Get The Answers: Creativity and design must fit with strategy

Stephen Cummings - Professor of Strategy at Victoria University. Photo / Supplied

Stephen Cummings, Professor of Strategy at Victoria University and co-author of Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation and The Strategy Pathfinder, says new and innovative practices may well be best developed by a firm's own staff.

A growing awareness in New Zealand is that creativity and design are key factors in having a successful business but are not the only components. All the proper processes must be integrated as well.

How can creativity and design add value in a sustained way?

The key is to see creativity as a strategic process.

It's easy to single out innovative things like the iPad, but that product isn't what makes Apple successful across the long term - their success is because of a process, and innovation is just one part of an integrated process for creative strategy.

For example, we're starting to get results from a study by Victoria Management School and Victoria's School of Design on the relationship between Australasian companies that have won design awards and their financial performance. We can't see any.

This suggests that creative design, in and of itself, is not a panacea - for a design to add sustained value it must connect with an organisation's existing strategy, be led to market effectively and reflect or lead to an organisational process that generates further creativity. In Creative Strategy, we found that organisations that created sustained value had clearly integrated processes of innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and organisation.

What case studies are you aware of where this kind of strategic creativity has turned a business around?

At Air New Zealand, I like the way CEO Rob Fyfe encouraged employees to help him simplify the company's strategy by drawing it, and now you can see tangible examples of Air New Zealand's strategic approach in recent innovations: new kiosks, innovative seating and bio-fuels.

This simplification contributes to people actually understanding the company's strategy and subsequently being able to help contribute to creating future strategies.

A lesser known example is what Shaun Coffey's team have done at Industrial Research.

Their "What's Your Problem New Zealand?" competition is one of the most strategic creative processes I've seen in the past 10 years.

We also look at less conventional organisational leaders in "Creative Strategy", such as Arsenal football manager Arsene Wenger and designer Trelise Cooper.

What these cases share is that their leaders operate from "the middle". They find ways of getting involved with their people, figuring out that they are a great source of unique creative strategies for the future.

How can a business rediscover that creative energy it had at its inception?

Creative strategies generally start from recognising a failing in the market. But as companies grow, systems emerge that discourage focusing on failings.

One of the most effective approaches for sparking creative strategies in any organisation is to talk frankly about "worst practice": where did we (or other companies) stuff up, what do we learn from that and what are we going to do differently?

While encouraging discussion about worst as opposed to best practice may seem counter-intuitive, it's not if you recall that the things that lead you to adapt and develop are more likely to be failures than successes.

Encourage your people to nominate and sponsor promising practices within your organisation or to develop potential "next practices" that would leap-frog current notions of best practice.

Is it necessary to have external help to tap that creativity in your business?

It can be helpful, but it's not necessary. If you can first find ways of helping employees understand your organisation's strategy, and then develop processes that enable them to create strategies that add to this, then it's likely that the best creative strategy consultants for your organisation to engage already work there.