Despite what many believe, being a creative company doesn’t mean you hire designers to make your product pretty and it doesn’t mean you’re on top of all the latest office layout trends. These things can certainly be a part of your creative company, but it takes a bit more than that to label yourself a creative business.
Being a creative company is more about exploring your industry and repeatedly asking questions that nobody else has ever asked. Once your question is known, you have a path to find the answer. It’s along that path a truly creative company makes itself known as such with its process for finding a solution.
Being a creative company is a 2 step process. The first step is to define a problem and the second step is to find your question by asking “why”.
How we’ll find the problem is by asking one of two questions:
1 – What are the pain points everyone has in your industry?
What are the pain points you and/or your industry have that people often chalk up to “that’s just how we’ve always done it”. We all know this as the worst saying in business but it exists in almost every company still. Think about the tasks people do that nobody likes. Think about the parts of your process that don’t make clear sense. Think about the things that often leave people confused or stressed.
or
2 – What are the pain points of your customers?
What are some things your customer dislikes about your company or industry? Why does that thing exist and how can it be changed or removed? Think about the complaints you may have received. Are there any that came up more than once or twice?
The “Why” Test.
Once you find one of these answers, you can then begin the “Why” test where you keep asking why to every answer until you get to the root of the problem.
(Example)
Let’s use an app development company as our example of how this would work.
A major pain point for my customers is that they hate the ads we put in our app.
Why?
Because they take up much of the screen and take away from the experience of using the app.
Why?
Because we rely on advertising to fund our projects.
Why?
Because we need money to run a business.
Only once you get to this answer are you done. You can then look at all the answers and come up with questions or solutions for each “why”. You’ll notice that you may be able to fix the problem at a high level by just making the ads smaller and less obstructive, or you could look deeper. Maybe the problem is that they’re relying on advertising for revenue. The question then becomes, is there another way to fund the project?
And just like that, we have our question to get us started down a path of curiosity and creativity.
Take note that the question itself isn’t what makes a company creative but it is a perfect starting point.
Now go ahead and give this a try and see what you come up with.
