Creativity in Negotiations and Business
By: John Cousins
Tags: Self Improvement, Entrepreneurship, Creativity, Life, Business

Negotiating is a creative act. To navigate conflict and strike a sustainable win-win agreement you need to think creatively. Creative thinking is a skill that can be developed and improved. Creativity is not just for artists and musicians.

Commercial enterprises need to create new products and services that have value for customers. Innovation and invention require novel ideas. Businesses need to solve problems and overcome obstacles. All solutions to problems start as ideas. These are all creative endeavors.

All solutions to problems start as ideas.

Creativity is usually thought of as an innate talent that people are born with. People are either creative or not, the thinking goes. Creativity is shrouded in mystery and the creative process in mystical mumbo jumbo.

There is the romantic idea of the lone creative genius who has a Eureka moment and something entirely new pops into their head. But creativity is actually synthetic, meaning it is a process that takes known ideas and combines them in a novel way. And this type of creativity can be learned, developed and improved upon.

Creativity is a name for the process of putting concepts and ideas together in new ways. It is a form of systems thinking. It has to do with pattern recognition and pattern forming. It has to do with taking ideas that work in one domain and applying them in another. This is how creativity performs the synthesis of using existing ideas and concepts as raw material and extruding new ideas.

Sir Isaac Newton who invented calculus and physics, two giant ideas that revolutionized our world, said “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

One of the prerequisites of being creative is to remain curious and devour information from a wide range of subjects. Creativity is either combining seemingly disparate concepts in a new way or repurposing an idea from one application to another. This is called lateral thinking.

The concept of lateral thinking is related to creativity and problem solving. Lateral thinking is a concept introduced by Edward de Bono. He has written extensively on the subject since the 1960s. Lateral thinking is an approach to creativity and solving problems that is contrasted with step-by-step logic.

In our current world, we have many newly developed platforms and technologies that can be reassembled in novel ways. Thinking about them laterally and figuring out how they can be used to solve problems is a practical strategy for fostering innovation and invention.

Creativity is combining things in novel ways. Arthur Koestler thought of this combinatorial nature of creativity as “bisociation”. Routine skills of thinking operate on one plane of thought. A creative act of thinking resides in the collision of two or more thought planes that, out of habit, have not been put together before. And it takes imaginative effort.

Humor works in this way. It is a process of putting two things together in a way you weren’t expecting. Creativity works in similar ways in art, science, and business.

Being creative and cultivating creativity is not just for artists. Developing a working knowledge of the creative process is fundamental to being successful. Creativity is critical in all aspects of business. It is a fundamental part of problem solving and conflict resolution. Marketing, Branding, Advertising depend on creative approaches. Brainstorming alternatives in planning negotiations relies on creativity. Products and services and their continuous improvement are creative processes. Deal making is always creative. Leadership is an art; it is creative. Business is a creative act.

Creativity is combinatorial and innovation is collaborative. Getting a diverse group of people to collaborate towards goals that require creative solutions is the essence of managing and leading. You need to get people from different disciplines with different expertise to contribute as peers to an outcome that isn’t known in advance. You have to be open to ideas regardless of their origin and create the right environment for them to flourish.

Ideas can come from anywhere. Have humility in the face of creativity. Senior people in companies don’t have a monopoly on ideas. Neither does long experience. In fact, experience can hinder creative thinking by limiting possibilities because “it’s always been done this way”. Encourage ideas from all staff. You need all the ideas you can get.

Cultivate a creative environment. David Ogilvy, the original Mad Man of advertising, is helpful here:

“Kill grimness with laughter. Maintain an atmosphere of informality. Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom.”

There is a tension between action and contemplation in management and leadership. Being decisive is a key attribute of a good leader. But it is equally important to think and plan strategically and that takes time and contemplation. We have to be thoughtful and disciplined not to let our tendency to act all the time get in the way of giving ourselves time for deeper uninterrupted thought.