Why a Creative Approach is Essential for Successful Business Change

When Afiniti works with senior leaders, helping to deliver successful business change, we’re always told our unique creative approach brings significant value.  When we say creative, we’re not solely talking about the design elements of your communications, or making a shiny, attention-grabbing logo. At Afiniti, we bring a holistic creative approach to every engagement, in the form of how we build the strategy, bring change to life, make it meaningful, encourage participation and ultimately engage and excite individuals to drive adoption.

Creative execution can be viewed as a luxury, or not an essential part of the change strategy. But over two decades of change experience tells us otherwise: the creative approach can be the difference between the success and failure of your change programme.

The creative approach is the use of our unique skills and methods to interpret, express and address our clients’ challenges. Business change is usually very complex or data heavy, so to make it engaging for those impacted, we apply creative thinking to visualise a way we can communicate with clarity. That process looks different for every client and programme, but the ultimate purpose is to create a cohesive campaign, driven by unified leadership conviction, to communicate with the target audience and drive the adoption of the change.

This approach is essential not just to guiding communications, but to aligning the leaders of change. Different functions will naturally have different ideas on how to achieve the same vision. The creative approach helps to harness this collective thinking in a visual way, producing something that everyone can agree and align on, in order to consistently articulate united story narrative and key messages.

Without leadership alignment on the vision, impacted people will receive conflicting messages, creating confusion and severely damaging belief in the change. The change will never be embedded, and business benefits will never be realised, so it’s crucial that leaders are singing from the same hymn sheet. The creative approach enables them to do this in brand new ways – you can see for yourself in this recent tech sector success story.

Aligning leaders is a big step to ensuring your change communications are effective, but your impacted stakeholders have to feel involved and empowered in order to be truly enthused. Too often, employees feel like they’re ‘subjected to’ change and not actually driving it. This is what Afiniti’s ‘people at the heart’ ethos seeks to remedy, and this extends to the creative aspects of our work too.

A key piece of our creative approach is gathering insights and data from stakeholders to ensure their needs are addressed. Senior leadership might not have a true picture of what people on the ground are really concerned with, which is where our data-backed approach uncovers valuable insights. These might come from surveys or workshops, for example. This intel builds a clearer picture of how people feel about the change and therefore how they need to be communicated with to address individual desires and fears.

Finding the best way to deliver a change goes hand-in-hand with finding its story. Storytelling is what brings the vision and change to life, and we use literal and metaphorical representation to communicate and address the behavioural, social and emotional needs of the audience. Storytelling has been used to connect people since the dawn of man, and in the case of business change, it’s an excellent tool for making the daunting exciting.

However, while messaging has to be consistent, it must also be adaptable for different audiences and needs. We focus on user-centred design to accomplish this, crafting bespoke user journeys based on how we expect stakeholders to access information. We want everything they encounter on their unique paths to be relevant to them so that they’re more likely to engage and progress further.

A practical example of this is tone of voice. You should always expect a level of change resistance, but the causes of this might vary. Some people might have misunderstood the benefits of the change, and therefore require more informative messaging to educate them and shift their perception. For others, any mention of change sparks fear, particularly if it comes at a turbulent time in their organisation. For those stakeholders, a more reassuring or sensitive tone of voice would resonate better. We have to sympathise with whatever concerns or priorities people have and adapt our creative approach to accommodate these.

It’s also important to make creative change assets sustainable and reusable. Clients will utilise what we give them in their own unique way, and the change itself will morph as it progresses, so the assets we equip our clients with must be adaptable and customisable.

Something I particularly enjoy about Afiniti is how our consultants and Creative team work together to bring change to life and ensure our audience identifies with it. This collaboration brings the most benefit to the client when the Creative team is involved from the start. We support discovery and ideation, drawing up the visual identity, the tone of voice and the cohesive set of messages and assets the client can use to articulate their change. Getting that aligned approach and visual language in place at the outset of change helps to speed it up, derisk the project and make it easy to communicate and drive forwards.

We also work closely with our clients’ internal comms teams to understand their brand guidelines – we might push right up against them sometimes, but often that healthy friction is where the best work emerges. The change communications have to feel like part of the organisation and its culture, but also have to stand out from existing communications, especially if the change initiative has failed before.

A standout example of this teamwork in action is from a previous engagement in the life sciences space. We co-created with the client from the beginning to understand what they were trying to say and to who, and this informed the solution, not the other way around. We ultimately created a role-based interface with complete, bespoke user journeys, which allowed each person to see and understand the tools they would use in the new state. The interface went from 2000 lifetime views to 29,000 within three months, clearly demonstrating the value of a collaborative and user-centred creative approach (you can see the full case study here).

That was actually one of our first steps into UX design, which we’ve been delving more into ever since. In the future, I see Afiniti creating even more interactive, immersive environments into which we can build our change landscapes. People can explore, inform and train within them. The tools that enable us to do this are advancing rapidly, and in fact we’ve just used some to build an immersive induction for our own Afiniti people. I’m really excited to bring this engaging storytelling method to our client audiences.

A creative approach can be the differentiator between change that succeeds and change that fails. At Afiniti, our in-house creative team collaborates closely with our consultants throughout an engagement, using a wide range of techniques, platforms and methods to craft data-driven, user-centred narratives that resonate emotionally with people to drive them towards action.

That creative approach is interwoven in everything we do to help your change stand out across your organisation, gain momentum and ultimately be embedded to achieve your desired outcomes.

Please feel welcome to contact us to discuss how Afiniti’s unique creative approach will help your change stick.