06 Set 3 reasons why creative confidence will boost your business

Unleash the creativity that resides in each of us.

Too often companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the “creative types”. Two of the leading experts on innovation, design and creativity, David Kelley (IDEO founder and Stanford d.school creator) and Tom Kelley (IDEO partner), show us that everyone is creative at his/hers core.

But what is creative confidence and why should we care so much even when our business has nothing to do with creativity? Or even if we are not business owners?

The reasons are many but we can summarize them into 3 main ones:

1. Creative confidence is at the heart of innovation. Promotes lateral thinking.

If our company wants to innovate or create innovative projects, knowing how to use creativity is essential to create unexpected, original and different solutions. Relying only on data, statistics and what marketing says is not enough anymore. It takes creativity to come up with unexpected solutions to complex problems.

2. Creative confidence promotes teamwork.

Creativity doesn’t have to be individual work, done by an “enlightened” few, but it can be created, nurtured and cultivated by a group that simply has the desire to experiment and to leave the inner critic aside for a while. Allowing a group of people to experiment with creativity leads to strengthening the sense of the group because everyone can contribute.

3. Creative confidence promotes positivity.

It helps in a virtuous circle to improve trust in our resources and therefore to dare to experiment and learn from mistakes.
I sometimes have requests from my clients for which I don’t have an immediate solution. And sometimes this solution seems difficult if not impossible. This can seem daunting and stressful.. and sometimes it is. However, creative confidence allows us to expand our horizons and gives us the possibility to believe that there is always a creative answer to (almost) any problem. Creative confidence allows us to tap into lateral thinking and then tap into different resources to create unexpected solutions.
This way of understanding problems can be seen from the outside as a “positive approach” to problems. I like to think that instead, it is not a matter of mere positivity but of true skill to use daily.

It’s all very nice you might say, but how do you do it? Creative confidence like any skill can be learned and improved.

I like to use the good old Design Thinking techniques to develop creativity and therefore also creative confidence. Design thinking is a series of steps (therefore absolutely understandable, learnable and applicable) that allow us to start from a problem to arrive at the solution. In a creative way.
The main steps are: empathize, define, design, prototype and test. It is not a linear process but rather a circular one and in my experience, an innovation or new idea can go through many iterations before the process is complete.

Many things have been said and written on Design Thinking and the fields of application of this methodology are now many! I have held workshops on Design Thinking in pharmaceutical companies as well as in textile companies.

Creativity, as the new trends also explain, is no more the prerogative of a few but becomes a tool for transformation and growth on a personal and professional level.

I’ll leave you some reading ideas that could be useful if you want to know more about the subject!

https://www.creativeconfidence.com/

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/creativity

Cover image created with Open AI DALL·E 2