Creative Thinking

Creative Thinking Is A Skill

In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, there has never been a greater need for firms to develop a culture and ecosystem to promote a steady flow of ideas. Those organisations that build creativity and innovation into their culture and business models, and take active steps to enhance creativity, contribute more to the bottom line than those that don’t.

In fact, McKinsey recently discovered that businesses that invest in creativity – as well as analytics and purpose – can expect to see growth of at least 2x that of their competitors.

An in-depth IBM Global CEO study from 2010, meanwhile, found that global CEOs ranked creativity as the #1 leadership quality for business success. Quite simply, a commitment to idea generation, divergent thinking and finding creative solutions to everyday business challenges can mean the difference between stagnation or thriving in today’s competitive environment. These skills are in demand and we can help you to future proof your business and your people with practical, interactive and engaging programs.

What is creative thinking?

In her book, In Your Creative Element,Now Go Create founder Claire Bridges reviewed hundreds of definitions of creativity and creative thinking, and knows that creativity is notoriously tricky to define!

One short definition we like, is that of creativity expert and government advisor Sir Ken Robinson, in his TED talk Do Schools Kill Creativity?, who said that it is “the process of having original ideas that have value.”

In a business context, creative thinking is a way to solve problems, tackle challenges and create new opportunities that will lead to success and competitive advantage. Creative ideas can help with customer service problems, creating new products and services, behaviour change, brand development, sales and marketing tactics and even staff motivation/morale.

Even a seemingly mundane challenge, such as how to encourage people to complete their timesheets, can be significantly improved by applying creative thinking. Using our practical tools you could find new ways to understand and tackle the issue.

You could use try one of these exercises:

• Use an empathy map to step into your employees shoes and find out what they think, feel, say and do about the problem, what the barriers and pain points are and try to tackle them
• Question Storm the problem instead of having a brainstorm – better questions produce better answers
• Use a behavioural framework like the UK Cabinet Offices EAST process – how can you make it easier, more attractive, more social or more timely?

All of our creativity tools and techniques have been curated by our expert team using real-life examples to help you apply them to your challenges

We can all develop our creative thinking abilities

They are likely to have studied and honed their craft, and already have a range of tools and strategies for solving creative challenges. Even so 77% of creatives say that there should be more time for learning at work. 74% say that lack of time is the biggest barrier to learning new skills. 96% of creatives want to upskill while at work (It’s Nice That Creative Skills Report).

The fact is that you can develop the creative capabilities of your whole workforce for competitive advantage.

A lot has changed in terms of thinking about whether you can teach or enhance creativity over the past few decades. The world is not divided into creative ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’ All our research and experience in this field shows that any one can be more creative – so you don’t have to rely on a single group, or ‘creative department’ if you want a steady flow of great creative ideas.

Many companies just don’t have the luxury of a team whose sole job is to develop ideas. Now Go Create Founder Claire Bridges has her own experience of this going from PR practitioner at MD level, to another leadership role, that of Creative Director, almost two decades into her career – see more below.

When you equip your employees with creative thinking tools, process and techniques for new ideas – proven over decades by some of the world’s leading organizations and creative companies – you give your whole organisation potential competitive advantage.

Companies like Netflix, Apple, Google and Amazon have creativity and innovation in their DNA – their leaders are constantly looking for new ways to improve, iterate and evolve. Innovate or die!

And as long as your organisation supports them with the skills for problem solving, ideas generation and supports new ideas, you can nurture that much-desired ecosystem in which idea generation – and with it, innovation – becomes an everyday occurrence.

How our founder discovered how to unleash creative potential

Fifteen years into her former career as PR pro, Claire was struck by the realisation that she had been using a process of trial and error on various client challenges. Though she was responsible for the creative output for a 100-strong team, she had no formal training, techniques or processes in place.

Claire knew that there must be a better way to try to ‘codify’ creativity and generate ideas in a more structured way, so that it could be shared and employed to maximum effect. She went looking for answers and creativity and innovation tools and training herself.

Over the course of several years, Claire set about learning – and putting into practice – everything she could about the creative process. Promoted during this time to Creative Director, she drew together a whole world of theories and techniques so that her brainstorming, process and ideas would be relevant and innovative for the clients she worked with. Training creativity became part of her remit.

After completing her MSc in Creativity Innovation and Leadership (Claire is one of only 250 people in the world to achieve this degree), Claire’s voyage of discovery eventually led to her leaving the agency world to launch Now Go Create, one of the the UK’s first dedicated creativity training consultancies in 2011.

“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” Jack London

What is creativity and innovation?

A rival organisation, where ideas are encouraged, evaluated and acted upon, will always have the potential to move with the times. We can look to Blockbuster, Nokia and Kodak for business examples of a failure to look to the future and innovate.

Creative thinking Vs problem solving

If you’re wondering if there’s any difference between creativity and problem solving, the answer in many ways lies in semantics – and how deep you want to go.

Problem-solving follows a logical approach and is solution-focused from the very start. While creative thinking often leads to a problem being solved, it can equally lead to much wider results – such as coming at a data set from a new angle and generating fresh insight. What we teach is applied creativity – harnessing that all important imagination for a business goal.

What is problem-solving?

Problem solving can be defined as: “the act of defining a problem; determining the cause of the problem; identifying, prioritizing, and selecting alternatives for a solution; and implementing a solution.”

We have both creativity thinking courses and problem solving courses. Please take a look at our individual courses to decide which ones are right for your and your teams.

Easily transferable skills

Understand the creative process

Creative training shows people how to use well-established techniques to unlock new ideas to unleash their own and their company’s potential. Our interactive training programs have been developed to elevate the creative thinking capabilities of everyone and improve collaboration. If you wait for the muse, you might just be there a long while.

Creativity Training – Our Courses

We have now trained individuals and groups totalling more than 25,000 people, including employees from M&S, Netflix, Sky Media, ASOS, Kenwood, O2 and hundreds of digital, PR and social agencies.

We run engaging creativity training courses for groups of employees from the same company, as well as open days where anyone with an interest in improving their creative thinking skills can book a place.

We also have a comprehensive selection of live, online creativity training options, as well as a large body of on-demand modules which can be followed in your own time which our students love.