How to Make Your 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.

And another of my favourites: think of a Polo Mint. In 60 seconds, come up with as many different ways to use that mint. A cat’s monocle, a spare wheel for a tiny car, a pea holder…

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.

So you could ask:

How would an artist solve this challenge?

What if we only had £1 to create a solution?

What would an 8 year old kid come up with?

All these sorts of creative prompts will take your thinking in new directions and lead to new ideas.

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@    – 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.

Jodie Newman runs The Business Allotment, the place where businesses grow creatively.

Get 100 new ideas for your business challenge by signing up for 20 Days 100 Ideas. Every day for 20 days I will send you an email with a creative workout and creative tool so you can think in new ways about your business challenge – and get 100 fresh ideas in the process. https://www.subscribepage.com/20days20ideas

And if you fancy a trip to the Hothouse where we work together 121 on a business challenge of your choice, pop your name into the Wheelbarrow of Opportunity – each month a name is drawn at random and wins a Hothouse visit! https://www.subscribepage.com/hothouse

This is such a fab post by Jodie and if you’d like to do a nit more reading, one of our other blog posts leads on really nicely from this as well which we wrote after we were inspire by one of Jodie’s social media posts.