Creativity-Aware Business Process Management: What We Can Learn from Film and Visual Effects Production

Creativity is of considerable importance to many organizations and is a core competitive factor in a variety of contemporary industries. Consequently, process managers increasingly ask: How can I successfully manage an organization without crushing creativity? In this chapter, we describe an approach to creativity-aware process management that is based on the understanding that many value-creating processes comprise both well-structured, transactional parts and often highly creative parts. We explain how the creative parts (“pockets of creativity”) can be identified and described in those processes that highly rely on creativity (“creativity-intensive processes”). Our explanations are grounded in studies in film and visual effects production (VFX), but we argue that ‘conventional’ industries can learn much from their management practices. We propose a set of guidelines that can support process managers in successfully managing creativity in business processes without systematically crushing it. We use the case of a leading Australian VFX company in order to illustrate our explanations.