The question isn't are you creative but how are you creative?

The Mars bar, Pret a Manger, Apple iPod, Google, X Factor, Dyson. All of these brands represent famous success stories that stand out from the crowd in very competitive marketplaces.

At some point in their development, a creative spark or two catapulted them on the road to success. Yet the important point is that the likes of Frank Mars, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Simon Cowell all found that creative spark in quite different ways.

Creativity is the personal skill that enables individuals and teams to help businesses act differently in order to grow. Unfortunately, this big word is usually misunderstood in the corporate world – it is difficult to nail down precisely.

This is why people shift nervously in their seats when asked 'Are you creative?' The word tends to be associated with the arts, and creative people are often believed to have 'special' powers. As a result, creativity and business often mix like oil and water.

So most people don't think they are creative. But they are.

INTRODUCING CREATIVE CREATURES

Creative Creatures is a ground-breaking marketing capability tool that helps companies to be more innovative by leveraging the full creative potential of their people. The tool breaks creativity, that big word, down into five fundamental behavioural building blocks: the Stimulator, the Spotter, the Sculptor, the Selector, and the Supporter (see table, page 43).

Creative Creatures enables you to understand how you are creative by identifying your strengths and weaknesses across each of the behaviours.

By being more aware of your personal creative profile, or your Creative ID, you will be clearer about the role you can play in any process requiring creative input.

So that 'Are you creative?' question should be rephrased more constructively as 'How are you creative?'

There are three really important comments to make about the five fundamental creative behaviours. First, each of the behaviours is critical to the creative process. Not one of them is superior or better than the others.

Without the exploratory mindset of the Stimulator, the flower-bed for creative solutions would soon dry out. Without the detective mind of the Spotter, it is likely that opportunities would go begging and golden nuggets would remain unearthed.

Without the Sculptor's skills of communication and articulation, those nuggets would not get developed into clear, fully formed ideas, understood by everybody. Without the Selector's rational and commercial perspective, the wrong decisions would be made at critical stages of the creative journey. And without the empathy and versatility of the Supporter, group dynamics would more likely hinder than help the success of the project.

Second, as individuals, it is unlikely that you will all be equally strong in each of the five behaviours.

If, for example, you are a strong Stimulator, always looking to explore, expand, unearth, diversify, you might not feel at ease closing down, choosing between two options – in other words, demonstrating the converging behaviours of a Selector.

If, on the other hand, you feel totally comfortable picking three sticky notes out of a forest of three hundred to identify a strong nugget of an idea in a brainstorming session – the archetypal Spotter – you may feel completely uncomfortable spending 30 minutes trying to carefully craft a concept for research – the Sculptor.

The third and final point relates to the overall shape of your Creative ID. It may well be 'spiky', meaning that you have clear strengths and weaknesses for each of the behaviours. That is fine.

Alternatively, your Creative ID may be 'rounded', meaning that you are equally strong across all the behaviours. Fine too. In both cases, you are more than earning your place at the creative table.

Essentially there is no such thing as a 'bad' Creative ID – 'spiky' profiles are no better or worse than 'rounded' ones. Whether your Creative ID is fit for purpose is another question and this will depend on factors such as your role, who you work with and what job needs to be done.

IN A NUTSHELL

By having a much clearer idea of your own Creative ID, you have a much better understanding of where and how you can contribute most to the creative process. By having a much clearer idea of the Creative IDs of those with whom you work, you can work much more effectively as a team, by making sure that the Stimulators are doing the stimulating, the Spotters are doing the spotting, and so on.

Remember, it is not 'Are you creative?' but 'How are you creative?'

WORKPLACE APPLICATIONS FOR CREATIVE CREATURES

So what exactly are individuals, teams and organisations going to do with Creative Creatures and their newly discovered Creative IDs? Is it a tool earmarked for that 'nice to know' cupboard or is it a tool with concrete applications that has the potential to make a tangible difference? Companies and teams have found the following applications particularly relevant:

1. Recruitment and Selection

Because the creative process relies on five equally important behaviours, it is important to ensure that the right mix of individuals with the right blend of Creative IDs is recruited to get the right job done. This is true at both team and organisational levels.

Katie Vanneck-Smith, managing director of the customer direct division at News International (who spikes as a Stimulator and a Spotter), sponsored one of the Creative Creatures pilot programmes:

'More than ever, the media industry is being challenged to come up with new and innovative ideas for engaging more customers on more platforms while developing new revenue streams. I decided to pilot the Creative Creatures tool to raise awareness of my team's inherent creative abilities to inject fresh thinking into key areas of their jobs.'

If News International is rethinking its business model, and using its titles as brands (rather than merely newspapers) in order to find new revenue streams, then it must recruit sufficient Stimulators into the business to help it break free from orthodox industry thinking.

At a team level, working on specific projects, it is always going to be important to make sure that an appropriate mix of creative behaviours is present to maximise thinking and effectiveness.

Including five Stimulators in a creative brainstorming session may well feel highly energising and 'creative', but whom will you rely on to do the spotting and then the sculpting to transform great stimulus into well-crafted ideas?

Team selection must be driven by the task at hand. Whereas a pure innovation-driven company might have to recruit an above-average quota of Stimulators and Spotters, a company that focuses more on renovation might need a higher proportion of Sculptors. It's like the proverb goes: horses for courses.

HOW WAS CREATIVE CREATURES DEVELOPED?

Since 2008, Hanne Kristiansen, Pippa Duffy and Mark Simmonds have been working with Dr Kamal Birdi at the Institute of Work Psychology, Sheffield University, to create and validate the psychometric questionnaire that underpins Creative Creatures.

Last year, more than 260 people from three different blue-chip companies (Vodafone, Kellogg and News International) participated in the pilot phase.

This consisted of quantitative reliability and validity analysis, based around a survey containing question sets for each of the five creative behaviours. This was complemented by three full-day qualitative workshops (with the same companies), which enabled the team to better understand the characteristics for each of the behaviours, and the concrete applications for the tool itself in the workplace.

2. Co-creation in Teams

Co-creation, translated literally, is about people working together to develop new ideas. Within a company, this way of working tends to involve multiple functions, often across geographies. Diana Harris, innovation controller at Kellogg UK (who spikes as a Sculptor and Spotter) ran a Creative Creatures workshop with her cross-functional team. She understands perfectly the importance of collaboration and team working:

'At Kellogg's, we are continually seeking new ways to understand and develop our creative capability, especially in our innovation, marketing, research and development teams. 'Working with the Creative Creatures tool, our teams gained fresh insight into their individual creativity preferences and behaviours and, importantly, how they could contribute to generating new ideas for the business when working with others.'

An extension of co-creation is companies working directly with empowered and committed consumers in order to develop new ideas.

Ana Medeiros and Andrew Needham, in their excellent Market Leader article (January 2009), demonstrate how companies such as Lego, GSK and Unilever have brought together dedicated consumers with their insight, brand, agency and R&D teams to develop ideas and concepts.

Whichever angle on co-creation you take, the interpersonal dynamic will be the same: a number of people from different walks of life, different functions, quite possibly with different value sets and motivations, all working together to drive future growth of the company.

In this situation, it would be really powerful and useful to know that, for example, we had three Stimulators in the room, a Spotter, two Sculptors (one good with words, the other good at pictures), a decisive Selector and a Supporter who was really good at facilitating.

Surely this would be better than using a more conventional professional and demographic labelling – for example, brand manager, market researcher, account director, male consumer, female consumer – that tells us precious little about how the group might actually work together.

3. Process Lubrication

Within the world of marketing capability development, business processes have been 'king' over the past 10 to 15 years. Most of the leading marketing-driven organisations have developed robust processes, tools and templates in key areas such as strategic management, brand planning, insight generation, brand positioning, innovation and communication development.

Most of these companies have spent significant time and money equipping their managers with the skills to implement these key processes.

But process can only take you so far. However well the individuals or teams understand the various stages, it is only when personal and interpersonal behaviours successfully 'lubricate the process' that one can start to generate quality outputs consistently. Creativity is one of those critical behaviours.

David Erixon, director, brand strategies and capabilities at Vodafone (who is a strong Stimulator and Spotter), ran a Creative Creatures workshop with his leadership team in global marketing.

He stresses the importance of people rather than process development: 'People and creativity are the engines of brand building. Anything to make the engine work faster, harder and more efficiently is going to be a good use of development time.'

For example, a key step in any idea generation process will be to develop as many initial ideas as possible. 'Good' behaviours required will include 'exploring', 'diverging', 'questioning', 'looking for new angles and perspectives', 'searching for hypotheses' – an archetypal Stimulator.

'Bad' behaviours, however, will result in a sad absence of rich stimuli, and the process is likely to stutter and stall.

The difference between 'good' and 'bad' is an ability to demonstrate the right personal or interpersonal behaviour within the stage.

Working out the creative styles of the people on your team can lead to more efficiency

Knowing the steps in the process is not enough if you 'behave inappropriately' at each step. At every stage of every process, there will be the requirement to apply at least one of the five core creative behaviours.

And without appropriate 'lubrication', the 'process machine' will simply not function properly.

4. Individual Creative 'Powerhouse' – on the Go

The current reality in most workplaces is that everybody is running around at a hundred miles an hour, meeting impossible deadlines, with no time to breathe, let alone think creatively. The luxury of spare time to enjoy two-hour, half-day or full-day group brain-storming sessions is becoming scarce.

Yet increasing pressure is being put on individuals to come up with ideas, without much support, by next Tuesday. Although Creative Creatures cannot claim to have found the answer to the madness of the modern office, it does provide a framework to help.

If you know your Creative ID as well as that of those colleagues 'within reach' on a day-to-day basis, you are much more likely to be able to maximise the 3 0 minutes that you have in the car on your way to work, the 15 minutes that you can grab with your Sculptor friend after lunch, or the 30-minute team meeting that you have every Friday afternoon.

The less time that you have, the more efficient you need to be, and the more important it is to play to your own creative strengths and weaknesses.

IN SUMMARY

If your business needs to innovate in order to grow and succeed, then one of the critical behaviours required will be creativity. And if you would like to make a significant contribution to the creative process at a personal level, then it is important for you to understand how you are creative.

By identifying your own Creative ID as well as your colleagues', you will have a much better chance of making greater impact. Remember, 'How are you creative?' is the real question.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hanne Kristiansen is an independent consultant. [email protected]

Mark Simmonds is an independent trainer. [email protected]

www.wearecreativecreatures.com