In rapidly changing market environments, creative strategy is more important than ever. Organisations need to continually stimulate creativity to get to more useful, more simple, more inspirational ideas.
It forces the question, ‘is there a perfect recipe, or apt activities – an optimal condition for ideas to surface and take flight?’ Or do we just take a shower and hope they will come to us? To be fair to the humble shower, it is scientifically proven to prime a person for creativity – releasing dopamine, relaxing the body and distracting the mind. However, unless you’re down the Turkish bathhouse, there’s typically an important component missing: other voices.
A diversity of people, together in an environment where they are able to collide, connect and converge different perspectives to unlock new thinking.
Take the world’s capital cities. The epicentres of human creativity. London, Paris, Tel Aviv, São Paulo, New York – points where cultures converge and positive transformations in the arts, architecture, music and business are constantly happening.
You’ll find a diversity of nationalities and ethnicities, but also new technologies, knowledge, traditions, styles and sub-cultures all flowing together. As knowledge is shared, styles crosshatch, and opinions rub up against each other, there are inevitable moments of harmony but also points of discord where subtle and seismic eruptions of creativity are able to occur.
It’s the points of discord, the tensions that form as a product of diversity, that you’d assume are less useful – maybe you’d try to avoid – because they get in the way of consensus; the ability to identify the ‘right’ idea.
However, tensions are at the centre of any enduring creative.
As Medium puts it, “tension is the grit around which you can build a great brand”.
Perhaps this is something we can then orchestrate at a more intimate level. Bringing together a diverse composition of people and perspectives to create purposeful tensions in order to stimulate creativity.
It is achieved to great effect in music. The term polyphony, meaning ‘many sounds’, is the combination of distinct melodic lines in musical scores perceived as independent yet fundamentally related, without one being superior to the other. Think of birds versing us with their morning chorus, all different pitches and sounds crossing and matching yet making beautiful, often extraordinary music.
It also exists in story writing. Dostoevsky was the creator of the polyphonic novel, enhancing his prose by achieving “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” Mikhail Bakhtin describes; “a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices”. The result is an anthology of dynamic storytelling that inspired a new way of thinking and style of writing that changed the literary world forever.
As in cities, as in music, as in stories, the same is true of the rhythm and flow of a creative strategy process. The more open we are to a plurality of independent and unmerged voices throughout the creative process the more beautiful and extraordinary potential ideas will percolate.
Malcolm Forbes once described diversity in this way, simply “the art of thinking independently together”.
We’re in a much more advantageous time where DE&I is at the core of company strategy ensuring fair representation of different social identities. An important evolution for businesses for many reasons. And in this context the crux for creative problem solving. Whether it’s sex, race, age, religion, even different personality types – tailoring a diverse team around the problem and creating a space for perspectives to be shared will deliver richer and more dynamic solutions.
Yes, more diversity of voices means more complexity to manage. But it’s the good kind of complexity. The kind that forces us to dismantle old or easy ways of thinking – the more linear, sequential problem solving that often fails to reflect the dynamic realties of organisations, modern markets, or culture.
Instead, we are motivated to look beneath the surface to get to a deeper level; to understand the intricacies of the context, to see the interconnected whole of the problem rather than fragments, and thus to think in new and dynamic ways.
So, as you embark on the next strategic journey, orchestrate a ‘polyphonic moment’ of diverse voices and perspectives. Better yet, encourage an always-on ‘polyphonic culture’ to collide knowledge in new ways, spark positive tensions, stimulate imagination and ultimately strengthen your creative strategies with bigger and better ideas.
To repurpose words from the composer Arvo Part, when you have a diverse creative team, “the human voice is the most perfect instrument of all”.
Written by Chris Allan and Hugh Roberts
