From music to business: How to foster, capture and communicate creativity – Part III

This post is the third of three posts to present some creativity-related beliefs from music and how to transfer them to the world of business. While I am neither a professional musician nor a business consultant or a remarkably creative person these ideas might be inspiring for some of you.


In part I and part II I wrote about how to foster and capture creativity. In this last short post of the series I want to stress the importance of correctly communicating creativity. Noone will care about your life-changing ideas if you they do not understand what you are trying to say.

Communicating Creativity - Translate your ideas into suitable language
Innovative ideas are often not easily explained to other people. If they were, they were most probably not being labeled as "innovative ideas". If you do not want to be ignored or ridiculed as a strange nerd, dreamy fool or incomprehensible stranger you better start communicating your ideas in a langugage that is understood by your audience.

Communicating Creativity in Music
I will never forget when organ player Dennis Montgomery III told drummer Victor Lewis in a jazzaar-project I was playing in: "Hey man, I need that center block country church gospel feel!" Of course noone of the Europeans knew what a center block country church is, let alone how they play gospel music there. Victor however, was right on it. By using an analogy Dennis communicated much more clearly than if he said something like: "Could please give me a snare on three and eights on the hihat?" While of course we were not playing center block country church gospel he could wrap his idea of the tune's groove into highly effective and understandable language. At least for those knowing how gospel music is played in center block country churches :-)

Communicating Creativity in Business
The principle of communicating creativity is the very same in business as it is in music. Before you tell somebody about your new, disruptive, ground-breaking innovation take a minute to reflect on how to sell your idea. Is he a number's guy? - Say something like: "My hypothesis is XY, given that assumption we should change our product to Z, which would cost approximately X." Are you talking to a social media enthusiast? - go with: "Hey, I've seen Foursquare and Gowalla adopting XY. Maybe we should follow the same principle by doing Z". For rather emotional people try: "Hey, I think XY really hurts people's feelings. Shouldn't we change it to Z?" You want to sell your idea to a consultant? - Better say nothing at all and prepare some slides instead.

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