Creativity: missing from the sustainability jigsaw?

There have been great strides on sustainable business in the last few years - from supply chain management to reporting and monitoring. Yet for someone like me with a creative background (it's a little-known secret I have two arts degrees), I can't help but ask if any of this is at all ‘creative'.

Creativity can be described as the ‘phenomenon whereby a person creates something new (a product, a solution, a work of art etc.) that has some kind of value'. And it's hugely important for unleashing the wave of new thinking and approaches - in science and technology, business, societies and behaviours, even policy - that is needed for step changes to a sustainable future.

As part of our own work on creativity and sustainability, not long ago we ran an ambitious workshop for our Network, entitled "Creativity Matters". We asked our partners and members to send in their biggest sustainability challenges, and then designed the sessions around some of our creativity techniques, to tackle the challenges live at the event.

We used four techniques:

Learning from leaders: taking inspiration and ideas from companies that already excel at sustainable innovation across their processes and projects, products and R&D.

Futures for innovation: using futures thinking, trends and scenarios to help overcome ‘locked-in behaviour' - it helps open people's minds to the prospect and acceptance of change.

Personas: using short descriptions of people's typical views, wants and needs to develop effective ways to engage different audiences, such as consumers, colleagues, suppliers and customers. How can you meet these personas' needs in a sustainable way? What sustainable products and services might cater to this?

Disruptive innovation cards: generating game-changing ideas using a set of 13 cards we've developed, that each feature a disruptive innovation method and include questions, facts, inspiration and examples to help develop new concepts for sustainability.

Participants worked in groups on a particular challenge. After using our idea generation techniques, they prototyped their best ideas (yes, Sustainability Directors/Managers using modelling clay, card, tape, coloured crayons!) and we had an illustrator with us to bring the final ideas to life through pictures.

The energy levels and the feedback on the day were amazing. I sensed that participants felt they were approaching sustainability in new, innovative and unexpected ways. The ideas and solutions generated were extremely smart too.

Here are a couple of the ideas in more depth:

Connecting health, well-being and sustainable living

We used consumer-based personas to tackle the question: ‘How can we help gym members to connect health and wellbeing with a sustainable future?' The group looked for ways to connect lifestyle choices with overall health management at the gym, and to encourage lower-impact living. Focusing on travel, home energy and food for their strong links with health and sustainable lifestyles, they came up with Gymsmart.

Gym members accrue points in relation to the energy they burn at the gym and in their day-to-day travel. Points earned through exercise can be invested in a range of health and wellbeing services also provided by the gym - participants enter a cycle of self-reinforcing increasing health and decreasing environmental impacts.

The points system works through i-phone software that gives participants a health points total each month by adding up points earned in a range of smaller apps: (1) apps to calculate the energy used/points earned outside the gym e.g. ‘pedometer app'/‘cycling app' (2) a gym app that totals workout points on each visit (3) athletic event apps that accrue points e.g. for running a marathon/playing football on a Saturday.

This can be combined with social networking sites to allow scheme members to compare the biggest point earners through competitions over the year.

The group then prototyped the idea and our illustrator provided a drawing.

Overcoming locked-in thinking patterns

Another group used a ‘futures-for-innovation' process to tackle this challenge: ‘Many in our organisation know we need to change and are aware of the issues, but are unable to overcome locked-in limitations. How do we overcome internal, locked-in patterns of thinking?'

The group used two different possible scenarios describing the world in 2025, brainstormed ideas for how supermarkets could provide access to food in the future, and prototyped Big Mother's Supermarket.

Welcome to Big Mother's Supermarket!
On arrival, our shopper Tom selects his virtual shopping assistant Amy. Amy accompanies Tom to his pre-shopping health check. The monitor detects that his cholesterol is a bit high so Amy creates some healthy menu options, based on his previous preferences and what ingredients his ‘linked-in' fridge tells her he already has at home.

Tom tries a few sample meals for the week ahead to choose from. He can also select whether to have convenient ‘ready-meal' options, or to have the extra ingredients he needs delivered so that he can enjoy cooking the recipe himself at home. He's allocated a delivery time for the food he orders, but it's not convenient so he opts to collect it from his secure neighbourhood food drop off point.

As he leaves, Amy lets him know his neighbour Bill has a crop of apples ready to pick in his garden; Tom can have a kilo in exchange for fixing Bill's bike chain. Tom decides to pop in on his way home.

All this was achieved in just a two and half-hour session and I'm convinced you can apply these techniques and creative methods to pretty much any sustainability problem.

Hopefully you also get a small sense of how enthusiastic, energetic, and innovative this group were on the day - and a snapshot of what can be achieved with a healthy dose of creativity for sustainability. So, to add to my colleague Fiona's call to creatives to get sustainable (link needed) , let's also get much more creative on sustainability.

Contact Chris Sherwin with questions or comments, post comments below, or click here for more (link needed) about our innovation work.