A Creative – and Radical – Reimagining of Business Transformation

Creativity is about people connecting with people to turn rules, silos, and hierarchies upside down. It goes beyond an individual with a mandate, an area with a goal, or a serialized activity per week that celebrates but perhaps fails to form a judgment.

Creativity is not the gifts that are grouped separately in the areas of marketing, product design, and user experience; all of these create the context for the product to be discovered, adopted, and propagated.

Perhaps this is its course because creativity in the form of product and service is much more than an internal service or a goal to be achieved: it is not outcome but flow. An ensemble of resources orchestrated to take different shapes: It is the business model and the organizational structure, its talent, and relationships with those around the business, the input of resources, and the output as net income.

While condensing creative energy is crucial, it's equally important to distribute ingenuity with discernment throughout the organization and extend its reach beyond its boundaries. The creativity of the organization is a matter of design: how it structures, organizes, and links the talent in the organization. Putting all our emphasis on the product-service-price-to-market formula is not enough to ensure profitability. Likewise, relying solely on the brand's attributes, history, or understanding of the market and its dynamics is inadequate.

Just as an entertainment company must attract different talents to shape the vision of a TV series or movie (script, direction, set design, lighting, casting, and a long etcetera), organizations of any kind should see themselves in that example and orchestrate a series of resources toward a specific goal in record time: create the architecture of knowledge and its innovative applications that can be commercialized.

The organization requires someone to assume the role of a Creative Producer; someone who can grasp the challenges the industry encounters regarding customer needs, recognizing that solutions extend beyond product offerings and their seasonal fluctuations. It involves broadening the perspective on how to maintain the product’s relevance; someone willing to attend to the future agenda for scaling, and promote differentiation from ideas, concepts, and connections that pave the way for innovation. 

The Creative Producer role will not be limited to the financial cycle calendar, it will create intermediate moments by sponsoring experiments, expanding dialogues, and training themselves and others to reconnect ideas and resources beyond self-imposed paradigms.

Creative Production unifies ingenuity in the face of the challenge because it has learned how to converge talent and efficiency (which creates products), how to link it within and outside the organization (breaking silos and stretching hierarchies) with management that knows how to organize purposeful discussions that culminate in actions, not just plans that are drawn up and have no consequence or completion date.

Beyond simply creating something that appears different from the norm, the Creative Producer orchestrates the elements of business transformation. Rather than adhering to the conventional approach of following industry trends set by leaders or imitating successful practices from more advanced markets, they strategically innovate to drive traction.

This format has reached its maximum capacity. Up to this point, the solution has been to enhance the efficiency of this model and ensure that products maintain a margin. A frequently cited example of this type of oversight is Kodak, which continued to make the manufacturing and distribution process of chemical-based films more efficient instead of marketing its knowledge resources and discovering how to adapt to emerging digitalization.

Rather than making the current business model more efficient, it is better to extend the pressure for innovation, novelty, and the gains from openly discussing challenges and exploring through experiments, making all the organization's resources converge to reinterpret the market challenge, the customer problem, or the challenges that define the industry. 

Marketing creatives or Product Design creatives face the challenges of AI integration and shorter cycles for launch that pressure competitiveness, and do not have enough time to develop at a steady pace. Thinking creatively is not the same as executing and structurally creating change. The outcomes necessitate a reassessment that segregating the generation of ideas from their commercialization is not profitable from an organizational standpoint. The weight of the innovation process must be distributed throughout the organization.

This requires creative collectives instead of isolated organizations, lateral collaboration instead of top-down management, and distributed creativity instead of centralized. No individual can consistently present original and imaginative ideas every six months for years. But an entire group of people could do it. However, someone needs to step up and champion the agenda; the role of Creative Producer is available for you to take on.

Being an innovative company requires a radical rethinking of its talents, knowledge, and experiences and how to structure them to better serve the organization's purpose toward the necessary future to keep it relevant and especially dominant in the sector in which it competes.

Creativity must be at the heart of business transformation. This will only happen when it is understood as a consequence of organizational culture. The McKinsey study, The Growth Triple Play: Creativity, Analytics, and Purpose, reveals that companies prioritizing this formula achieve organic revenue growth 67% above the average.

The immediate challenge is to transition from a culture of immediacy in results, which limits in terms of deadlines, forms, and substance due to ”pressure for productivity” that leads to the repetition of formulas from past successes that carry hidden vices: sequels, revisions, restarts, and versions that are the same but cheaper and are self-references already proven and known by everyone in the market. 

The pressure for immediacy cuts short the experimentation of creativity as everything is set in terms of short evaluation periods, not staggered evolution. Along with this creative acceleration, which does not lead to profitable innovation, there is pressure to execute and achieve quarterly financial targets. The imperative for novelty and compressed commercial schedules do not allow for generating original ideas, let alone allowing those ideas to grow and mature. Innovation is not consolidated in a campaign; it requires fine-tuning over time.

In response to this disconnection, companies have persisted in attempting to adapt their isolated innovation models and long-standing business structures. As improving execution offers immediate rewards while fostering creative collaboration and transforming knowledge into innovation does not, the emphasis remains on revising existing business models.

The need for large-scale, cost-effective ideas implemented rapidly to yield immediate results adds pressure, making it challenging to carve out room for dialogue between departments, rethink the circumstances of common and recurring issues, and suggest alternatives beyond the industry's established norms.

Mobilizing the organization to decentralize creativity from areas of design, communication, experience, or product does not mean that everyone in the organization should be creative. It means adopting a creative approach to business opportunities across functions and roles, only reimagined to create and not just to execute. 

It also means having a clear vision of the future evolution of the company and its business model, fostering the incentives of strong inter-functional leadership that keeps its teams focused on aligning purpose and business objectives, a return on investment, and realistic timelines in all activities.

Creativity is an approach, more than just an outcome. As an approach, creativity focuses on the opportunities to monetize knowledge and its intersections, formed at the junction of culture, management, and the operational model of the organization. It needs more creative responses, processes, and business models, and as a result, more innovative ones.