A Curious Business: What Is a Creative Learning Agency?
“Creativity, their ability to solve problems, come up with new solutions, and use their brainpower to figure things out are the skills CEOs most value in their people.”
- Richard Florida, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management
The age of a productive and mindless drone workforce is dead. Businesses today need employees who think and react. The key to solving business problems remains the same, creativity. The best way to learn how to harness creativity? Empower your employees with training and development that brings value. That’s the kind of training we build for clients as a Creative Learning Agency.
The desire to learn something new, that same desire that led you to read this article, supports the idea of what makes a creative learning agency more effective than a traditional advertising agency or e-learning company. A creative learning agency solves problems through learning.
Education and implementation live at the core of any business initiative or social change. It can be the difference for a new marketing campaign reaching and impacting the right audience. The ability to teach a workforce new skills, new ways of thinking about problems, builds innovative company culture.
Curiosity is the human condition.
From birth, humans’ curiosity and desire to learn propels them to try new things, change behavior and embrace new ideas. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also led to every major discovery in human history. From exploring what’s on the other side of an ocean to experimenting with wrapping breakfast in a tortilla, curiosity drives innovation. And innovation keeps businesses and the human species in general growing and progressing.
This innate curiosity informs everything a creative learning agency does. We combine modern learning methods with data and human driven insights used by advertising agencies to create memorable experiences that grab attention.
No gap learning can’t solve.
We believe every problem has a learning solution. The first step towards that solution involves recognizing whether the problem arises from a knowledge gap or a skills gap.
Knowledge gaps are easier. Your employee doesn’t know something, so you give them the information they need. But that’s only half the battle. Solving for a skills gap requires giving your learner the information and the practice to complete the task proficiently.
Think back to the last training course you took. You were probably given a manual to read and memorize, maybe shown how to do certain tasks a few times. Then, you were thrown in to learn on the job. That’s when most learning occurs — when it’s real. Unfortunately, it’s also where the majority of mistakes are made, mistakes that can hurt the company and the morale of your employees.
The best way to curb loss due to insufficient or on-the-job training is to create a learning environment that allows for mistakes to be made. Modern training courses allow for simulations, even VR, to give employees chances to try new ways to solve problems. This allows them to safely fill in those skills gaps without hurting the company in a real customer or sales situation.
A new approach to an old problem.
A creative learning agency solves learning problems. And all business and marketing problems have learning at their root.
Too many companies want to have a culture of learning, but they continue to approach learning development and marketing the same ways they always have. This usually means training manuals, lectures, classroom style session, intrusive advertising and maybe some experiments in the latest technology that lack any substance or rehash the same boring material in a new way.
These methods appear to work. They check off the boxes, but employees don’t retain the information for the long term. And they make employees and consumers miserable. This leads to poor work environments, hurts employee motivation, creates unhappy customers and makes everything at an organization harder.
Learning can be better. It can be more creative, more enjoyable and more effective. Our approach to learning does more than get employees or consumers to pass a test or recognize a brand. It gets our audience interested. It taps into their innate curiosity and creates advocates for your business goals. The best businesses invest in the development of their employees, in the stewarding of their customers and constantly improve.
The right learning program is the silver bullet. It gets to the core of problems instead of covering them up.
So, what is a creative learning agency?
It’s a group of creative individuals experimenting with where curiosity takes them. It’s the confluence of art and science to creatively solve problems. It’s learning that empowers employees with purpose and skills to be able to react and think critically. It’s marketing that’s informative, relatable and memorable instead of intrusive, annoying and hated. It’s advocating for better experiences for the modern learner. It’s the pursuit of knowledge and implementation of new ideas.
It’s what we do at Mindspace.
Want to learn how a creative learning agency can help your business? Let’s chat.
