Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 1

False Separations and Creative Connections

‘One fine day in the middle of the night Two dead men got up to fight. Back to back, they faced each other, Drew their swords and shot each other’

Anonymous

Creativity and strategy are much discussed but poorly understood. And whilst there is no shortage of advice on how to apply innovation in business or on how to apply strategic thinking to creative enterprise, much of this is poorly directed. Too often it relies on stereotypes which ignore the complexities and interactions of real creative and strategic processes. Or else it amounts to little more than window-dressing, talking up a particular business idea as ‘creative’ or a creative initiative as ‘strategic’. Most damagingly though, creativity and strategy are seen to be at odds, with out-dated conceptions facing off and taking pot-shots at one another, much like the two dead men in the poem above.

This book aims to peel away these stereotypes and misconceptions to reveal how creativity should be at the heart of strategy and how strategy should be at the heart of creativity. The approach or framework we develop in this book is at once a creative approach to strategy and a strategic approach to creativity.

Having surveyed organizations with concerns ranging from theatre to computer games, from novels to noodles, from baseball to barcodes, from fashion to fighting, we have found that the most successful of these are both creative and strategic. And, moreover, the processes ...