Creative Management in the Creative Economy
Creative Management:
Decentralizing the Intelligence of Decision
Creative Economy? There was a time where you’d be either independently wealthy, a self-employed artisan or a rural subsistence farmer. For centuries those were the only three options. But then the inventions of the power loom and the steam engine kicked off the Industrial Revolution and things changed forever. Once the revolution was in full swing the once semi-independent rural workforce moved en masse towards metropolitan areas and became employees, working for a ‘boss’ in urban factories. At first, the workers of the Industrial Age were mainly employed as unskilled factory workers, but overtime this shifted from traditional industry to an economy based on information computerization. In other words, a knowledge-based economy in which most of us have desk jobs and work in the service industry. Currently, however, we are living at the end of this Information Age and moving into an age of innovation and creativity.
The Creative Economy
In their 2010 Creative Economy Report, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) claimed that “[a]dequately nurtured, creativity fuels culture, infuses a human-centred development and constitutes the key ingredient for job creation, innovation and trade while contributing to social inclusion, cultural diversity and environmental sustainability.” In other words, the creative economy as a concept deals with the interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology in a contemporary world dominated by images, sounds, texts and symbols. Together, artists, cultural non-profits, and creative businesses produce and distribute cultural goods and services that generate jobs, revenue, and improve the overall quality of life; a thriving cultural sector leads to thriving communities. Today, the creative industries are among the most dynamic sectors in the world economy providing new opportunities for developing countries to leapfrog into emerging high-growth areas of the world economy.
Wonderful as this might sound, one sector often overlooked in an Age of Creativity is management. How does one effectively manage the creative worker? Traditionally, management was (and sadly in some cases still is) heavily reliant on the hierarchies and the command-control behaviour that was born out of the Industrial Revolution, which saw the breakdown of labour into specialised tasks. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, this model worked well for most factories and businesses were just cogs in the machine and certainly helped them grow. Today, however, both the market and the workforce have changed and organizations can no longer simply rely on division of labour and central command-control to be successful.
Although management still continues to use hierarchical centralized control, over time, organizations started to realize that their workers were more than just cogs in a machine. Many have adopted innovating tools/practices to help their managers get more control, optimize workflows and improve the governance of staff. In terms of evolution, this has been a good step, but it’s still relying too much on hierarchies, centralized command-control and specialization. These days companies are continuously threatened with disruption, digitisation and ‘glocalization’. Moreover, problems have become more complex and staff more diverse and less loyal. In short, the Creative Economy needs a new form of command-control to meet these challenges.
Creative Management
Traditional decision processes, most of the time, are too slow. This is because the intelligence of decision is centralized and specialized, creating a series of bottlenecks in the process of making decisions. The market is fast and volatile. Every day, it demands quicker answers to its problems and needs. If the decision-making capability is centralized and specialized, an organisation will lose momentum quickly. To addresses this problem, the intelligence of decision needs to be decentralized. This doesn’t that anyone can just do whatever they want. It means allowing the right people to make the right decisions, at the right time, which will produce results in the fastest possible manner. As long as the right constraints are in place, decentralized control will create maximum value for any organisation. Not too bad, right?
It is important to stress that creative management does not mean getting rid of management, nor is it a remodelled form of communism. Rather, it is a commonsensical way to transform the role of the Manager into an enabler for the collective intelligence of decision. A creative manager fosters an environment set up to help individuals and teams to use the best possible intelligence to make informed decisions. It is also important to notice that creativity is more about attitude then structure. Of course, the tools and practises will be easier to implement in more flexibly and organically structured organisations , but it is possible to creatively manage even the most hierarchical organisations.
Any manager can be creative regardless of their organization’s structure. As long as a manager aims to manage the system, not the people, the people will take care of themselves and consequently, the organisation will maintain or regain its momentum in the market.
[T]here you are.
