lounging is it?) 

The ‘creatives’, on the other hand, had a very different dress code – be as scruffy as possible was their motto.  The divide in the room was also very marked – suits and scruffies very rarely mixed, as if they didn’t want to be tainted with the scent of the other side.

There is a clear perception that art is for the frivolous and the slightly seedy, and that the real work can only be done by the men in suits.  Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel can tell you just how much hard work art is.

I don’t know who coined the phrase “There’s a book inside everyone,” but I doubt he’d ever written a great deal.  Wouldn’t it be disappointing if it was true, and the book inside you turned out to be a telephone directory? 

The sharp divide between creativity and the world of work robs us of a great deal.  Most business innovators have in fact been highly creative, they are the people who have seen the opportunity that other people have missed and been able to create ways of developing that opportunity. 

A life in accountancy may not appear to be very creative, but sometimes the figures produced by accountants are greater works of fiction than we are be led to believe.  Monty Python’s assertion that “Accountancy does terrible things to a man” may have some truth in it, but hopefully it isn’t the death sentence to creativity that many would suppose.

The structure of large organisations often seems to be designed to crush any creative urges that employees may posses.  Huge tracts of procedures are hardly likely to promote creativity, and the odd suggestion box nailed to a wall is unlikely to provoke employees to progressive leaps of the imagination.

Neither are the dreaded focus groups and brainstorming sessions that some businesses have imported from across the Atlantic.  Hierarchical structures are also designed to repress any new ideas that emanate from minions, and few directors are likely to embrace flashes of insight from receptionists, as it is likely to raise the question of what the executives do to warrant their car parking privileges. 

Creative thinking can be of immense value in the business environment by developing new ways to approach problems, yet most companies seem to be developed in ways that stifle that creativity and therefore repress innovation. 

The business community would be well served if it could find a way to break down its contempt for creativity and harness it rather than crushing it.  There does seem to be a growing awareness that the commercial community could be better served by that course, but the problem arises as to how such a process can begin.

Developing creative departments in areas such as marketing may be only partially effective as they define everyone who is not a member of that department as non-creative, and may inhibit people who could make a valuable contribution. 

Perhaps a better way would be for companies to try to identify individuals within the organisation, at whatever level, who have a creative potential and allow them the space to develop their ideas.  This process can only be achieved if companies actually learn to value creativity, and we seem only to be at the begining of that process.

One area many companies struggle with is that of communication within their own workforce.  It is in the area of communication that creative people can highly effective, and this is an area that can be usefully developed. 

I often perform stand-up comedy, and a comedian has to be an effective communicator or his audience will simply switch off.  I have found my comedy experiences often have useful cross connections into my commercial writing, but many companies might find that difficult to appreciate.

I was walking into a business meeting once and a colleague turned to me and whispered, “Don’t tell them you’re a comedian, they won’t take you seriously,” I had to think about that one. I wonder if my Granddad would have approved?
 

© John Burns, 2006