Andy Green delivers an invaluable workshop for member and non-members on Thursday, 8th November - Creativity - How to Manage and Transform for Modern Day PR Practice.
Here Andy has written us an exclusive piece which will confirm why this workshop will greatly add to your skillset, bolstering your creative and strategic thinking capacity, giving you the ability to solve problems in new ways.
Why creativity is getting harder - and why you need to do it differently
Andy Green
Creativity is still one of the key crucial skills in Public Relations and Comms to stand-out from the crowd, achieve cut-through and deliver inspiring work. Ask most recruiters what are the essential skills sought by employers and the ability to think creatively, generate original insights is usually among the key attributes.
For most practitioners when it comes to creativity however it is often a case of flying by the seat of their pants, bluffing, or repeating what they have done previously.
To make the creative task even more challenging there is a revolution underway changing the face of how you do and deliver creativity.
We now live in a more complex world, where technology and integrated communications are changing the face and follow-through of the creative act.
Now your campaigns need ‘big multi-channel ideas’ - ideas that work across a range of different channels, over a longer period of time.
PR and Comms people need to change from acting like magicians pulling rabbits out of a hat, to being skilful collaborators and co-creators alongside an expanding range of communications specialists.
Plus, we have all got to achieve more with less, faster and under greater duress.
How can you respond?
You need to be smarter in knowing how creativity works, how you create ideas, and how you can manage the creative input of colleagues and collaborators.
You need to find out your own creative profile. Everyone is creative, but we have different styles of how we do our creativity. By finding out about your creative profile you can better understand yourself, and also your colleagues, knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
Are you an action/goals-orientated person or someone driven by relationships? Is process and procedure more important than ideas? Knowing thyself can transform your potential and bring out the best in others.
The creative practitioner needs to be able to read situations and know which responses, strategies and tools work for the type of problem. Any challenge you face can range from being simple where there is a clear-cut potential solution through to wicked, chaotic situations of such complexity where there isn’t a simple answer.
You need to manage your creative mindfulness. Each of us are phenomenally brilliant creativity machines, with the potential to produce great insights or ideas. The challenge is we can often be blind to our own brilliance. Your creative mindfulness, your self-awareness, can help you spot the potentially great thought and make it happen. New on-line tools can help quickly identify new insights, identify points of interest or creative angles you would have otherwise missed.
You now need to understand how to use and manage the creative dimension in public relations practice, providing you with new processes, tools, and tips to develop your own creative and strategic thinking skills along with the ability to solve problems in new ways.
Creativity in PR and Comms is changing. Are you?
‘Creativity - How to Manage & Transform for Modern-day PR Practice’ is on Thursday, 8 November 2018. Book your place:
Thank you for your interest in the PRII Media Sourcebook which is available to full PRII members (MPRII & FPRII)
and Life Fellows of the Institute. Affiliate, Associate and Student members of the PRII may purchase discounted
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