Think of science and you’re likely to conjure images of white lab coats and lab benches full of Bunsen burners and test tubes. It’s how we’ve been conditioned to think. You’re probably also thinking it’s very systematic, regimented, linear and dusty. To a point, you’d be right.
Yet science is one of the most creative pursuits known to man.
And I should know. I had no inkling that my first career as a medical research scientist would so perfectly set me up as a strategic growth practitioner down the track.
The purpose of science is to gain understanding, to build knowledge. That understanding is based on observation, experimentation and testing. All of which we use to inform our thinking, our ideas, our creative endeavour. I am completely bewildered as to why the fundamentals of science would be mutually exclusive to the notion of creativity.
Remember we’re talking about creativity in the context of commercial outcomes, aka sales and profit generation. Not art. Not cool shit for cool shit’s sake. When we boil creativity down to the creation of something new that is of value, then we are in the act of creating value, of growing a business.
Greatest discoveries are often mistakes, serendipity, beautiful moments of clarity or wild leaps of imagination.
Think penicillin, Velcro, Camelbak and anaesthetic (check them out, great origin stories).
So broadly speaking, the only real difference in the process is that there is more rigour around testing of the ideas or hypotheses. There is more documentation. There’s more reflection on what happened, what can be replicated, what can be applied for future knowledge. Let me know a CEO or business leader that doesn’t want ‘D’, all of the above.
I’m proud to lead a practice at AFFINITY where we live science every day. It lends credibility to our ideas, strength to our strategy and minimisation of waste when it comes to our media, martech and data recommendations.
We really don’t need to make a choice between either being scientific or wildly creative – it is possible to have both and a better bottom line to boot.
