McKinsey Measures What Your Company Already Did. The CAA Measures What It's Capable Of 

When people first encounter the Creative Archetypes Assessment™, a reasonable question sometimes follows:

How is this different from the innovation diagnostics used by firms like McKinsey?

It is a fair and intelligent question. Both are interested in helping organisations perform better creatively and innovatively. Both seek to identify hidden strengths and structural weaknesses. Both aim to improve what organisations are capable of producing.

But beneath the surface, they are answering fundamentally different questions.

The distinction, stated simply, is this:

McKinsey measures innovation performance. The CAA measures creative capability.

That difference matters more than it might initially appear.

What McKinsey Actually Measures

McKinsey has developed several frameworks for assessing organisational innovation, and it is worth being precise about what each does.

Their R&D conversion metrics — among the most rigorous of their approaches — measure how effectively a company converts R&D investment into new product sales, and how effectively those new product sales convert into margin uplift. These are financially grounded, benchmarked against industry peers, and genuinely useful for understanding innovation performance at the portfolio level. McKinsey's own researchers are candid about their purpose: these are scorekeeping metrics. They tell you how the game ended. They do not explain how it was played.

A separate strand of McKinsey's work — their Award Creativity Score, developed for a 2017 research study — measured marketing creativity through Cannes Lions advertising awards, tracking total Lions won, breadth of categories, and consistency over time. This was valuable research demonstrating that creative marketing correlates with financial performance. But it was a one-off study, limited to consumer-facing companies, and measured creative output through industry prizes rather than the internal human capacities that produced them.

Both frameworks have genuine value. Both share a common limitation: they measure what creativity produced. Neither measures what creativity is, or why it is thriving, declining, or unevenly distributed inside an organisation.

Innovation Measures the Harvest. Creativity Studies the Soil.

Innovation is concerned with a specific outcome: did valuable ideas reach the world? Did a company launch successful products, improve services, increase revenue from new thinking?

These are important questions. But they are questions about commercialisation, execution, market timing and organisational systems. They are questions about what happened after an idea was generated.

Creativity begins earlier — at the point where someone thinks differently, connects ideas others missed, challenges an assumption, experiments with something uncertain, or imagines something that does not yet exist.

A company can be highly effective at bringing ideas to market while still relying primarily on incremental, predictable thinking. It can optimise brilliantly, execute faster than competitors, and generate impressive revenue from new offerings — while the underlying creative capacity of its people quietly stagnates.

Conversely, an organisation can be rich in genuine creative capability and fail to innovate because it lacks the commercial infrastructure to bring ideas to market.

Market success and creative depth are related. They are not the same thing.

McKinsey's innovation metrics tell you whether the harvest was good. The CAA tells you about the condition of the soil — and what needs to change before the next season.

Leading Indicators vs Lagging Indicators

Another way to understand this is through timing.

Most innovation metrics are lagging indicators. They measure what has already happened: successful launches, patents filed, new product revenue, R&D conversion rates. These are valuable for investors, boards, and strategists assessing historical performance.

The CAA focuses on leading indicators. It asks: what creative capacities exist before innovation appears? Where are the hidden strengths? Where are the structural weaknesses that will limit breakthrough performance before anyone realises it?

A team with low Explorer scores — low curiosity, low tolerance for uncertainty, low openness to outside influence — will struggle to generate genuinely original ideas regardless of how efficiently it executes. A culture that suppresses the Rebel archetype will refine and optimise but rarely challenge the assumptions that most need challenging. These are structural creative weaknesses that no financial metric will reveal until it is too late — until the harvest is already poor.

The CAA identifies these conditions in advance.

What the CAA Actually Measures

The Creative Archetypes Assessment is built on a different premise: that creativity is not a mysterious gift, but a structured set of capacities that can be mapped, measured, and developed.

It measures creative capability across three dimensions — Expertise (the Sage), Openness (the Explorer), and Oddness (the Trickster) — and nine sub-dimensions within them: Erudition, Competence, Experience, Curiosity, Tolerance, Egolessness, Counter-dominance, Irrationality, and Otherworldliness.

Critically, the organisational version of the CAA is administered at three levels: senior leaders, middle management, and individual contributors. The gaps between those three sets of scores are where the most important intelligence lives. When leaders believe the organisation scores high on the Mother archetype — openness to upward feedback, distributed authority, genuine collaboration — but individual contributors score it low, that gap is the diagnosis. It reveals precisely where creative culture is being lost in transmission between the top of the organisation and the people who do the work.

No financial metric can show you this. No award tally can show you this. Only a psychometric instrument applied to the people themselves can show you this.

Two Different Questions

Ultimately, McKinsey's innovation frameworks and the CAA are asking different questions — and both questions are legitimate.

McKinsey asks: How effectively does this organisation innovate?

The CAA asks: What creative capacities exist within this organisation — and what is limiting their full expression?

An organisation serious about its creative future needs answers to both. The innovation score tells you where you stand. The CAA tells you what is possible, what is blocked, and what to do about it.

Because innovation measures what reached the market.

Creativity measures what becomes possible.

The Creative Archetypes Assessment for Organisations is available at kermanu.com. The individual assessment is free.