Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

—E. M. Forster

The great challenge for organizations and the individuals who comprise them is to come up with sufficient creativity to solve their problems and those of their clients. When viewed from the perspective of an entire organization, creativity becomes, essentially, a supply and demand problem, as unromantic as the need for the raw materials that make up the goods in a factory.

The paradox is that as the world becomes faster and more connected, this supply and demand problem becomes tougher and tougher to solve. As each link in the chain of all our interconnected systems—infrastructure, health care, finance, client services, media—becomes stronger, the weaker links have to get stronger. Standards that may have supported society 50, 20, or even just 10 years ago are no longer good enough. Economist David Autor expressed this idea in a TEDx talk in 2016, and used it to help explain why, despite a century and a quarter of continued automation, the proportion of people with jobs has always gone up.

So how do we solve the supply and demand problem of creativity for ourselves and our institutions?

It's hard to cut through the noise of everyday life and develop our best ideas when we're constantly distracted by a stream of information and stimuli. For creatives, technology enables collaborative processes and sparks inspiration, but the widespread accessibility of information and our growing dependency on digital tools can also discourage divergent thinking. When it's easy to see what everyone else is doing, it can be harder to come up with novel ideas.

For individuals, inventive ideas come from conversations with other people as well as in moments of complete solitude. For companies, creativity comes from a mixture of conditions as well as from allowing a constant flow of new ideas and people. Most important of all is creating a culture where people can make authentic connections with one another.

Companies that strive to have the best ideas first need to build a complete, holistic culture of creativity. Here are some places to start.

Building a Content Culture

Every company is built by humans who come together each day in pursuit of a shared objective. Businesses express a vision through company values and mission statements with the hope that both will permeate all corners of an organization. Having a clearly stated mission defines the company's identity and can bring people across departments together.

In the same way, a strong content marketing program, in which the brand has a clearly defined voice, set of goals, and the will to stay true to its identity, can unify an organization. The most successful content programs have buy in from across the organization, especially from the top. And they can give employees a clear understanding of how their day‐to‐day tasks ladder up to the larger business goals of the company.

Unless your company is in a heavily regulated industry, where there are restraints to what your brand can say, allowing creatives to take ownership of their projects will allow them to bring unmatched energy and imagination to their work that, well, most brands lack. Once the right people are on board with a shared vision, leadership should take a step back. Provide support when needed, but allow your creators to work independently. The results will surprise you.

When employees are able to be creative within a framework, the content becomes a reflection of the organization's company culture. It shines through in writing, design, social posts, and videos. These personal touches of each individual are the mark of truly original content. It makes the brand one of a kind, which is what your customers want. Collectively, these personal touches are what set you apart from your competitors.

A business is a set of structures, but it's also a collection of minds, personalities, and attitudes. Content is a method by which the sum of individuals makes up the brand's identity. When you have a diverse group of people with a range of talents and areas of expertise working together to tell the brand's story, it's an expression of the brand's culture—a more genuine way of communicating compared to how it happened years ago, when press releases were the primary method for external communications and PR departments were gatekeepers.

In the nascent stages of the digital transformation, public relations departments at corporations were adept at sharing messages but they didn't understand emerging social platforms. Meanwhile, marketers quickly adopted new digital tools but struggled with messaging. Today, these departments are interdependent and reliant on many other groups across the company. It's simply impossible to tell your best stories effectively in silos.

At companies where there's a culture for content marketing, there's a transfer of knowledge happening between people with years of industry expertise and storytellers—nuggets of gold that were once buried are being extracted and prized. This collaboration is the best way to authentically connect with other people and liberate the knowledge within your company that's dying to get out.

It all starts with hiring curious people who think outside the box and are passionate about your brand.

The best teams come from diverse backgrounds. Former journalists are obvious hires for many content studios and brands, because they bring objectivity, strong editorial judgment, specific expertise, and speed to their work. But consider screenwriters, fiction writers, and bloggers as well.

On the video team, consider the former reality television producer as well as the documentary filmmaker and the former news producer. The applicant for the illustrator role, who majored in ceramics at art school but has an incredible Tumblr filled with her work—hire her. The most talented people I've met in this industry have come from the most unexpected places. You want to hire doers, makers, and collaborators who can inspire others and aren't afraid of hard work. Not much else should matter beyond that. It's diversity that drives innovation.

After you've got your people in place, empower them to pursue projects they're most interested in with people from different teams. At SJR and many other content agencies, regular brainstorms help us come up with our best ideas. With people from editorial, video, design, account management, and social in the same room from the start, we're able to conceptualize big‐picture ideas for clients as well as plot the logistics and feasibility of a project. We also ask our clients to help us dig, so we'll meet with various teams and subject matter experts to hunt for interesting story angles.

A collaborative approach to storytelling puts everyone on an even playing field, regardless of title or years in the industry. Today's content creators—both inside corporations and at agencies—operate as startups do, with speed and a lack of hierarchical roadblocks. It gives creatives the freedom to do their best work.

To be a successful storyteller, you have to have the mind‐set that everything is interesting—you just have to search for the unexpected angle.

As author Nicholson Baker eloquently said in the New York Times:

Art can be scrutinized in hundreds of ways. The only thing you can be sure of about how people will perceive art is that their perceptions will differ. Consensus will never be reached. At brands, not reaching a consensus on a piece of work prevents it from seeing the light of day.

When too many different stakeholders are involved, it might feel tempting to rewrite a blog post or delete it entirely. Or you might ditch a piece of design because the font and colors just feel off. Resist the temptation. Don't doubt yourself. Especially at the start, overediting takes away the storyteller's unique voice. The personal touch disappears. High standards are important but so is trusting the creative judgment of the people you've hired.

As your people tell stories, it's important to remember that there's no such thing as perfect in creative work. Embrace it. Imperfection is what makes creations human and ultimately meaningful to the user. Publishing consistently, with authentic stories that provide value to the reader the same way service journalism does, matters more than striving for unattainable perfectionism.

When you discourage perfection, you encourage experimentation, and that's a major culture booster. Open‐mindedness, curiosity, and diverse perspectives lead to more creative work. Incentivize and reward it as much as possible.

Inspiring Organization‐wide Creativity

Culture and creativity go hand in hand. Many times, especially at corporations with a lot of hierarchy, the absence of creative ideas isn't because your employees aren't creative people. It's because your employees aren't encouraged to bring their ideas to the surface. The bottleneck starts at the top.

Google's founders, for example, tracked the progress of ideas that upper management had backed as opposed to ideas that had been executed without support from higher‐ups. They found that employees' autonomy and success went hand in hand.²

Solve that by creating an atmosphere of trust, in which employees of all skill levels, including interns, are encouraged to bring forth big ideas, even if they aren't fully fleshed out. Then embolden them to bring ideas to colleagues, rather than upper‐level management. If you have the right people in place, there won't be widespread anarchy—there will be uninterrupted invention.

Don't forget to reward teamwork as often as you reward individual innovation, perhaps by tying a percentage of employees' bonuses to how well they work with others. Find a way to make collaboration a metric for success, and measure it using analytics tools as Intuit does when it tracks where new product ideas come from and how they improved business outcomes.³

Innovation should come from collaboration outside your company's walls as well. The Wright brothers didn't build and recognize the commercial success of the airplane on their own. The aviation enthusiasts openly discussed their developments with other hobbyists and built upon others' discoveries. There's a reason why open source software is so innovative; collaboration overcomes technical challenges and advances progress in a way that individuals most often cannot. This revered depiction we have of Steve Jobs as a lone genius who invented the iPhone all on his own couldn't be farther from the truth. Jobs would have never been able to build it by himself—he needed feedback from people inside and outside of his company to find the best path forward.

It's foolish to view people from outside your company only as competitors. You certainly don't want to share proprietary trade secrets with everyone, but there is so much value in collaborating outside of your company, and leaders don't encourage it enough. In the early days of SJR, a lot of my time went toward building a massive network, because I knew I would fail fast if I expected the company to succeed as an island unto itself.

Like the ever‐evolving technology industry, content marketing is in its nascent stages. The only way we're going to get better at telling stories is by learning from each other's failures. Running into difficulties building a virtual reality app? Connect with other developers. Unsure how your client might react to a proposed campaign? Ask a sister agency for a second opinion. It doesn't make your team appear weak when you ask for help—we all need it sometimes. It's time we problem solve together.

As much as I'm an advocate for collaboration, there's research we can't ignore around how individuals have their most creative moments.

Individual Creativity

There's plenty of research around how employees can unleash inner creativity. Meditation, exercising, walking through nature, and travelling somewhere new are just a few recommendations.

Inspiration often strikes when we least expect it, at moments when we aren't trying hard to be creative. It might take hours, even months of diligent practice, research, mental preparation, and trial and error, but when it comes down to the wire, we get the best from ourselves by relaxing and trusting in our abilities. Chinese philosophers, from Confucius to Lao Tzu, called this state of mind wu‐wei, and it means “try‐not‐try.”

Your physical workspace is just as important as your headspace, though.

Today's employers have torn down cubicles, walls, and corner offices in exchange for open office floor plans to encourage a more democratic way of working that increases the exchange of information as well as camaraderie. Privacy is a luxury that few have access to. According to the New York Times, roughly 70 percent of office workers inhabit open floor plans, and the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.⁴

Open offices are great for collaboration, but they can stifle creativity. When solving logistical problems, a certain amount of friction and random interaction is crucial. But those workers who are doing your deep thinking for you need permission to go off on uninterrupted journeys of discovery and intense, solitary work. These journeys sometimes last a few hours and sometimes a few days. The important thing is to let your team members know that they're allowed to go on them.

And psychologists have determined that many extraordinarily creative people have preferred to do their most important work alone, including Sir Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, J. K. Rowling, and Frederic Chopin.

What does this mean for the worker? Private time is equally as important as brainstorming, and if your office doesn't have enough private rooms, it's essential that you allow your employees the flexibility to work from anywhere. Some people need white walls and a grey carpet to avoid distractions. Some people need to have their desk face a window. Others need to have their desk face a wall.

When SJR moved into a bigger office, we built many private rooms into our floor plan. And we allow people to do some of their work from home.

We can hack our creative processes by figuring out when we're most “up”—if you work best at 5 A.M., then get up and do it. If you find that you get a daily burst of inspiration right when you should be going to bed, gather your tools and stay up late. If your habits mean going to bed at 9 P.M. or 9 A.M., so be it. Especially in the age of digital collaboration, it doesn't matter that we show up to the same office from 9 to 5. You're worth more to your company if you can produce a regular stream of work. It's up to you to let others know how to make that happen, and then stick to it.

Some creative people tend to have certain personality traits: unconventionality, curiosity, openness to experiences and one's inner life, tolerance for disarray and complexity, high emotional intelligence, and confidence to express themselves without fear of judgment are a few. Some of us are born more creative than others; the brain works differently for everybody. Creative people aren't “right brained,” rather, neurologists have determined they use many regions inside the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes of the brain at once.⁵ And researchers at Cornell University found that creative people have smaller corpus callosums, the nerve bundles that connect the left and right hemispheres of the brain.⁶ To an extent, creativity is not malleable. But it can be nurtured. Here's how you can coach employees to be more creative:

• Provide feedback as much as possible. In a study with 456 supervisors and employees, researchers found that employees given feedback perform more creatively than their counterparts.
• Challenge people with projects they love. Pretty obvious, right? Well, science backs it up, too—employees who are intrinsically motivated by projects they enjoy and that interest them often come up with more creative solutions. Meanwhile, research shows that extrinsic motivators, such as financial incentives, do not inspire greater creativity.⁷
• Foster your employees' expertise in areas they're passionate about. Without a highly relevant skill set or knowledge of a specific area, they won't be able to improvise. So give them opportunities to learn; offer to pay for design classes for your designers, or send your writers to writing workshops.
• Remind your team that at the start of the creative process, a mixture of ideas will come to mind, both good and bad. The trick is to avoid too much judgment, keep moving, exploring, and experimenting until you find the next thing that fascinates you. For those of us whose careers demand creativity, we have no choice but to be like sharks—in constant motion.
• Encourage them to take risks that could end in failure. As philosopher Daniel Dennett has said, “The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them—especially not from yourself.” The prospect of failure is terrifying; no one wants to feel vulnerable, but the potential for growth is enormous. If you're looking to do truly innovative work, you can't plot all your moves before you make them. You have to embrace the possibility of failure and openly explore how to learn from it. “We must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future,” Pixar co‐founder Ed Catmull says.

Connectivity

Aside from having distinct creativity, what separates successful content marketers and strategic communicators from those who are perceived as out of touch is an ability to truly connect with people.

Content created by other consumers, not brands, is 35 percent more memorable and 50 percent more trusted, according to research from the global research company Ipsos.⁸ Why? Marketers aren't human enough. They aren't listening to consumers enough, engaging in meaningful conversations with them, or going off a corporate script to deliver better, bigger, more delightful customer experiences. And not enough brands are communicating values that individuals want to be affiliated with.

As I've said before, consumers today have many options, and more than ever they choose particular brands to communicate something personal about their own beliefs and priorities.⁹ The best way to establish and reinforce common values is to create content that's so highly specific it defines not only the brand, but the customer.

Expressing a strong stance on social issues and taking action—to lessen the effects of climate change, source materials ethically, support hot‐button legislation such as gay marriage, or donate a portion of profits to charity, for example—has become an expectation for consumers, especially millennials. According to a study by Horizon Media, some 81 percent of millennials expect companies to make a public commitment to good corporate citizenship.¹⁰ Another report by Mintel reveals that 56 percent of U.S. consumers will stop buying from companies they perceive are unethical.¹¹ At the time of this writing, in the early months of the Trump presidency, the pressure on brands to take sides on political issues has only increased. As one commentator put it, after the election of Trump, the “sidelines” disappeared from under our feet. It's no longer a differentiator for a brand to have some involvement in social issues; it's a requirement.

If you really want to connect with consumers, involve them as much as you can in your work.

Taylor Swift, arguably the music industry's best marketer, is the most adept at this. She has invited fans to her house to listen to her album before it drops as well as solicited their feedback on new material. Fans starred alongside her in the music video for “Shake It Off.” And she pays extremely close attention to her supporters on social media—giving some Christmas presents as well as making her brokenhearted fans break‐up playlists and giving them heartfelt advice. Her latest album 1989 included personal, hidden photos and messages to fans.¹² Collectively, these kinds of engagements led 1989 to sell a staggering 1.287 million copies in seven days, the single largest sales week for one album since 2002, when Eminem's The Eminem Show moved just over 1.3 million copies, according to Forbes.¹³

Of course, brands don't attract the same level of insane fandom as Swift does. But they can engage customers in smarter ways, such as leveraging user‐generated content. Last summer Coca‐Cola's “Share a Coke” campaign featured 250 popular names and colloquialisms such as “BFF” and “Bro” printed on labels where “Coca‐Cola” would be printed and encouraged customers to share bottles with friends and family. Coca‐Cola also asked consumers to share their experiences on Twitter with the hashtag #ShareaCoke and users who did had their photos featured on the company's website and on billboards. Coke saw a 2 percent jump in sales after introducing the campaign, and more than 500,000 photos were shared with the #ShareaCoke hashtag.¹⁴ The brand also gained more than 25 million Facebook followers.

Millennials prefer people over brands, and 84 percent of the demographic say user‐generated content (UGC) on company websites has at least some influence on what they buy, according to a Bazaarvoice report.¹⁵ Additionally, 86 percent say that UGC is generally a good indicator of the quality of a brand or service. YouTube is a particularly powerful platform for UGC, with user‐created video far outperforming brand‐created videos. Of CoverGirl's 251 million total views, 99 percent are from fan‐created videos,¹⁶ and 99 percent of Revlon's views also come from fan content, according to Forbes.¹⁷ Not only do fan‐created makeup tutorials make these brands appear more authentic, it makes the process of content creation a heck of a lot easier to scale and it comes at a low cost. If you're concerned about the sheer hours it might take to comb through UGC, there are plenty of automation tools that surface quality content in real time.

Some brands have gone beyond promoting their own products, tying user‐generated content to philanthropy to stand out in the realm of socially responsible businesses. Target asked customers to submit videos of themselves opening college acceptance letters in 2010, and the best videos were featured in a company commercial, which highlighted a pledge to donate $1 billion to K–12 education causes.

And some marketers seem to have been inspired by the widely successful ALS challenge, which asked people to do something accessible, but odd enough to gain attention—pour a bucket of ice water over their heads or make a donation to the ALS Foundation for bragging rights that you did some good.

In the same vein is Chevrolet's “Purple Your Profile” campaign, in which users applied purple filters over their Facebook photos to raise cancer awareness and donations. The automaker raised more than $1 million for cancer organizations with that campaign and drove attention to its Road to Recovery program, which provides transportation to and from treatment for people who have cancer and do not have a ride.

Both campaigns relied on something easy to do, visible, and easy to share.

Ultimately, people want to be engaged in new ways and surprised. They want to feel special and valued, so get personal and really connect with fans individually. It makes lasting impact and in many cases delivers an immediate return on investment.

How Brands Evolve

Constant adaptation—refreshing old models as well as overhauling approaches entirely—is the necessary ingredient to relevancy in today's business world. Brands can't afford to stand still, even momentarily.

Typically, when successful companies fail, there are three reasons why, according to Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and coauthor of “The Other Side of Innovation.”

1. They make big investments into old systems or equipment rather than new innovations.
2. Company leaders pride themselves on past success to the point that they ignore new competitors that threaten to outpace them.
3. They focus too heavily on the marketplace of today and fail to anticipate consumers' future needs.

Sometimes, companies' failures fall into all three categories—Blockbuster is a famous example. When Netflix founder Reed Hastings approached Blockbuster CEO John Antioco back in 2000 and proposed a partnership, he was laughed out of the room. Antioco later had multiple opportunities to buy Netflix for $50 million but never accepted. By the time Blockbuster launch its own DVD‐by‐mail business and rental kiosks, it couldn't compete with Netflix or Redbox. Failing to see how the home video industry was changing early on and overestimating his company's future success (Blockbuster was doing $6 billion in sales in 2004), Antioco inadvertently forced his company into bankruptcy by 2010.¹⁸

If brands don't evolve, they quickly become extinct, and the companies that have successfully evolved leverage ingenuity. Lego has proven its ability to constantly reinvent itself, through design‐driven, highly covetable toys and branding across successful movies, product licensing deals with Star Wars and Harry Potter, international Legoland theme parks, and its innovations integrating technology with its hardware. An example of the latter—the popular Lego Fusion, which allows kids to build houses or castles with Legos, take photos of them, and watch the structures come to life in a virtual world in the Lego app. While Fusion sold well and was on the Toys“R”Us list of the 15 hottest Christmas toys, Fusion's creators told Fast Company that the product was, “at best a 1.0 version of a digital‐physical play experience” that they were aiming to revolutionize.¹⁹

The basic Lego bricks haven't changed since 1963, but almost everything else about the company has, in part due to the genius of Lego's R&D team, Future Lab. Every global company has a research and development arm, but what makes this group different is its autonomy. Future Lab operates entirely separately from the rest of the company's design groups, and only a handful of senior executives even have access to its building.

Most of what Future Lab builds doesn't see the light of day, but the learnings from its experiments have been momentous in helping the company innovate over the years. Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp told Fast Company, “When you do such an exploration you become a lot more clever about everything from different business models to ways of developing a meaningful play experience. And you become wiser about the things you actually do launch.”²⁰

Over the years, Future Lab has partnered with MIT's Media Lab to build a robotics platform, launched an “open innovation platform” called Lego Ideas for fans to design and upload ideas to potentially be made into products, and hosted many 24‐hour hackathons with industrial designers, interaction designers, programmers, ethnographic researchers, marketers, and master Lego builders to build better products. Now worth $7.1 billion and ranked number 86 on Forbes' most valuable brands list in 2016, the 84‐year‐old company cites its consumer‐focused strategy as the secret to its success.

The most successful companies tend to loosen their grip on central control when it comes to fostering innovation as Lego does with its Future Lab.

I often hear CEOs say that “staying consistent” or “being timeless” is an ultimate goal for the brand. I tell them that being timeless isn't the same as avoiding change entirely. A brand can have a distinct personality, but it has to respond to the issues and concerns of the day for that personality to continue to express itself.

A company like General Electric hasn't survived since 1878 by staying rigidly the same. Rather, GE has evolved into many different markets over the last few decades, including health care, analytics and software, and energy. Innovations in each of these sectors are too numerous to name, but to highlight a few recent examples: a CT scanner that cuts radiation exposure in half, a hybrid locomotive that reduces emissions significantly, its brilliantly reengineered jet engine, and commercially viable OLED (organic light‐emitting diode) lighting.

Approach content the same way you'd approach exploring new markets to disrupt. Build a culture of creativity; allow for the open exchange of ideas as well as the flexibility for your team members to work independently, and involve your customers in your conversations as much as possible.