Attracting and retaining beautiful minds with data driven creativity

“There is an ocean of creativity within every human being”

- David Lynch

Creativity is hard to describe, quantify and turn into a repeatable process. To the untrained eye, it is often seen as a gift spared only for the special few: the artists, the musicians, the writers, the thinkers, the innovators. This is false.

We Are Unity believes that the capacity for creativity – that ability to generate or recognise ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that are useful in solving problems – exists inside everyone. In the past we’ve provided guidance for ‘How to unlock your inner creative’ and proposed a suite of ‘Creative Types’ to unpack and identify with.

Now, with a war for talent across a rapidly growing number of industries, we thought we’d take a look at how creativity – and specifically, data-driven creativity – could be harnessed to address this problem.

What is data-driven creativity?

Over the past few years We Are Unity has frequently explored the ways in which we can harness data to inspire and cultivate creativity – bridging the gap between the more intangible aspects of creativity and the requirements of real-life business impact and sustainable behaviour change. 

This is what’s known as ‘Data-Driven Creativity’ – the intersection between science and intuition that connects and amplifies data points in novel ways to generate a commercial outcome.

Unlocking creativity ‘by the numbers’

Y = mx1 + mx2 + mx3 + mx4 + ….. + e

Those of you who paid attention in statistics class might recognise the above as a multiple regression formula – used when we want to predict the value of a variable based on the value of two or more other variables. But what does this have to do with creativity?

Let’s take the ever present problem of employee retention as an example. We know that the relationship between employees and their employers is getting worse. Whether it’s the changing nature of work, stagnant wage growth or the ongoing economic hangover from COVID-19, the same problem remains: “We are losing our best people”. 

It costs money – lots of money – to replace employees. The yardstick of 150-400% of the employee’s salary has been used to estimate the cost of replacing mid to senior-level employees. And that’s before you consider the potential impact to intellectual property and client relationships that can far outweigh the recruitment cost. At the end of the day these factors can make or break the performance of your business. 

The key questions many organisations are grappling with are: How can we proactively manage retention risk? And how do we attract the right people? Questions we were confronted with in a recent scope of work with a leading Australian technology provider. 

Case Study: Bringing data-driven creativity to life

Enter our multiple regression formula, which can be used to proactively attract and retain critical talent in the organisation. 

Step 1: Build your hypothesis

Here was our starting hypothesis:  Employee Retention (Y) = Employee Personality (mx1) + Employee Experience (mx2) + Error.

From this hypothesis, we are able to ascertain the factors that we could control. We can attract certain employee personalities into our organisation and we can give them a curated employee experience, and understanding this ensures that our creativity can be practical and actionable. 

Step 2: Test your hypothesis 

In testing this hypothesis, we were able to develop a predictive model for why employees stay 5+ years in this organisation using data and insights from 120 employees. Our results demonstrated that if we have certain types of people and give them the right experience then they are significantly more likely (R2 =.42) to stay with our organisation. 

Step 3: Use the results to strengthen Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

Now that the data has uncovered what really matters to our people, we can make sure our EVP is founded in science. Instead of thinking about how to sell the promise of an amazing job, we can drive self-selection by promoting the aspects of the job that will appeal to the right kind of person – the person that will stay and thrive in your organisation.

Watch out! The problems with data dependency.

If I was able to predict the future 100% of the time then I probably wouldn't be writing this article (or I would be writing it from my yacht in the Bahamas). There are always factors that impact our predictions or influence the relationship between two variables, so we need to be cautious in our interpretation of data, remembering that analytics--like people--are not infallible. 

Ideate, create, test, repeat.

The craft of creativity isn’t going away anytime soon. That ability to think laterally and curiously, and to explore new and alternative ideas isn’t something we can simply automate and leave to the algorithm (a fact our exceptional creative team are all too happy to remind us). But creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it requires a source of inspiration – and when that inspiration is founded in facts, patterns and data-driven insights, the results can be incredibly powerful.

The trick is to allow yourself to think about your creative endeavours through the lens of the scientific method – building the right hypothesis, testing it and using it to inspire new ideas and explore new paths. Not only will this unlock an entirely new creative avenue for your organisation, it will also help you draw a clear line between insight, idea and impact – an incredibly valuable skill for winning over your more commercially-minded stakeholders and clients.

If you’re excited to start flexing your data-driven creativity but still wondering where to begin, our recent blog on Vanity Metrics will help you separate the data that matters from the fluffy stuff. Or get in touch with nick.tucker@weareunity.com to start a conversation around what your data could be doing for your creativity.