A call for creativity... or not?

I am truly fascinated by the latest trends - perhaps call them hypes - about creative thinking, agile management and the like, which are highlighted, promoted and professed by top leaders and managers; albeit that a manager is not necessarily a leader and vice versa, but that aside.

Personally, I do profoundly believe in the fact that creativity is the only tool to increase your chance of survival. Mostly in dire needs, people often become more and more creative, which opens another question, why have we lost so much creativity.

Recently, a Dutch celebrity artist Youp van 't Hek, utterly frustrated by the incompetence - or be it the disinterest - of a mobile phone provider staff to help a customer, despite all acknowledgement that it was indeed their fault, nevertheless no solution was provided. The customer happened to be Mr van 't Hek's son, and when trying to intervene, unsuccessfully trying to contact eventually the managers above, the result was the same zero point zero. 

Upon being able to mobilise similar victims through Twitter - and the number was beyond any one's expectation - the big boss finally personally called the celebrity, fully apologising and accepting full responsibility. In other words, the lack of creativity ("the system does not allow this") has finally exposed the arrogance towards customers. And customers are, as we all know very well, the most important part of your business.

The ramification is not to be underestimated; for the sake of profits, much of the creativity is being squeezed out. When applying for a job, one must fit into a certain template, else one is not making it to the short list, resulting in a standard "thank you very much for your interest, but we have filled the position with a more suitable candidate".

True leaders do understand the need for creativity; it is unfortunately the majority of overly specialised managers, who seem not fully understanding the scope of this message. A recent experienced only highlighted this; where a finance person negatively communicated irrelevant information, resulting in a loss of talented candidates, which the company urgently needed, since they coped with a serious issue. The reason; unjustified and unverified bias.

Creativity in business is undergoing an unfortunate erosion; While being used as a fashionable hit, at the same time it is underlying bad interpretations, bad communication conventions, and poor true management skills.

Time to re-think what creativity really means, and if all candidates should be creative, why letting fairly inexperienced and incompetent HR assistants select experienced senior staff in the first place? Curbing creative and experienced people is going to damage your business in the long run. Many of my clients have finally admitted this mistake. Though, these are the few exceptions.