An Integrated Perspective On Traversing The Era Of Productivity Scarcity To Establish The Creative Paradigm & Let Innovation Flourish

Behavioral elements such as anxieties, resistance to change, inertia, push and pull are omnipresent forces that dominate and inhibit the proclivity to be creative and adopt new standards that provide a compelling opportunity to drive collective intelligence. Creativity as it stands, is the new productivity and more so in an age where Augmented Intelligence is on the rise as the third industrial revolution . Management and entrepreneurial pursuits in fostering creativity has led to an adoption of intelligence machines to perform tasks that were usually time consuming, laborious and repetitive – thereby allowing leaders to focus on adding breakthrough insight within the value chain i.e. thinking creatively and strategically!

Today, machines can accomplish a huge percentage of our daily tasks just as well as we can (if not better), and they do it for a lower price tag. Obviously, this has led to serious, negative ramifications for labour markets, but there is also upside. We are finally freed up — and disproportionately rewarded — for doing something only humans can do: be creative.

From <https://marker.medium.com/creativity-is-the-new-productivity-d287d6ad7533>

Creativity is not rooted in methodological framework but is more so emergent. You need to create the right environment and enable forces for change to flourish by integrating a dynamic range of network partners in your broader business ecosystem. This is delineated in my article “An Innovation And Learning Framework For Business Model Evolution” wherein its clear that “

Creativity is not rooted in methodological frameworks but is more so emergent. You need to create the right environment and enable forces for change to flourish by integrating a dynamic range of network partners in your broader business ecosystem. This is delineated in my article wherein its clear that ” just like the gears of a manual car, everyone needs to traverse first, second, third, fourth and fifth gear to conceive, develop, augment and deliver [creative] value. The value chain itself needs to have contribution from all players in the system whom are not only inspired but operating more like a soccer team where anyone can take the ball and score the goal”

This creates a radical re-think to how top down and waterfall like chains of command  and information flows need to evolve to the new paradigm. By doing so, “primary and support activities leverage the gamut of internal and external organisational resources effectively and nullifies the propensity for any disconnects between satisfying customer requirements, product and service engineering and internal operations. When this is achieved, you are driving an innovation imperative on the business model“.

To re-iterate, these network partners can play the following strategic and tactical roles such as:

• Asset builders deliver value through the use of physical goods. These companies make, market, distribute, sell, and lease physical things.
• Service providers deliver value through skilled people. These companies hire and develop workers who provide services to customers for which they charge.
• Technology creators deliver value through ideas. These companies develop and sell intellectual property, such as software, analytics, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology.
• Network orchestrators deliver value through connectivity. These companies create a platform that participants use to interact or transact with the many other members of the network. They may sell products, build relationships, share advice, give reviews, collaborate, and more.

This type of interactions between partners lead to intra and inter company collaboration which fuels a strategic innovation. Often it makes sense to employ the rules inlaid in the Ten Rules For Strategic Innovators, which I did incorporate in my Effective Executive Journal submission in 2013 (read a copy here wherein a NewCo is created from CoreCo using three simple frameworks through the forgetting, borrowing and learning challenges. This is a creative process in its own right and will lead radically new business models, products, services and markets.

This concept and trajectory is confirmed by Clayton Christensen in his new book “Competing Against Luck: The Story Of Innovation and Customer Choice” wherein he asserts that “circumstances of struggle always existed; Innovations have just gotten better and better in the way we can respond to them. So no matter how new or revolutionary your product idea may be, the circumstances of struggle already exist. Consequently, in order to hire your new solution, by definition customers must fire some current compensating behaviour or suboptimal solution—including firing the solution of doing nothing at all.”. This reveals a didactic truth in that you need to not only nurture the right mindset internally but you must also acknowledge that “The anxieties that come into play are powerful: anxiety about the cost, anxiety of learning something new, and anxiety of the unknown can be overwhelming”. Collectively, these are powerful forces inhibiting creativity and adoption of new products, services and mindsets which go back to our prime instincts that are delineated through the three brains concept.

It’s true that in order to nurture innovation within all ecosystem partners and transcend from the era of productivity scarcity to one that is full of creativity; we need to nurture capabilities internally, externally and create intra and intercompany networks and collaborations. Future business competition will not be between businesses but between business networks, and to this effect, it’s important to establish the tenets of distributed leadership, emergent strategy, agile working practices and collaboration to drive an adoption of the age of creativity. I stumbled across an interesting article that was kindly shared on LinedIn by a Chief Product Officer of a fintech company which talks extensively about the natural progress through these ages and which is relevant for further reading on how creativity is the new productivity. I am sharing the diagrams from the article below and further reading can be explored here.

I very much accept that we as human beings need to embrace and nurture the shifts between the era of productivity scarcity to productivity abundance and ultimately to the era of creativity!
New marketing methodologies will emerge and disrupt existing models but not without collaboration!
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