When I was a boy, we lived in a small house, eight of us in total. One room in that house in the corner of the basement was dedicated as an art room for my father. In the evenings and sometimes on the weekends throughout the long winters, my father would go down to that room and work away on his oil paintings.
I remember watching him as he mixed his paints on his wooden palette and the unforgettable scent of the paint and turpentines. I was fascinated with the creative process as he applied different layers to the painting and how the pictures would take shape over days and weeks to become something beautiful that eventually hung on a wall in our house.
Right now, business owners around the world are getting creative. They are mixing up the different aspects of their business on a big palette, using their imagination to modify their current reality to form something that they hope they can be proud of in the future.
Over the past few weeks and months, I have had the pleasure of working with a number of business owners who have focused on diversifying or pivoting their businesses to enable them to create something different. Some are attempting to shift their business model online. Others are reframing the business with new systems and processes to navigate through uncertain waters and there are those that are taking the canvas and painting over the old image with something totally new.
Many artists will tell you that before they start a project, they have a concept of what they are trying to create. They may not know exactly what the end result is going to look like, but they have a picture in their mind of what they want to fashion. Sometimes they will draw out a sketch, and other times they will copy a picture. Unfortunately, in business we forget that important concept of getting clarity about what we want the end result to look like before we begin. The muddled outcome is for many a picture that no one wants to see.
Messing up on a canvas usually means that we have lost a few dollars in paint and a few hours of our time. It might not worry us because we have benefited in the process through the stress reduction associated with doing something creative.
Messing up in business can be more serious. We might invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, in addition to weeks, months or years of work and energy, and then the business is an absolute failure for the simple reason that we didn’t take the time to sketch out what we were creating. A sketch in business might be a drawing of the business, but probably more likely it is the effort put into thinking through our value proposition, determining what it is that our customer will benefit from and then testing our assumptions.
Recently, I was working with a business owner who wanted to shift his business entirely. As we discussed his concepts, I thought I saw some flawed assumptions. Rather than discount the idea entirely, I asked him how he was going to test out the idea. He worked through a variety of options and decided that he was going to try to create a minimal viable product. In other words, he was going to try to test out the idea on a few of his ideal clients for a minimal cost without painting the whole picture or building the whole business. This would allow him to see if there was value for his potential customers before he made the whole shift he was considering.
Creativity is essential in business and we need it to ensure that our businesses are able use it to create and adapt products or services that meet the changing needs of our customers or clients. Engaging our teams to facilitate the necessary ingenuity that will allow us to survive and thrive in changing economic climates is essential today more than ever. Using common sense and practical measures to test the validity of our creative output is even more essential than the creativity itself.
My father never became a great artist and over the decades was known more for his logical thinking than his artistic endeavors, yet his art lives on in the one or two paintings that hang on the walls of his house and in the minds of his children.
- Dave Fuller, MBA, is an award-winning business coach and the author of the creative business book Profit Yourself Healthy. Looking to create a beautiful business but not sure how to design and paint your creation right now? Email Dave@profityourselfhealthy.com
