Playing it safe
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less”, General Eric Schineski.
When researching his book Disciplined Dreaming, Josh Linkner interviewed nearly 200 leaders from some of the United States’ most impressive names. He expected to hear artists and musicians to be fans of creativity but when talking to business leaders, finance executives, hard-nosed CEOs, not for profit leaders, the answer was always the same. Creativity was one of the most important ingredients in their success and often the actual number one.
Just in case you’re still feeling creativity is about keeping children happy with a box of crayons, try on these quotes for size.
“Our willingness to embrace creative problem solving and experimentation enabled our growth at every level, from raising capital to developing winning technology, to winning customers. Creativity was the key ingredient.” Scott Dorsey, CEO of Exact Target who grew his email marketing business to have a turnover of $100m and five hundred employees in under a decade.
“We are in a highly competitive industry that is increasingly commoditised. It is a cluttered industry with tough competitors fighting ruthlessly for a share. We must offer something different and compelling, that’s where creativity comes in. Without it we wouldn’t stand a chance. When things get tough we need to double down on our creative efforts to stand out.” John Balardo, publisher of Hour Media.
When rating the importance of creativity in business, the bosses said average 8.9 out of 10. But when questioned about their organisations’ ability to meet the creative challenge, the ratings fell to 4.7.
This creates a clear gap between the need for creative ability and actual creativity capability.
But why bother? Surely in times of challenge and struggle, companies should hunker down, preserve resources, cut costs and sit out the storm? Well in reality the storm never ends and its rarely stormy across the entire globe at any one time. What once may have been true when businesses largely stayed in their own domestic markets is no longer true when virtual products can be manufactured anywhere, built in an entirely different territory and sold across multiple legislative environments. Competitors are not alongside you sitting in the safe harbour also weathering the storm, some are ready to take to the high seas knowing they have the oceans entirely to themselves.
How has this happened to us, and why does safe harbour no longer work or apply? Here’s a few reasons.
First is our trend to commoditisation. Whatever is made, there will be someone out there forgoing the investment in research, simply seeking to adapt and copy whatever they can and turn it into a product with a price. Once consumers start to see what they experience in product terms, then you have commoditisation where price becomes a key factor in decision making. The trouble here for many companies is competing on price becomes a race to the bottom that few will eventually win. It’s tough to grow a business if your main mission is to be the lowest bidder, there will always be someone trying to go lower whilst you cheapen the value of the offer to your customers in the process.
The second relates to how speed of reaction has surpassed size of company and resources as a competitive advantage. If you take drop-shipping for example, though there is much to be desired in the ethics and customer care, there are companies out there who have set up a store selling two or three products and within a matter of hours, with some carefully placed ads in social media they are buying cheap, selling for a little bit more and generating a steady revenue within hours, not weeks or days or months or years.
The third point related to this that the barriers to setting up in business have changed considerably. Sometimes for the better in that businesses can be set up sometimes without cumbersome property transactions, importing and exporting raw materials. A teenager in their bedroom can establish a viable business in hours when maybe a decade ago it wasn’t even possible for them to sign a legal contract because of their age. Speed of reaction is one thing but also speed of reaction. The number of potential competitors is bewildering and could come from any and every direction. For the drop-shippers out to make a quick buck before the business implodes this is one thing, but for those intending on staying in business for a long time it means scanning an ever growing horizon and having an ability to respond quickly to threats.
Truth is no one really needs another “me too” player in a saturated market. Standing out to become really and truly remarkable takes an ability to see change potential in what others do, be happy to be the disrupter and break the mould. Starbucks originated as a coffee roaster in an age where something black and hot was as good as coffee could get. Then a field trip to Italy originally intended to bring back inspiration on roasting actually created the spark of an idea for injecting Italian coffee culture back in to the US. This change, or inflection point, was the pivotal moment where creativity could do its work. Whether the design of the physical buildings, the spotify cool soundtracks, the extensive innovation in drinks menus, extensions into food and a whole theatrical experience.
Through the inflection point, Starbucks broke the mould when it came to a commoditised coffee market trading down on price point and who can really remember the relevance of Maxwell House? The genius of recognising the inflection point is often where a business can rebound from a drift towards commoditisation of what it does. As I live in the UK we have a range of different coffee houses, from Starbucks to Costa, the Nero and each have their own devotees. I’d wager not really for the coffee itself but for the brand experience and the consistency of what you can expect from wherever you are (except for some reason in airports which maybe someone can explain to me why coffee in transport hubs seems destined to be universally poor, expensive and invariably served by people who give every impression of wanting to be somewhere else doing something different). That brand experience is difficult to copy or emulate but it had to be built from somewhere.
It's also a common misconception that creativity is all founded on technology and that you need to be a millionaire to have the money to invest in creativity. Often creativity is about recognising the fundamental friction that gets in the way of customers and adds cost and effort without compensatory value. Take Dell computers for example. Prior to Dell you had to buy your computer through recognised agents of computer hardware and great though that might have been for those that needed this kind of support, it also added cost and friction to the journey.
Ikea reflected on the high price and long wait times for people to furnish their homes. In breaking the mould of creating furniture that customers with little skill or specialise equipment could construct in return for a time and price advantage it’s a model that’s been taken up across the world – others had done flat pack furniture but only Ikea realised the power of making it easy for people to assemble furniture without a detailed understanding of isometric schematics. Although it feels like Ikea has been around forever, it really hasn’t and when I buy something that needs assembly and it wasn’t from Ikea my heart sinks at how obscure and complex self-assembly can still be. It doesn’t take the genius idea or ground-breaking app to notice what frustrates customers, adds no value and removes that from the process.
Relatively recently, getting home and deciding to order take-out instead of cooking was a case of opening that special drawer we all have in our kitchens, the ones with the string, screws from things we can’t quite remember where they came from and candles, you know the one. It involved pulling our a range of menus, deciding what you wanted, trying to rally everyone around a particular food choice and then phoning up different places and hoping when the food arrived you got something approximating to what you’d ordered. And then Deliveroo and JustEat came along and helped with some of that friction – don’t know what you want? Here’s all the menus in one place. Frustrated at phoning up to be told they can’t deliver because you’re out of area of can’t deliver for a couple of hours when you’re hungry, yep we have that solved as well. And I know they are far from perfect but the innovation isn’t the app, the creativity came from firstly wondering why certain things frustrated customers and secondly building solutions to alleviate the frustration.
Why with such a compelling case for change are so many of us paralysed from seeing ourselves as creative? Well one reason might be that it’s drummed out of us in our early years when others convince us that it’s either not needed or we’re not good at it. At school I was terrible at art, and art was considered the creative subject so it was easy for me to pick up on messaging that I was simply not creative. And yet I could write and I loved writing poetry, prose and stories. I was not great at tactile things such as woodwork or metalwork but I could play for hours with lego inventing buildings and designs of my own creation.
In short it is easy for us to see creativity as a label some are deserving of and others are not but we can all be creative in different ways. Often what holds as back as individuals and as companies is our fear – the fear of getting it wrong and the fear of being told so. But ask yourself this, are you genuinely happier if your company gets no feedback from your customers and just gradually fades into insignificance because even your customers can’t find the energy to tell you they’re feeling the love somewhere else?
So here’s a few things to leave you with as you tackle your inner creative gremlins.
1) Where is your zone of creativity? Is it in music, DIY, writing, speaking, making people feel valued? Dig deep because it’ll be somewhere.
2) What’s your relationship with feedback? Do you welcome, love and embrace it, do you fear its critical powers? Dig deep to pacify and contextualise feedback; it’s a point of view not necessarily a fact or a demand to be acted upon.
3) How do you feel about surprises? Often those of us who fear and are reluctant to change are the ones who like surprises least. Are you running the type of business which is prone to watching the world and your customers go by until one day you wake up and the only remaining surprise is there’s no one left but you?
4) What’s going to set fire to your island of comfort that you occupy right now? If you’re in business this may come from competitors, new markets. Shifting from your island may involve packing your bags, finding materials to build a boat, building the boat, navigating it to a new island and setting up home there. How do you feel about that process and what can you do now so things feel more purposeful than a great and sudden escape.
5) How can you bring more curiosity into your daily life? How can you take the opportunity when being a consumer yourself to consider how the service you’re receiving has been designed? Which elements of the service feel clunky and not built for you? The starting point of the creative journey is wondering why things are, how things might be can come later.
6) Get out the magic wand for your business. If you could make one single thing easier or better for your customers than it is today, what would you choose? At this stage don’t worry about the how or the cost, just what would you change, what is your inflection point?
We all have the ability to be creative, we’ve just fallen for the gremlins that tell us we’re not or we’re not as good as others or we’re looking at creativity through an overly narrow lens. We all run the risk of a slow fade into irrelevance if we allow things to be this way, we can’t take anything for granted. But the good news is the inspiration to be different is all around if we can recognise the starting point of creativity is a curiosity as to why things are and how things could do.
And one day, maybe only in my dreams, there will be someone who ponders on the plight of a weary traveller, further from home than they’d prefer, whose legs are tired, who’s running low on emotional energy, who needs affordable and nutritious food and beverage to sustain their journey. And this will be brought to them by someone who helps them feel welcome, looked after like a relative, connecting with them as a human not merely a walking wallet, who makes each person feel a little bit better about themselves and that little bit closer to home. One day.
