Ep 148 Creativity: 7 Years, 3 Buzzwords, 2 Studies, and 1 Constant Problem

0:00So back in 2019, when I was at Envision, I helped co-author what at the time was the largest study that had ever been done. that looked at the relationship between design and business performance. A lot of you maybe remember this. It was called the design frontier. And if you didn't see it or you didn't know, the finding was that what we found was that the vast majority of companies were stuck. They were full of creative potential, but they just couldn't convert it into results. And the numbers were there for why being more creative forward, why doing design thinking, why it had huge business benefits.

0:36This was not the first study that showed that. And so it was interesting when over this past weekend, I saw a new study from Accenture or Accenture Song. I found it's just Nick Laws, the ECD or the creative lead over there. He used to be at RGA New York, just super smart guy with an insane amount of respect for. But they did a new study and they looked at somewhere just north of like 1700 different executives in 14 countries. and drum roll please and as a surprise to absolutely no one they found the exact same gap almost to the exact percentage point that we found so in this episode what I want to do is I want to actually take a minute to look at both of these studies side by side why two firms two companies seven years apart totally different methods found the exact same wall for creativity how that is not a coincidence.

1:31I want to look at, there's a new term that I keep hearing a lot of people using, which this like applied creativity, why I think it is well on its way to becoming the next design thinking in that it's a term that everybody's going to adopt. Nobody builds unless we all start to treat it differently this time. And I want to look at like, cause look, if we're going to do this, then there's also something I want to share, which is this sort of just like a three question audit that I think you can run on your team. You can do it before this episode's over to try to help you understand where do you sit?

2:06Do you have this wall? Because here's the thing is that there's obviously there's two camps, right? There's the one camp that AI is going to kill creativity. And then there's the one for everybody who is sort of tired of hearing that AI is going to make creativity matter, which I guess I kind of don't agree with either camp. And that's the point that I want to make, right? Like creativity already mattered. It was just nobody ever built or almost nobody built the infrastructure to actually act on it. So that's what we're talking about today. So welcome to episode 148 of the crazy one podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates.

2:45This is the show where we talk about leadership, creativity, design, and all sorts of things that matter to creative people. so usual plug right like do the review youtube all that blah blah whatever um unless this is your first time listening to the show and i'm guessing it probably isn't you know all that stuff but but let's start but like why do this episode now i've talked about the study in the past it's seven years old like that's not anything new but for those of you who maybe didn't you know forgot or whatever it was that so seven years ago to envision we did a study called design frontier And what we did was we looked at 2 ,200 different designers in 77 different countries.

3:27And coming out of that, we built a maturity model based on sort of five levels. We could look at basically 12 different factors inside of an organization. And based on those 12 factors, we could assign them to one of five tiers from ones where design and creativity and those sort of things were core assets and they were reaping the business benefits from it. And it fell all the way down to the lowest level where, you know, designing creativity was that sort of just make it pretty, right? It was seen as almost purely executional. And so, again, I think that I guess it was maybe last week or I just saw it last week.

4:03I don't know candidly what the publish date was on it. But Accenture came out with a new study. And they spent a year doing the research. They talked to 15 different executives and like I think it was 1 ,725 other people. to just sort of, again, do a similar sort of challenge. And then, so again, for me, like it's interesting because look, I think just to say it simply, what's in that report isn't a new problem. It's just going to bring new attention to it, right? Like it's, it's an old problem that's just kind of getting reconfirmed, but let's just do kind of a quick comparison by the numbers and some of the things that I saw when I looked at the two reports.

4:44So back in 2019, we found that about 41 % of companies were stuck in the lowest level of design maturity. 82 % of the world's companies were stuck in the middle to the bottom. That only about 5 % of companies really were at the highest level of that maturity, and that as a result, they saw really disproportionate and outsized benefits. You would see, on average, they would see anywhere between 4x and 26x. the business results. There's episodes on here. You go back to my old talks, right? Like they, they could produce products more quickly. They could do it more cheaply. Like every metric in the world that you would want was there for why you should lean into this stuff.

5:31Aside from cultural problems and things like that, that prevented it, that it wasn't just flipping a switch. So the new study found that now 81 % can generate ideas, but only 16 of them can actually convert them. They can actually take that idea and get it out the door and convert it to something that makes an impact. So again, the problem basically is the same shape, just different decade. And I think that both studies landed on three things independently. I think Accenture would call their model like commit, like structure and expertise, we called it people practices and platforms. And I think even it's interestingly, even the kind of like the failure models match, because in Accenture study, they saw that only 9 % of board members at major companies have created backgrounds.

6:23Ours was that again, we saw that bigger teams didn't predict maturity, right? Like, again, if you had a really big team, it didn't mean that you had a big impact or outsized impact, that in a lot of cases, there weren't creative leaders, bigger didn't mean better, that in a lot of cases, no matter what the size of your team was, most companies were stuck on the bridge between level two and level three, which was often defined by level three was basically when a team or creative would start to take more control of their destiny, right? You would see things like design ops, we would see documentation, we wouldn't basically just see them taking whatever mess they were given and trying to make the best of it.

7:07They would define and say, look, to be successful, we need to do very specific things. And so we need briefs and processes, infrastructure and people to help us accomplish that. And I think like in Accenture study, they had kind of like a creative penalty stat, where they basically found that 57 % of leaders say, they've personally been held back from being creative. 59 % say challenging the status quo makes you quote unquote difficult. Welcome to my world. I've been labeled as difficult, divisive, right? Like all of those sorts of things where basically if you want to not just do the status quo, if you want to do something different, if you actually care about what the output is, you're often labeled as slow, you're labeled as difficult, you're labeled as challenging, right like why can't you just go along to get along and again not seeming to understand that that's not the goal of what we're trying to do and what i think is interesting for me is that that the gap between those two studies really is two kind of distinctly different eras and that i think a lot of the problems that we have now predate ai right it was always there i think that's the argument i've been continuing to try to make is that that's what we are seeing is that, again, AI is going to continue to be a culture problem, not a technology problem.

8:30Now, the other part that layers into this is the emergence of applied creativity. And so again, if you're not intimately familiar with the difference between design thinking and applied creativity, let's do sort of just a quick rundown on this. So I think design thinking has been around since I don't know what's been the 50s or 60s. It's had a few different resurgences. It came out of IDEO. And look, I still think that it is the gold standard and has been for decades. But it is obviously, I think, actively disappearing right now because it had its moment a few years ago. A lot of companies saw that resurgence.

9:09They tried it. And for a number of reasons, we'll get into in a minute. It didn't work right. They didn't see the benefits. It wasn't this magical switch. And so because of that, you see it disappearing from job listings and descriptions and conversations, and it's being replaced by applied creativity. And sort of, again, for the comparison, design thinking, I think, is a very structured methodology in that you sort of go through and you do research that lead into insights, that lead to how might we, that lead to ideation, prototyping, and testing, and you repeat that loop, right? It's a way of how do we do structured creativity that gets us data and feedback that we can act on, not opinion, which is why I like it so much.

9:54And then we have a way of moving forward in a structured way that gives a structure, but doesn't force us into specific, you know, just more solution oriented thinking. Now, applied creativity is more, it is not something I practice. I've had a lot of conversations. I've done a lot of research. It's more of sort of like a mindset or a skill. and it's using creative thinking to solve problems. And again, I think that design thinking in a lot of cases will focus more on kind of user needs and empathy. You start with research and insights, doing those sort of things. Applied to creativity, it could be aesthetic, it could be conceptual, commercial, personal.

10:34There's not necessarily a fixed starting point to that. And again, where design thinking is taught to be run by teams and scaled across organizations applied creativity seems to be a little more kind of idiosyncratic and that it depends on your personal taste your instinct and your range so i can understand why this would be more corporately palatable i guess um because it's just it isn't as structured it doesn't require as much accountability i guess that it can be a little more touchy-feely and those sort of things um and and look and i think that even nick had nick laud said it in this and i agree that really design thinking's fatal flaw was, I would say, maybe twofold.

11:17What he said was like the flaw was really treating creativity as a vibe, kind of instead of a trained skill. My assumption continues to be that everybody is creative. Most people just forgot. And I think that that was what I saw why design thinking failed, because I worked with company after company, taught it at place after place, where what you would see was that companies would only take parts of design thinking, usually the parts that were easy, but they would skip over most of it and then kind of moan about why they didn't get results. I had one company that told me they ran design thinking.

11:48And when I asked them to tell me about their methodology, they showed me a stack of post-it notes. That's not a joke. They actually thought just using post-it notes was design thinking. And that's often what it was, is they would take the shiny parts, the post-it notes, the how might we do a few of those things. They didn't have the rigor. They didn't have the discipline. They would only run the cycle once, like a lot of those sort of things. And then again, like I said, bemoan why they didn't get magical results. And that's the, that's for me is the repeating pattern. Why I don't think this time is going to be any different because I look, I don't think frameworks die because the idea was wrong.

12:24I think they die because most companies like to adopt the vocabulary and skip the infrastructure and then blame the framework. And this is the fundamental difference. Whenever you study organizational change and what makes great teams great, it is the difference between the teams that address behavior versus thinking. Behavior is we're going to use some new words. We're just going to take the shiny parts and then we're going to go back and it's like waterfall with different props kind of a thing, I guess. And that's the difference is the fundamental thinking, the approach, the rigor, the discipline, the comfortable being uncomfortable never manifests.

13:00And I think that's the part. And that's why my prediction here is that applied creativity is headed for the same grave unless companies and leaders build actual pillars instead of just renaming slide decks. Because I think that's most of the time, right? Like it's just, what's the phrase of the moment? Because here's the thing that I've learned and that I know for an absolute fact is that vocabulary without structure is nothing more than theater. That's just simply the way that it is. Talking differently, using a few different words, picking up some design thinking phrases, talking like that sort of thing with no structure, with no impact, with no discipline, without the ability to understand that creativity is about learning and iteration.

13:41And that if this is why corporate culture and creativity generally do not like to coexist is because there is a tension there that they don't want to address. But that is the tension that I think is worth sitting with, is that again, in my eyes, design thinking can produce competent, validated, and forgettable work if it just follows the recipe, right? Because again, I can run a design thinking sprint and get the answer that I want if I want it. And that it's, you know, I think that a lot of the kind of applied creativity or those sort of things probably de-risk some of this. But I think that that's my concern in this, right?

14:21Is it's going to be a bunch of decoration, a bunch of language that I think in applied creativity, it's going to sort of keep the focus on the output, but it's going to be generic, right? It's the taste and the judgment layer that can't be manufactured that I think that the best teams use design thinking for rigor and you can use applied creativity for distinction. So to me, these are more complimentary kind of approaches whenever I'm looking at it objectively, as opposed to one as a replacement for the other. But, but that's the thing is that either one, Just the process alone doesn't get you a defensible answer, right?

14:55Process just gets you a lot of people that tend to go through the steps. That's why in most cases with organizations, I like to instill behaviors, not process, because process is something people will follow because somebody told them to. It's that creativity gets you an output somebody actually cares about. And I think that's maybe a little bit of the harder truth in all this is that, look, I think that most companies aren't failing because they don't get it. They're failing because they're optimizing for shipping, not for quality, that they think that speed. And again, this is something I've said for longer than I wish I'd had, right?

15:30Like done is not a standard. Shipped is not a standard. Quality, impact, moving the business, right? And I think that that's the thing that maybe this is more of a failure on leadership is that velocity became the only thing that leadership or somebody could put on a dashboard. So it became the only thing that mattered. Quality doesn't show up on a dashboard. Quality doesn't show up in a sprint report, but a ship date does. And I think that in a lot of ways is the actual engine behind plausible noise whenever we talked about that, right? Like that work that is polished enough to clear the review that says nothing underneath the polish.

16:05It's a veneer. It ships fast because nobody has, honestly, to defend that opinion. And they don't have to defend it, usually because there isn't an opinion there and leadership isn't looking for one. They're just simply looking for progress. That's why, for me, as I've talked about on previous episodes, we talk about pre-mortems, we talk about decision logs. This is why I bring this stuff up. Because, like, look, I think now, for me, this is going to be, and this, for me, is always the thing, right? Watch what happens the second, and I mean the second somebody tries to slow down that train, right?

16:44They want to do real design thinking, even if they want to do real applied creativity. And I think that the kind that goes looking for a position, nobody's claimed yet, right? The kind that makes somebody uncomfortable, they call it slow. They call it cumbersome. They call it like the line you always get is like, you know, look, we just have to move. No matter how many years I've joked that, like, look, if you think doing it right is expensive and time consuming, let's try doing it wrong six times. And that's often the case is why we would see in the report that we did. That's why the companies at the higher maturity move so much faster.

17:20The work they did was so much cheaper because they did it once. They did it once and they did it right. They didn't do it six times and sort of with mediocre, fumbling, fawning attempts every time to sort of get it right. Yes, it took them a little bit longer to ship it out the door, but whenever it shipped, it stayed shipped. It wasn't something that we shipped and then we had to make a bunch of excuses and maybe somebody had to get fired or we had to wait for the next quarter and then we had to come back and revisit it. Right. Like we all know the cycle. and because my thing is like that slow cumbersome we need to move that reaction was never about speed for me it's a tell it means for me if i'm being totally brutally honest right it means that nobody in that room can tell the difference between fast and right so anybody that takes longer than fast gets treated like a problem and ai is just making this worse not better Again, it didn't build a quality machine.

18:18It built a faster noise machine. The same gaps, same output, like they need to get filled in. But this is where AI is making this worse. This is why I'm saying that AI is going to destroy so many companies because, again, they're just going to ship bad ideas faster. But that's, again, to go back to what I said in the beginning, for me, creativity has always mattered. The infrastructure to act on it never got built. Now it's competing against noise that ships at the speed of a prompt, right? That's the thing. So, so let's talk for a minute because, you know, for a lot of you, if you've been through this, this probably, this episode is probably going to turn into a therapy session a lot more, right?

19:01Like, um, I think the best of you, maybe you're talking to your car, you're talking to traffic, you're talking to your screen, you're trying not to yell out something if you're listening to it at work because we've all been there, right? We all seen it. We, we all know it. We all see it when it walks in the room. So how do we start to kind of like go through this? How do we start to push back? And I think that for me, like, let's start with how do you beat that slow label? And for me, it's, again, I think it's not arguing that slow is actually fast because it isn't right. That argument gets you kind of laughed out of the room to go, oh, it's not slow.

19:38It is slower. Yes. What I often like to do is to argue sort of an asymmetrical point instead, right? Because again, I think that for me, that if you look at hard data, right? Plenty of these studies, there are other ones that are out there, right? Like we talked about before that doing it right will get you not only disproportionate returns on the project, you'll do it ultimately faster and like, again, a lot cheaper. But again, I think that slow and right beats fast and forgettable. And that at the end of the day, the thing that we forget is that that is the only metric that your leadership or your board gives a shit about.

20:21Is that at the end of the day, everybody forgets the process. Everybody forgets how long it takes. Everybody forgets those sort of things. That fast is sort of just a short-term vanity metric that nobody's going to remember if it's not right, if you have to do it again, if you have to go ask for more money, right? Like all of those sort of things. And in a lot of cases for me, this is really an approach where I'm trying to separate the judgment from the ceremony, right? Like that five-step workshop is slow. A trained eye knows that, you know, in 10 seconds, whether an idea is ownable or not, right?

20:53You can tell if it is good or not. And I think that that's always the thing that I hear is like design thinking is slow. And again, I think that what people are often reacting to is kind of the ritual around it, that maybe people that were running it didn't know how to do it again, because I can run a design thinking sprint in an hour, we can get a prototype in an hour. So again, that some of that is pulling those two things apart. But I think that in some cases, it's kind of shrinking that unit of stop selling judgment is this kind of like phase that gets bolted onto the front of a project because that was often the problem right like you design quote unquote would do design thinking then we're going to do the work if that is the way anybody thinks you're running it wrong right where again it's not something that gets bolted onto the front it's built in as a filter that runs at shipping speed that if you are doing this stuff right that this isn't some two-week detour that you go on before then it's like we get back to doing those sort of things that again this should be something that everybody of every discipline is doing and part of that is also look i think one of the biggest faults of design thinking if i'm really being honest is that it has the word design in the title like that was why when we brought design thinking into citibank didn't call it design thinking nobody wanted design thinking if we gave them a discovery mindset everybody wanted that but also stop calling it a process right it's not processes get scheduled, anything that is on schedule, right?

22:23Like again, then that gets deadlines. There are those sorts of things. Now, look, this is not mean I'm not saying this is just a free for all. This is a standard. This is a mindset. This is approach, right? That this is a way that we need to work because standards get applied or right, or those sorts of things. And, and like I said, it's also for me, it's just, it's not, this is why I think design thinking and design systems, all these things have struggled inside of corporations because for so many other teams, design is not seen as an approach. Creativity is not seen as a mindset. It is not seen as something everybody is doing.

22:55It's seen as a word of ownership, right? Design thinking is what design owns. The design system is what design owns. We all know none of that's actually true. Design thinking is something everybody can do. A design system needs a lot of different teams from a lot of different disciplines for it to work. But here's the other thing that, and I kind of promise this at the top, right? Like what's this three question, three pillar audit that I think you can do to sort of figure out where you're at. And again, let's kind of go back to this commitment structure, expertise sort of approach to things. And real quickly, I think you can just do an audit of where you're at and where your company's at.

23:34On the commitment side, the easiest thing that I knew to do is can you bring a risky, often unfinished idea to your leadership or an idea that challenges the status quo without it being held against you, without you being labeled slow, without you sort of trying to disrupt product with like, can you actually, because look, ideas are really fragile. But for me, just that simple, simple question, right? Can you bring an unfinished idea to leadership? Or can you challenge the status quo without that actually being held against you? This is why I'll often say that I think most companies value compliance over creativity is because of that question.

24:11The second one on structure is that is there an actual owner and process for creative decisions? Or does everything die in committee? Are you able to take a risk? Are you able to try something? Are you able to prototype it? Are you able to get feedback? Or is it just down to the way an executive or somebody quote unquote feels? Or is decision making just being made based on a calendar? So again, does anybody actually own those decisions. And then the third one is on expertise. Does anybody with real creative judgment sit in the room where resourcing and priority gets decided? Now, often for me, this is a place where it will fail on two sides.

24:50Oftentimes, one, the creative judgment is not sitting in the room, but also whenever it does sit in the room, too often that person only wants to focus on the executional aspect of it, not the, is the idea right? How do we make it better? Is anybody going to care about this? Are they going to forget it before they're done looking at it kind of approach to things? And that here's the thing, there's simple questions, but if you can't say yes to all three of them, you already know where to start. Because here's what each no actually looks like. And again, I think the one move that could maybe fix all of this.

25:28So if we're talking about commitment, right, can you bring an idea without getting published? If that's a no, I think that here's the thing for the way that actually often looks like in practice, right? Ideas only survive if they are proven to be safe. If a competitor has done it, if we can point to somebody else has done it, right? And look, I think at the end of the day, again, if we're being real, nobody calls that kind of punishment, but risk quietly gets remembered the next time your review comes around. And that's where you're being labeled as difficult. That's where you're being labeled as problematic.

26:03I know that because I still have my reviews that have used that exact same language. And look, and I think that the fix for this isn't going to HR. It's not some poster about psychological safety. It's a specific public rule that, look, I think one unfinished risky idea per cycle gets brought to the room and is protected from blame no matter how it lands. At some companies, this has been innovation boards. You'll see at companies like Disney, where I think about 60 % of the work they do is expected to fail because they know the 40 % that works makes the expenditure worth it. But is that sort of rule actually achievable?

26:45Now, again, you can try this inside of your own group, try to find some success and then scale it. But for me, the first move, if you get like a no on the commitment line, is to pick one project this month. Say it out loud in front of your team, if you can, in front of your leadership team. And again, I think that the riskiest idea in it won't be held against somebody if it doesn't work. This is why in so many places I've tried to instill the understanding that like failure is just badly placed learning, right? Like the fail fast and break things, the intention is right, but the phrasing is wrong.

27:22But it speaks to this moment. But I think if you are not able to create a space where you can try things, if you're not able to create a space where you can have an idea, where you can try something, or you can take a risk, this is where I'll often also comment. it. There's a difference between crazy and stupid. I'm not encouraging stupidity. But if that one simple thing of trying something is impossible, innovation, progress, usually all the goals that your leadership is asking for is also impossible. Because that's something I can tell you absolutely is that if you want to innovate, if you want to do something different, if you want to make an impact, you're gonna have to try some things, you have to get some things wrong, and you're gonna to have to iterate.