How to make a business more creative

Let’s start with a quick quiz. What was the most in-demand soft skill last year as recorded by LinkedIn?

Creativity.

And the year before?

Creativity.

And the year before that?

Juggling. No, it was creativity, of course.

I think you get the idea. Well, let’s hope you do, because ideas are more important to business than ever and more business owners are recognising that creative skills are the most valuable skill to have in their businesses. Even more than juggling.

But there is nothing soft about ideas and being creative. Become a more creative business owner, encourage your team to become more creative, and it will have a hard impact on your business. Ideas give you competitive advantage: you can innovate your way in front of other businesses in your field and keep innovating to build and sustain growth momentum and create stand-out.

Putting ideas at the heart of your business and encouraging your team to be creative will create a perpetual flow of ideas that will attract like-minded customers, engage your staff by utilising their brain capital and  - can I be so bold – make it a fun and rewarding place to be.

Which is all lovely, but how can you make your business more creative in practical terms? There are so many different ways to do this, so I have picked five of my favourite things I have introduced with my clients over the years to help them foster a more creative business. (Cue the Top of the Pops countdown music…)

Workouts

This one is super quick and simple to implement. Before every meeting, before you start your business planning, strategic thinking or a myriad of other business tasks such as creating content, do a quick creative workout. These take as little as 60 seconds and change your mindset to help you think more creatively. Here’s one for starters: draw 12 circles on a piece of paper, each about the size of a tennis ball. Give yourself 1 minute to then turn each circle into something. It’s great fun to do as a team, too.

Get away from your desk

We ran a survey of business owners, asking them the best and worst places to have business ideas. It will probably come as no surprise to learn that the worst place was their desk. At your desk, you are in doing mode – but for ideas to flourish, you should be in curious mode. So find your creative place. Often, it will involve another activity such as walking, driving or exercising, because your conscious brain is diverted by the activity which allows the subconscious to get on with all that creative stuff. A quick tip: write down your challenge as a headline question on a Post-It – such as ‘How to create a valuable, exciting online membership product for start ups’. Now put the Post-it somewhere you can’t see it, and go on your walk, or for that drive, or to the gym. When you next sit somewhere un-desky, notebook open, ideas will be waiting for you.

Ideas sessions

Get your team together and have regular ideas sessions. Work on a business challenge you have, or a client brief. Set a few simple ground rules – such as no judging of ideas at this stage. Make sure you use a handful of creative thinking tools throughout the session – these will interrupt the ‘usual think’ of business problem solving and open up creative avenues of new ideas. And write down every idea that is said, no matter what you think of it – at this stage you are in creative thinking mode, not evaluation mode.

Creative thinking tools

No matter how creative you are, using creative thinking tools will level up your creative thinking. We all have what I call an ‘ideas territory’ – we think in certain ways, come up with ideas within certain thinking processes, and even if your ideas territory is a wide, expansive place, it has limitations. Using creative thinking tools helps you vault the fences at the edge of your territory, giving you new ways to combine thoughts, forging new paths to ideas and expanding your ideas territory. Having a few trusted creative thinking tools in your back pocket is a fantastic way to keep your business thinking fresh.

Get an Ideas Bank

An ideas bank is a place for… yes, you guessed it, your ideas. If you are a one-person ideas machine, then a dedicated notebook for jotting down all your ideas - half-baked, fully risen or overcooked, it doesn’t matter – will suffice. For a team, you are better off creating your bank as a spreadsheet, or if you really want to push the ideas boat out, an online solution where people can contribute ideas. Whatever shape your bank takes, regular deposits of ideas that are generated in ideas sessions will reap huge dividends for your business. An idea might not be right for one project, but could be the start of something brilliant for another.

And a quick bonus idea…

Start an ideas pipeline. How does your team contribute ideas? Do you make it easy? You may hold regular ideas sessions (and if that is the case, go straight to the top of the ideas class, you’ve got yourself a gold star) but what about all the ideas they will have in between those sessions? So many ideas get lost because people have nowhere to put them. What about setting up an email address - ideas@mybusiness.com - or starting an ideas wall where people stick up ideas? Or our favourite, the kettle whiteboard, with a business challenge on it that people can contribute ideas to whilst waiting for their tea to brew?

April 21st 2022 is International Creativity and Innovation Day. Why don’t you pick a couple of these ideas and start making your business more creative? Putting ideas at the heart of what you do could be the best idea you ever have.

Resources you might like to check out:

Find out more about why finding your creative place is so important: read our Creative Places Thinking Spaces paper, get a month of creative workout ideas and boost your creative mindset with our ebook 30 Days of Creative Workouts and level up your creative thinking with our Creative Thinking Toolkit, packed with tools to help you think differently about your business challenge. All these resources (and many more) can be yours simply by joining our complimentary online membership, the Tool Shed. Sign up here.

Or why not get a copy of my book, Build your Business On Ideas, available from my website or Amazon.