How Can We Allow Creativity to Flourish More in What We Do?

In today’s world, more than ever, thinking creatively, managing change, and solving complex problems are part of the daily routine. The impact of technology, the role of data and the fact we are all playing in a global community, success will depend upon a workforce capable of effective thinking, problem solving, and innovation.

 On January 22, 2019 at the Royal Overseas League Cairney & Company hosted their second Cairney Conversation with guests from across the education and charitable sectors to hear about Design Thinking a solution-based approach to solving complex issues.  An approach often applied when tackling complex problems that are often ill-defined or unknown, by framing the problem in a human-centric way and understanding the human needs involved.  It is a hands-on approach creating ideas through discussion and brainstorming and then prototyping and testing these ideas.  It is a process that celebrates failure and takes risks and places your customer, donor, stakeholders at the core of the creative process.

 Sarah Drummond Co-Founder of We are Snook discussed how she and her team approach creativity using a design framework model.  Looking at how to spot the opportunities within and assessing where the value is for your users.  Here is an excerpt from Sarah’s thoughts that evening.

You’re not going to do art, are you?

 That was the fear from my guidance teacher, that I’d be relegated to the ‘art teacher’ job brigade (and hey, my art teacher was my hero).

 I spent 4 years beavering away in art school making products such as Lampshades, chairs and bicycle stands when I had a sudden realisation… the world didn’t need more stuff.

 As a student I ended up working for a government agency, helping to design education services. At the heart of this, was working with the end user, the people who would use the service to design it with me. This was novel, and in many sectors still is. I worked on developing the practise of Service Design inside a public institution where they hadn’t worked like this before, nor wanted to. However, we used the same process as we took to designing chairs.

 Fast forward 12 years, creativity is now being applied to most corporate and public work places but in a way where it’s not your ‘creative guy’ in the thick of it. Professionals are now practising Service Design and are using research to put people’s needs at the heart of delivery. For instance, in government there are now over 900 hired designers in a community working to re-design how Government services work for people. 

 Over the last decade, I’ve dedicated my time to teach people that design, and creativity is owned by all of us. However, most people when asked if they can draw or if they think that they are creative, put their hand up and say no, I’m not. Creativity is drilled out of us in the traditional school subjects as children, but it is still there. However, it makes me incredibly sad to think that people don’t think that it is and that they don’t think of themselves as having the potential to be creative individuals.

 Creativity is latent and we allow it to come to life when we give people the autonomy and freedom to design things better and to find better ways of making things happen. In fact, most people apply creativity on a daily basis, applying hacks to help them work smarter and better.  

 I see this in my role at Addaction, the UK’s recovery charity for drugs and alcohol. We have services across the country where frontline staff are hacking their way to use broken IT systems and difficult offices to deliver the services people need in recovery. We’re working with them across the country to say, ‘you know best’, you know the challenges and opportunities first hand and are pairing them with designers to bring this knowledge to the surface. 

 We are mapping new stories of how we want services to run, using walls like a design studio in back offices to map the client experience. What’s more, we are building prototypes of new CRM systems and are testing these with users. This in many ways, is creative and design led. 

 What I’m excited about, and what we do at Snook, is give people the tools to design and express their creativity and work together to design a world that helps people thrive.

We have worked with universities and students to highlight where the problems are from their perspectives and work together with them to design solutions from new alumni networks to student support.

 Moreover, we have worked with the Department of health to design better mental health advice services by working with people who are seeking support and with the NHS to create new children mental health services.

 Presently, we are working on trying to solve the problem of how to ensure children entitled to free school meals take them for the Scottish Government and North Lanarkshire Council. What’s exciting is it is a group of multiple perspectives from data science, to design to research all working together with children, families and schools to open up and expand the problem. When design is used, it creates a framework and space to say, we are going to try and understand this problem, solve it and test the solutions we come up with before implementing. It also allows for safe failure and the exploration of the ideas themselves.

 You can see creativity is making a comeback. It does bash up against the traditional business processes and it is not easy to ‘embed inside organisations but we are seeing it integrated across lots of sectors from Cancer Research UK to Lloyds Bank. The design economy generated £85.2bn in gross value added (GVA) to the UK in 2016. This is equivalent to 7% of UK GVA. So economically, there’s evidence that companies thrive when they use design. 

 I can feel a tide change of design and creativity being welcomed back to the table. The challenges of today and tomorrow are in desperate need of creative and new approaches to transform old industrial models of delivery. Our new CDO’s aren’t just chief digital officers, they are chief design officers, and it’s finally getting the C-suite understanding it needs from seeing it as an ‘add on to make something look nice’ to a fundamental point of difference for business. 

 We need creativity more than ever before. We have systemic problems to solve in-work poverty, mental health crisis, the environment, internet safety, housing to name a few, and it’s going to require creativity for us to unpack this, to frame the problems, to work as networks to solve them and test this.

 Creativity can be a scary thing for many. A ‘skill’ that we don’t have because we can’t ‘draw’ or come up with good ideas. That’s why I am a fan of design. When opened up I think it provides people with the format, process and space to collaborate on solving problems creatively.

 So, with so much to do, where will you apply creativity? What does the word make you feel? 

Where are you creative in your work? Where are you creative in your personal life? 

 Some food for thought and to get your creativity flowing

 At Cairney Conversations we aim to do two things, bring interesting people around a table to debate and dialogue over an interesting and relevant sectoral topic and to share that content with you.  If you are interested in attending a future Cairney Conversations dinner, please do let us know by sending a note of interest to marketing@cairneyandcompany.com or visit our website at www.cairneyandcompany.com