System Architect | Brent Hodgson
How awesome would it be if your creative team always comes up with the most unique ideas and innovative solutions to problems? Wouldn’t it be great if you were in an organisation where “Eureka!” and “Aha!” moments just seem to pop-up at every corner of the work place every day?
Creativity is a product of one’s imagination, knowledge, experiences, cultural influences, and environment. While some of us are born more creative than others, it is an undeniable fact that every individual’s creative potential can be fostered through education and training.
You will find that the most successful organisations nurture a work environment that inspires people to be open to ideas, to learn from each other and build on each other’s experiences.Steve Jobs, former CEO and co-founder of Apple, was once quoted saying,“Creativity is just connecting things.” Creative people, says Jobs, don’t really “do” something but rather they are able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesise new things.
One way of enhancing your team’s creative skills is putting in place a system that allows this sharing of experiences so that team members are able to more effectively transform ideas into innovations. Leading marketing and sales strategist Brent Hodgson shares a simple 3-step process of systemising the creative process to enhance your creative team’s productivity and help them achieve outstanding results.
How to Systemise the Creative Process
Step 1: Make experience accessible – create a memory bank or knowledge base of all your resources.
- Collect case studies, source materials, templates and swipe files, inspiration and best practices and any other core knowledge/experiences/foundational ideas someone would need to have had to get a great outcome
- Create repository for storing/referring to these.
o Bonus tip: Create a checklist for how to review them.
Step 2: Decide on your success metric and measure outcomes.
- Choose your success metric – how you’ll know if you’re on the right path. Get feedback from stakeholders on the output/concepts (use this to refine your process).
- Choose how to document concepts so that everyone is on the same page.
- Formally measure quality of work based on your success metric.
Step 3: Review results and turn learning into experience – rinse and repeat.
- Use both successful, and unsuccessful work to improve knowledge base and refine system. Implement what is learned back into the system.
o Successful outcomes gets added to the knowledge base.
o Unsuccessful outcomes gets approved upon and implemented.
Some would probably argue that systemising the creative process is tantamount to destroying the very essence of creativity; that it suppresses one’s ability to think outside the box. But if you really think about it, many of the latest inventions are simply enhancements of their predecessors orsolutions to problems that previous innovations have failed to address. The greatest artists and inventors of the world have built on their own and other people’s experiences to come up with the most novel and ingenious of creations.
Systemising the creative process is simply putting together and allowing your team access to ideas, knowledge, and experiences that will inspire them to tap on their own creative minds and come up new ideas and solutions. It is about knowing how to measure success andlearning from your unsuccessful outcomes.Put this system in place within your organisation and you will see tremendous improvement on your creative team’s productivity.
System Architect – Brent Hodgson
Brent Hodgson is obsessed with high-performance marketing and sales strategies. But when effective marketing strategy relies on creative thinking – how do you systemize creativity, and get consistently outstanding results?
