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Why Does the Social Sector Need Creativity?   

Creativity and innovation make the world whirl with a bit more fun and verve; beyond that, in today’s hypercompetitive and complex world, they are essential. Whether you are an organization seeking new ways to engage key constituents, an individual looking to be an in-demand professional, or even a nation state looking to boost GDP, creativity and innovation are the seed of opportunity. Without them – and the imagination that sparks the process – we in the social impact sector cannot build the infrastructure – the just and dynamic systems – of the future.

To learn how Ignited Word helps teams build their creativity, visit Creativity@Work

Aiming straight for innovation without developing the imaginative and creative powers on which it depends, would be like an athlete hoping to win a gold medal at the Olympic Games but with no intention of exercising beforehand.

 — Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

Creative thinking is the skill with the fastest growing importance in the workplace.

In recent years, creative thinking has drastically risen in importance as a desired core worker skill—as evidenced in the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs report — and is now the second most desired workplace skill. 

We ranked the top ten skills using a weighted scoring system, which means that skills were given weight based on their importance in the future of work core skill ranking. We used these weighted scores to create a chart of the data.

    

As a data cleaning rule, we maintained the score to the left for missing data. This means that we kept the same score for the skill "complex problem-solving" from the 2022 period in the 2023 period, even though it was missing a ranking. We applied this rule because although complex problem-solving is highly emphasized as a rising important skill for workers in the future of work in the 2023 report, it was not ranked in the report.

Learn About Our Methodology

Source: World Economic Forum's Future of Job Reports 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023

World Econ Forum

Weighted Rankings

Global leaders like the UN recognize creativity as a catalyst for social progress and development.

It seems fair to say that few people think "creative powerhouse" when they think of the United Nations. Yet, ironically, the UN says of their own organization, "that the creation of the United Nations was a bold act of collective imagination and hope in 1945," and they recently published a report called The Most Creative Look to the Future: Imagination and Creative Practice in Service of Organizational Transformation. Check out how the U.N. itself is touting the need for more creativity and imagination to diffuse the many crises of our time.

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True innovation is indeed impossible without the skill sets and behaviors associated with imagination and creative practice.

 – UN Global Pulse, The Most Creative Look to the Future

10 Reasons

Explore Our

Top 10 Reasons

Why

Creativity

Matters

in the nonprofit workplace

I’m convinced that our current training, experience, and well-laid plans will only deliver 70 percent of the results we seek, whereas the remaining 30 percent gap can only be achieved through creativity.

  Josh Linkner, Big Little Breakthroughs

Cultivating a Culture of Creativity

Have you been hearing buzz on how important a creativity culture is in today's workplace, but have only a vague sense of how your team would implement such a thing? Fear not. In the resource below, we guide you through key areas of practice and provide thought provoking questions to get you started. Think of the key areas as building blocks upon which more targeted activities can be layered.

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Wondering if your team promotes a culture of creativity? 

Take this quiz to find out!

More on Creativity:

Interested in working with us to build a culture of creativity? Learn more about how we can help. 

We know it can be daunting to know where to begin, so checkout our forever growing power tool belt

We have lots to say, not just about using creativity and imagination to spark innovation, but about the social sector in general.

We love experimenting with different ways to express ourselves. 

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