Breakthrough strategy with creativity: The unlikely pairing
“Game-changing strategies […] are born of creative thinking: a spark of intuition, a connection between different ways of thinking, a leap into the unexpected.” — Adam Brandenburger
A few years back, I came across an excellent article by Adam Brandenburger entitled ‘Strategy Needs Creativity: An analytical framework alone won’t reinvent your business’. It’s a must-read.
Brandenburger’s premise is that you can only get to breakthrough strategy if you overlay strategic thinking and tools with creative thinking.
This really resonated with me ’cause really, how could it be otherwise?
Strategy is, by its very nature, all about imagining different ways of moving from a current to a future state; from the present way of creating and claiming value to a ‘better’ — or, frankly, why bother? — one. Doing this requires a huge creative leap. How could possibly we do this well if we haven’t got the tools to think differently?
Good, worthwhile strategy should be breakthrough and ‘breakthrough strategy’ is only developed when teams apply the same rigour in their creative thinking as they would their strategic thinking.
..breakthrough strategy is only developed when teams apply the same rigour in their creative thinking as they would their strategic thinking.
And yet:
- The tools are taught as though they’re sufficient. I’ve done my share of courses and degrees in marketing and economics and business and have always felt that there was something lacking in the tools and frameworks I was learning. It felt as though I was capturing things I/we already knew but not shedding light on what could be or giving myself the means to “invent a genuinely new way of doing business”.
- Strategic frameworks get used in a ‘tick the box’ manner. As an independent facilitator and trainer, when I’m briefed for workshops and training sessions, I’m often told that teams are simply “going through the motions”. Be it a SWOT, a confrontation matrix, a PESTEL or a Business Model Canvas, working with the frameworks without overlaying a creative lens is unlikely to spark new ideas.
- Organisations continue to see innovation and strategy as distinct. I’m struck by how often clients create an artificial and unhelpful divide between strategy and innovation. I tend to be briefed to facilitate sessions at offsite events where innovation and strategy will be broached in distinct and unrelated sessions. They need to dance together.
So how can we combine creative and strategic thinking?
Firstly, by doing just that: make them rock n’ roll in unison. It’s not enough to train your teams to use certain strategic processes and frameworks. They need to overlay this with techniques that push their thinking.
Brandenburger proposes four explorations for more robust strategy underpinned by creative thinking. They are a neat foursome captured in 4-Cs. Here are his questions and my take on ways to work on each one:
- ‘What pieces of conventional wisdom are ripe for contradiction? (Contrast)’
For me, this exploration involves harnessing toolsets and mindsets that help us sweep for assumptions and unconscious bias. One safe assumption is that there will be blind spots.
The number one way of challenging bias? Invite diversity into the room.
The number one way of challenging bias? Invite diversity into the room.
Another go-to for me is Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), one of the only innovation methods I know that tackles bias (particularly, cognitive fixedness — our tendency to get stuck on structures, functions and relationships — head on and enables us to scan for blindspots. What is remarkable is that better ideas and solutions are often hiding in plain sight.
Anne Kerwin’s Ignorance Map is also a nice way to be very intentional about exploring known unknowns and unknown unknowns. (I go through this in detail in my book, UNBLINKERED).
2. ‘How can you connect products or services that have traditionally been separate? (Combination)’
Being able to join new dots and create novel and useful connections is a powerful skill. One thinking tool that helps do this very powerfully is SIT’s ‘Attribute Dependency’ tool. Attribute Dependency helps you do thinking experiments on new dependencies between internal variables (the ones you control) and external ones (those that sit with your customer or their environment). Basically, you pick a variable in each camp and either create a connection if there isn’t one or break one if there is. An example of the former was the famous Dominos pizza 30-minute-delivery-or-your-money-back promise whereby a dependency was forged between delivery time and price. An example of the latter is Calvin Kline’s CK One (a unisex perfume which broke the link between gender and type of perfume).
3. ‘How can you turn limitations or liabilities into opportunities? (Constraint)’
One of my favourite thinking tools to push our thinking in new directions is the creative problem solving approach also developed by SIT. This involves stepping out the ‘world of a problem’ — as opposed to getting bogged down in the problem definition or root cause — in what we can loosely call a ‘causality chain’ and then ‘breaking’ the chain with counter-intuitive thinking. I write about this too, in detail, in my book and confess to being very partial to teaching it…
The upshot of the tool is that it helps us explore all the available resources as potential solutions to the problem — including the causes of the problem themselves. Just think how this could help foster a growth mindset! It also feeds a very different approach to strategy: I take teams through a way of thinking that helps you flip the weaknesses and threats identified in a classic SWOT into assets. That can lead to some radically different strategies!
…just imagine if you could learn a way of thinking that helped you flip weaknesses and threats in a SWOT into assets!
4. ‘How can far-flung industries, ideas or disciplines shed light on your most pressing problems: (Context)’
One of the easiest ways to test out different models and future strategies is to reframe using existing templates or patterns to test them out in your world.
- I find that the act of filling out the Business Model Canvas is useful but insufficient. SIT also offers 5 robust and learnable pattern-based thinking tools that I use to shake up any business model. What makes the difference is the exercise of challenging it with different ‘provocations’. e.g. “You now have a business model with 2 distinct value propositions”…
- In their book, ‘The Invincible Company’, the team from Strategyzer behind the Business Model Canvas template used around the world, offer a library of business model patterns from successful businesses. These form a set of success formulas that I get teams to ‘plug into’ their business model to help imagine alternative ways of doing business. This is also fun to play with in workshops…
There is no single, perfect tool for building bold and successful strategies. It is a complex task that requires that we have the ability to step away from our usual way of thinking and imagine future possibilities. Be sure to tackle the task with robust creative tools in hand.
There is a flip to this: Creativity requires strategic rigour too. I’ll tackle that next time!
Rachel Audigé is a trainer, facilitator, writer and coach in innovation and marketing, based in Australia. She has published ‘UNBLINKERED: The quirky biases that get in the way of creative thinking…and how to bust them’ and is currently writing her next book on facilitation.
