Creativity has become a buzz word in business and in finance. To be able to cope with the fluidity and dynamism of our work and lives, finance professionals need to be creative.
But what does creativity mean? Ultimately, it is about developing, testing, and refining new ideas and then transforming them into solutions that enrich businesses and people, both economically and socially.
Organisations know that employee creativity thrives on freedom and flexibility. But drawing on creativity also requires coordination. Linking ideas, resources, and teams to transfer knowledge and scale up solutions does not happen naturally. It requires planning and infrastructure that nurture creativity and innovation.
Finance can play a critical role in fostering creativity. The finance team has visibility over the entire organisation and affects both strategy and operations. Thus, it is well positioned to link information with questions, and ideas with problems. By underpinning all initiatives and processes, it can provide connections between creative endeavours and innovations in organisations. Finance professionals should develop and improve their own creativity as well. This can help them add value in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.
CFOs can develop creativity in their teams with these four tips:
Create a safe environment
To support creativity, the CFO needs to create a safe environment that challenges the team intellectually and enables dialogue and openness. They can build that safe environment through active listening, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and encouraging diversity of thought. All this helps better understand the status quo and generate ideas to improve it.
Creativity is not magic. It is analytical work. In their book, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, neuroscientist David Eagleman and composer Anthony Brandt say that creativity is about breaking down information, thinking critically about it, and then bending it to achieve a new iteration or blending it with other data to discover a surprising variation.
Some of this is not unusual for finance people, who habitually analyse and synthesise information. What may be less typical is the element of boldness — challenging the status quo with the aim to improve. And since creativity is about disrupting existing patterns of work when those no longer serve, CFOs must put employees at ease to do so.
Foster collaboration
Creativity loves diversity and teamwork. So, the CFO needs to be deliberate about fostering collaboration. This is because, contrary to what some may believe, idea generation is not the bottleneck of innovations. Naturally, we come up with a lot of good ideas. But putting them into practice is crucial — often this is the hurdle that many companies struggle to overcome. Co-authors Michael Morris, Donald Kuratko, and Jeffrey Covin highlight the difference between “dreamers” and “doers” in their book on intrapreneurship. The CFO needs to attract enough dreamers and doers and motivate them to work collaboratively to operationalise creative endeavours.
Mediate
Creative people value freedom, flexibility, challenge, and responsibility. Therefore, it is important to give them freedom, let them choose how to contribute, and encourage them along the way. They should not feel limited by organisational procedures. In fact, often they do not understand the purpose of those procedures. This, of course, poses a challenge to conventional risk management procedures within a business. The CFO is in a position to mediate — communicating the rationale, while also considering how to amend procedures to facilitate creativity. Through effective mediation (ie, bridge building), neither the analytical finance professional nor the creative professional is left in a silo.
Let them play with it and fail fast
Creative people are visionary. Their motivation comes from inside, and they feel rewarded by making a difference. For them, the creative process is enjoyable and often feels like play, not work. The CFO needs to facilitate this flexible mode of work, which includes experimenting for pleasure and puts people at ease to create.
However, the CFO’s position here is delicate. The challenge is to cultivate creativity and, at the same time, set organisational and cultural mechanisms that incentivise creative people to leave their comfort zones, engage in iterations, and learn by failing fast. Both experimentation and failure are key. By trying, failing, learning, and then trying again, creative people achieve optimal results.
Creativity as a way to adapt
Some people say that creativity is intelligence having fun. Others believe that imagination rules the world. For finance professionals, creativity is a way to adapt as the pace of change accelerates and their responsibilities broaden. Thus, they can add value and fulfil the evolving role of trusted business partner.
Irena Teneva is associate technical director–Research & Development at AICPA & CIMA, together as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. She leads a research project on how management accountants can enhance their creativity. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Oliver Rowe at Oliver.Rowe@aicpa-cima.com.
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COURSE
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