Future-Ready Creative Organization: Unleashing Creative Confidence in Organizations by Reflecting on Their Cultural Values

Abstract

As a key element for futuring, creativity is becoming increasingly essential in today’s workplaces and organizations. Although creativity is an innate ability, not everyone feels confident enough to express their creative ideas. While organizational culture plays a significant role in shaping the creative climate, the influence of creative cultural values on employees’ creative confidence remains unclear. In this paper, two studies were conducted: a preliminary study involving interviews to map out creative cultural values at two Dutch national companies, and a follow-up study to propose and evaluate a design intervention. As a result, it was found that the two organizations share a similar creative culture. Key creative cultural values and their impact on creative confidence were identified, leading to the development of the CreatOrg workshop toolkit. This toolkit aims to enhance employees’ creative confidence by increasing their sensitivity and awareness towards specific creative cultural values, identified in the preliminary study.