Creativity at Work
When you say the word creativity, people’s minds usually go first to artistic endeavours. But it turns out that when you look at what makes companies and other organizations special, the ability to create something new is what matters.
Creativity in the work world (as everywhere else) is about people. New ideas and the evolution of those ideas into something real is a fundamentally human endeavour. It requires doing things like creating connections between ostensibly unrelated domains and jumping from a locally optimum method to a completely different way of approaching the problem. Those ideas are then relentlessly iterated on until they become tangible. These activities are all part of the process of bringing something new into existence. New products and processes mean differentiation and that means better performance as a company.
Inside a company, creativity that has an impact isn’t just about people who have “creative” backgrounds. In other words, not just designers, architects, and copywriters. Senior managers, business analysts, sales leaders, and product teams all need to generate, explain, and sell ideas to make real progress happen within a company. Making companies more creative means making all of these people more effective and creative.
Although most companies today hire for creativity and leadership teams spend a lot of time communicating to their organizations about the urgency of creation, investment in tools for creativity at work are usually limited to whiteboards and Post-it notes. While those analog tools are pretty powerful in their own way, it seems amazing that all of the digital tools are focused on productivity and compliance, rather than creativity. Companies invest massive amounts of money in CRM, ERP, and HR management services, but basically nothing in making their people more effective.
The very nature of creativity and the historical limitations of technology have made it hard to build great tools to augment people’s abilities in this area. A lot of these limitations have been more about the platforms:
- Creativity demands fluidity and adaptation — input devices like mice and keyboards are designed instead for precision
- Creation happens anywhere and anytime — PCs and laptops are not always there when they are needed
- Creativity is visual — the tools for generating visual explanations are clunky and slow
The advent of mobile devices like iPads and smartphones has the potential to ease those constraints through richer multi-touch input, and by being much more intensely personal and always available. The platform is ready for some incredible tools in this area. Now we as developers just have to deliver experiences that match that potential.
FiftyThree is focused on helping people be as creative as they can be, regardless of field. Within FiftyThree we always talk about the “squiggle”, which represents the overall creative process — going from the nascent and tangled stages of ideation, to a focused and concrete idea ready to be shared with the world. With the introduction of Think Kit, we are focusing on the business and educational worlds, and the specific creative needs within them.
