Podcast: How to get more creative in Internal Comms

Jonathan Davies
31 mins read

Table of Contents

Podcast Overview

There’s an essential business skill that many professionals underestimate, that many believe they don’t have, and that many don’t know how to use.

One that’s often associated with art, but is important for every industry. Did you already guess it? Yes, we’re talking about creativity. From creativity in financial services to creativity in film and TV – Beth Collier has seen it all, and she’s joining us today to tell us all about it. Watch or listen to the podcast here, or read the full transcript below – whatever floats your boat.

The Internal Communications Podcast - Episode 27 from Happeo on Vimeo

First things first – what is creativity and can anyone be creative?

Jonathan Davies: Fantastic. I fully agree. All of those soft skills are the one thing that will always be setting us apart from the machine. So if you want to make sure that you don't get replaced by a robot, keep listening to this episode. As we're going to dive ahead into my little creative segue here, was that creative? Actually, I don't know. Beth, what is creativity? Let's define that.

Beth Collier: Ooh, that's a great question. Good place to start Jonathan, because one of the challenges with creativity I find is that it is so misunderstood and there are so many myths and misconceptions about it that go around. And when I talk about creativity, I talk about a process for coming up with ideas that are new and useful.

It's not just that I've come up with an idea. It's got to have some sort of value. If you just think of something being new and useful, that's what creativity is all about.

Common Misconceptions About Creativity

Jonathan Davies: Just for reference, saying that it's a great idea to have a purple dinosaur as a mascot parading around in our office might be new, but it's not necessarily useful. Right?

Beth Collier: Well, a purple dinosaur worked really well for the people who made that show Barney...so, who knows. That's part of the challenge of creativity as well, because you don't know if it's going to be useful till you actually put it out there. That's one of the challenges – actually coming up with the idea and then testing it out, experimenting, learning, refining to see what really has an impact.

Jonathan Davies: I'm going to dive into that one in a little bit, but first I just want to know – because one of the most common things that you hear around the theme of creativity is “I'm not creative, so I don't know what to do, and I don't know how to get out of this.” Do you believe that that's a myth that we can dispel that everybody is essentially creative if we follow your definition, which is coming up with a new idea that's useful. Can everyone then be creative?

Beth Collier: Yes. Not only can they be, they are. That's one of the things I think is an important distinction to make upfront. Oftentimes when I talk to people about creativity, they will come back to me with art. And they'll say, they're not creative because they're not very good at drawing, or they're not very good at singing, or they weren't very good at writing stories or poems.

And that is a form of creative expression. But if you put it to one side, what you're doing when you make music or when you make art is you're coming up with something new and original. If you look at Picasso, he's not creative because he picked up a paintbrush. He's creative because of what he did with that paintbrush, the way he painted was new and different.

And the public decided it was useful. The idea originally of “I'm going to paint a face from the front and the side” – crazy! Rejected! Not the way you were taught!...but that's what he did. That's what made him creative. And it's the same kind of thing if we actually look at creativity as a skill.

It is a skill that we all have as humans. It is something like any muscle you can strengthen with practice. That's one of the biggest things that I try to drill in all my creative workshops is getting people to understand what creativity is first, so they can then see that actually this is an important business skill.

Understanding Creativity as a Skill

Jonathan Davies: Creativity in communication is not about how well I can draw a picture. This is about how well I can think and come up with new ideas and collaborate and use those skills to innovate and solve problems. So it is such an important business skill. We also have that problem with people who talk about the creative industries. So if you're not in the creative industries, quote-unquote, then what are you? I spent 10 years in finance – that is not an area where people talk about being creative a lot. But you know what? You've got customers and you've got problems to solve.

If you look at what FinTechs are doing now, if you're a traditional finance company, you've got to look at that and go, “Hmm, how are we going to serve our customers?” How are we going to solve that problem of giving them the service that they want, expect and need?” So if we position it in a different way, then you can see if you work on it. Then you are creative.

Reigniting Creativity in Your Work

And the other thing I'd add to that. It's to think about yourself as a child. When you were a kid, what did you do when you had time? When you went to play, what did you do? Did your parents or guardian sit down and go, “Okay, at 3:05 you will pick up the car and you will play with them for exactly five minutes going in concentric circles and turning them at 89 degrees. No, you just played. You just came up with things. If you had dolls or toys, you came up with ideas, you created your own narrative, you did all that. So if you think about where you were as a kid, and this is what all the research shows that our creativity really peaks when we are children – you had it. And if you don't feel like you have it now, this is the time to reignite it. It's because it's still there. It's within you.

ARC – The golden rule of creativity

Steps to Enhance Creativity

Beth Collier: Great question. Actually I have a lovely acronym for this that I coined a year ago when it came up in one of the other workshops I was doing, where somebody asked me, “How do I strengthen my creativity?”
When you can convince people it's important and to understand that they're going to need it to help their career. It's like, “Okay, now what?” I have this acronym that I call “ARC” and what it stands for is absorb, reflect and create.

When you want to be creative, how do you do that? Well, you first got to start by absorbing information. Give your brain some material. And by this, I don't just mean you've got to read academic papers or textbooks. Feed your brain information. I get inspiration from all kinds of things.

I do read a lot of books. I do read a lot of the news, but I also love entertainment as you can probably tell. And so I'll read Variety or The Hollywood Reporter, which aren’t in my necessarily line of work, but it might give me an idea.

I read something about Steven Spielberg and Netflix yesterday, and this might have given me an idea about leadership or something else. It could have given me an idea instantly, or in six months.

The key steps are:

Absorb - Feed your brain information from various sources, be it books, articles, or entertainment.
Reflect - Give yourself time to think and let your mind rest. People often come up with ideas when they are relaxed, like during a shower or a walk.
Create - Experiment and prototype your ideas, gathering feedback and refining them to achieve the desired outcome.

If you can do those things, that's where you will strengthen your creativity.

Jonathan Davies: That's fantastic. We're almost out of time, but there's one question that I've really wanted to ask you. I guess I've asked it, but not as direct as this and I'm half Dutch – my directness is begging me to do this. There are going to be Internal Communicators that are listening to this that just feels like they're stuck in a rut. What I want to ask is to all of the Internal Communicators that are listening, that feel like they're stuck in a rut and feel like a good, healthy dose of creativity could help them, but they just don't have it within them right now to reignite that spark, what’s something or some way, or a method that they could use to reignite that spark? Even if it's just for the one assignment in front of them, just to get that ball rolling. What would you recommend?

Conclusion

To all the listeners: Follow your curiosity, embrace your creativity, and remember that you are capable of innovative thought.