INTHEBLACK August 2025 - Magazine - Page 49
“Organisations aren’t innovative without pushing boundaries.
The trick is to identify the boundaries that you want to be
pushed and the boundaries that you don’t.”
AARON MCEWAN, GARTNER
So how can accounting and finance
organisations cultivate a culture of creativity
without compromising compliance, control and
accountability? The first step may be as simple
as identifying good risks versus bad risks,
and embracing failure along the way.
DEFINE RISK AND SET BOUNDARIES
At first glance, creativity and risk management
may seem at odds, but creative thinking
is essential for identifying and navigating
complex, emerging risks according to
Aaron McEwan, vice president of research
and advisory at Gartner.
“Effective risk-taking requires using creative
strategies to explore many outcomes and find
unintended consequences. But the most
important thing is to recognise the idea of
there being good and bad risk,” McEwan says.
“Bad risk is a breach of safety, an ethical
breach or poor judgment. When it comes
to things like managing safety or auditing
processes, you don’t want people to be taking
risks,” he contends. “Good risk, however, is risk
that leads to innovation or creative ways
of solving complex and difficult problems.
It could be risks that enable people to move
faster through a process and gain efficiencies,
for example.”
As well as defining what risk means
in an organisation, having a clear definition
of what creativity means also helps set
boundaries and provides people with guidance.
While taking risks shouldn’t mean putting the
business in a vulnerable position, encouraging
creativity doesn’t necessarily mean having
a reckless attitude.
“Organisations aren’t innovative without
pushing boundaries,” says McEwan. “The trick
is to identify the boundaries that you want to
be pushed and the boundaries that you don’t.”
Mykel Dixon, workplace creativity specialist
and author, suggests false stereotypes of
creativity — implying it is about “wild ideas”
that are going to break the budget or offend
people — can limit the use of creative thinking
as an effective business tool.
“It’s more about ongoing discovery and
dialogue that can provide you with a creative
breakthrough, or at least the next step to take,”
Dixon says.
“Creativity is the fundamental building
block for almost every decision that isn’t just
operational. In risk management, it is about
thinking differently to anticipate, understand
and mitigate risks in innovative ways.”
CELEBRATE FAILURE
Organisations that have tackled the tension
between creativity and risk are very clear
on how failure can contribute to success,
says McEwan.
“It is sometimes phrased as ‘celebrating
failure’ because it leads to learning, which leads
to innovation. If we look at it through the lens
of creative problem-solving rather than failure,
it helps identify efficiencies and what needs
to be done differently.”
McEwan uses the example of DirecTV, a US
television service provider that faced increased
competition from emerging streaming services
and recognised that innovation and risk-taking
were key to their survival.
DirecTV’s solution was to introduce
a gamification tool where employees were
rewarded and celebrated for posting stories
about failures. Instead of failure being
a negative term, it became a positive
one and resulted in a significant increase
in innovation.
“They put people on a leaderboard when
they experienced a failure, then wrote about
what the failure was and how it led to learning
and positive outcomes,” says McEwan.
DirectTV created a culture and an approach
to risk management “where failure that led
to learning and innovation was celebrated”,
McEwan notes.
Applying creative thinking to risk
management is all about reframing risk into
opportunity, then helping people feel
comfortable with looking at things differently,
says Dixon.
“If you let people understand there are
no good or bad ideas and you create the
context for creativity to be explored, you will
be able to access more ways of solving complex
and difficult problems.” ■
READ
an article on
productivity
vs innovation
UPSKILL
with CPA Australia’s
Innovation and
Creativity short
course
READ
an article on how
to create a culture
of learning at work
intheblack.cpaaustralia.com.au 49
