Boost Your Creativity in Any Job
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Welcome to the H B idea ast from harvard business review. I'm Allison beard.

If you ask people in business what drives individual, team and organisational success, creativity often ranks pretty high on the list. Yes, you need the skills to execute on whatever new ideas you have. But those great ideas for ways to streamline processes or find new revenue streams or disrupt your industry need to come first.

And this is especially true in the age of genii because while large language models might be very good at recycling, combining old thinking from the content they've been trained on, they aren't actually able to think outside the box of existing data. For that critically important creative work, we still need humans. And yet, according to research studies, only twenty to twenty five percent of people feel their living up to their full creative potential.

So how do we jump start our own creativity, especially when we're feeling overwhelmed by th Epace a nd d emands o f o ur c urrent w ork? How do we find the time and energy to pursue novelty and innovation? Today's guests argue for consistent, small scale practice. They offer up simple exercises that will allow individuals or teams, no matter the functions or industry, to get Better at generating new ideas. Cater n Jacobin suit union are marketing executives and authors of the book, a year of creativity, fifty to a smart ideas for boost in creativity, innovation and inspiration network.

Cater sub hi, hi. Thank you. Heavy as.

Now, don't worry, i'm not gonna ask you to list all fifty two ideas, but the overarching message is that you to think creativity should be a weekly practice, even if you're just spending a little bit of time and energy.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, we are used to IT might sound like a cliche pe, but we are obviously used to the idea that we need to exercise in order to be able to stay fit genuinely. You need to exercise your creative muscles as well.

You can't just expect to go to an a way day once a year and generate random ideas in a brainstorm and have that step change your business. You need to be thinking creatively and outside the box in order to get competitive advantage. I on a weekly basis.

we believe to you both work in marketing, inherently creative roles. Why do you see creativity is something that everyone needs to practice, rather than only people in specific jobs are at certain kinds of companies?

Because everybody brings a perspective to work of how things are working in an organization about improvements they think they should make, about shortcuts that would make your company more productive or progressive, or will answer consumers needs more quickly. And the idea that there's a creative elite is wrong on so many levels.

IT shuts down the source of a number of ideas, and IT also chance down your people from their possibilities as well. So if you talk to a bunch of children, you know, when they're in kindergarten until about seven, and you say, are you creative? They say, I am.

You know, look at this square with square rising. And you know, one year, that's my mom. And people go, yeah, is your mom that's right.

That's a really, really good. Fasten them by the time people about fourteen, unless you're execution ally brilliant. No one thinks they're creative. And there's an amazing researchers that was ironically done by lego, which says that eight percent of people feel that they don't fulfill their creativity. So if in work, what you can do, if you need your work practice, you can take that capability, which we all have, and bring IT to bear into what you do day to day and in your company, then that's a win, win for everybody, the individual and the organization.

So you mentioned of sight brainstorming sessions, this idea that we all go with our colleagues maybe once a year, think outside the box, come up with some brilliance, and then come back, and typically nothing happens. Why is that? Why can't organizations put that creativity practice to work in the actual functioning of the business?

This seems to be some sort of accepted wisdom that the daily job is the daily job. But the once a year or once every couple of years, you'll take everybody off, show them a good time, put them in a you motel or a hotel, everyone will do a nice warm up session, which is vital, embarrassing. And then people will be asked what will be expressed.

Blue sky ideas. So no halt, but we want to transform the company. We want to win against the competition. No idea is a bad idea. And the truth is, is not the best way to generate ideas and insights, things that will actually make a difference.

But secondly, there's this sort of launching leave mentality that affects a lots of places where people will brain store ideas, y'll vote on the ideas Normally waiting until the most important in the person in the room has voted first, and then following their example, which is also not good practice. And then on top of their day jobs, they will be asked to work on one initiative or another. IT won't have proper support.

IT won't have proper funding. And so of course, IT just falls by the wayside until perhaps somebody else thinks of IT, you know, a year or or two years later, this is a waste. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of talent and also, it's a waste in terms of the step change that you could make against your own competition or to improve your your own business. And we are absolutely ready to call for this to come to an end.

So the argument then is to bring him back into the organization, back into the weekly catenary of work. I guess the first step you say is to to prepare ourselves to be creative IT is honestly hard to step away from doing your work and good, efficient way in the way it's always been done successfully before and then try to shake things up that might not even pan out. So how do you persuade people to set aside the time for doing this every week and then shift their mindset so that they're actually excited about trying something different?

So think the cat will, to an extent, depend on the requirements of the job. You're not gonna come up with four huge ideas every month. What you can do is come up with ideas that will make a difference to the activities that you're doing. I don't know anybody in a in work in kind of my third year plus career where the practices that you're thoughts by the people who are handing down to you, where they've kept pace with technology, where y've cut pace with startups, where y've cut pace with chAllenges. The importance here is to recognize that you need IT.

And I think complacency is, you know, the enemy of winning here to think that everything is being done in a good enough way and you shouldn't disrupt IT that might be comfortable in a world where things are changing such a fast paced way, it's unrealistic. You need to have a really serious look at your competitive environment and the business world overall. If you're satisfied with good enough, then you're probably heading for not good enough. If you work on your creative thinking capabilities and the creative thinking capabilities of your teams, it's an investment of some time every week. It's not millions on bringing in a new system or even a massive training scheme.

So let's see in a manager who's interested in encouraging my team to be more creative or I want to encourage myself to be more creative and sort of jump at these weekly exercises that we're going to talk about in a second, what are some things to say to make me feel like I can be innovative?

The fact that you have so much knowledge about where you work on what you do and look at just tiny things, where are the abortion points in your job, and how could you make that Better? And in removing the need to do certain processes or think about consumers in a certain way, turn IT on its head a bit and say, if I was starting this company now with a completely blank shooted paper, what would I do? Would we be where we are now? You know, why is IT we're here. And what can we change? Small things, medium things, big things, as I think we fall into patterns, the same way that you fall into patterns sometimes in brainstorms, which is everyone says that we're looking for a really amazing ideas.

That sounds like you're saying that I don't need any great preparation or a manager doesn't need to give any great preparation to their team. Sort of the exercises themselves are designed to get you in the mindset of just let's think creatively about the specific problem. You break up those exercises into seasons, but really, you're talking about sort of what's going on with the person or team or organization at a particular time. So for example, when you're in a rut or your businesses, so what are some specific ways that you recommend a Spark change in that scenario?

One of the ways of Sparking change when you're in a rut is that technique, which is what won't you do? why? So this is just, you know, if you're sitting and you're going, how do we improve things? That's quite hard question.

It's much more fun to go through an exercise that goes and he are going to change things. What are things were definitely not going to do. What are the things that this business would never do that we know that the management would definitely say no to going through that exercise.

Answering those questions then gives you a set of ideas that you can go back to. You can question again, you can go, well, we would never do that. But what happens if we did? And this, I don't think this is why this happened. But the example that springs to mind his barbi hind, so as you know, alison, the forward of the book, was written by josh goldin, who's the global c. mo. At Warners entertainment, and the idea that you would release the Barbie movie, a movie that everyone thought was a children's movie, but IT wasn't a children's movie, and and the fact cast, in the first time, you said to me, you know, you gonna to see barbi, I said, well, I haven't a child to take. You said, you not take child .

supposed to take all your women from?

Yes, that's right. And so maybe that people wouldn't understand to then release IT you a huge, expensive movie on the same day as another huge, expensive movie that I had absolutely nothing in common with. You could easily go.

We would never do that. And of course, doing that created the bar behind phenomenon, which was immensely, immensely successful. So you're stuck in erat. Ask yourself, what wouldn't you do? Because the answer might be that's exactly what you should do.

even mattel itself, to choose to do instead of a cartoon version of verbi or something incredibly light hearted, you know, fully happy ending a etra, you know, to choose to allow margo robbie in her production company to make a political movie of sorts. That was definitely something I don't think most tory company executives would think they should do now.

And I think all of us, I jaw drop a bit, didn't when we watch the makey out of my outside management exactly, is one of the great joys of that will .

and the fact that they were willing to do that for a company that had been so closely associated with childhood to say no. Actually, it's a different way of looking at the empowering girls and women peace that they talked about. But everything that they did was different.

So the posters were just pink with a date on. No idea who's in the film. Nothing, no logo, just the color pink on the date. And because IT was so different, people started talking about IT. IT was intriguing and building that intrigue around your product of of taking the norms and twisting them paid off them and then the audience reaction as well, which was thank you for surprising me.

And then the whole thing where both companies, both universal and Warner brothers, when the whole barbon home, the thing happened, and people are using their skills to create a kind of weird joint poster for barbon hamer. And they didn't say oil missing with our I P. We're really unhappy.

They love IT. They just let IT go because the coal lessons of those two films, one about the invention, the uka bomb in the other about female in public. I mean, jan, I would not come up with that.

Yeah and absolutely, one of the reasons why we thought now is the time to write the book because the predominance of logic and organizations fuel by all the data that there is out there has just grown, grown and grown. But truly creative step changing. It's gone to change the cause of your business choices. They don't come from logic. They come from a combination of understanding the data and then using yoga instinct to make a leap.

You also talk about this idea of refreshes being important, you know? So even when the business is coming along just fine, you want to still try to be creative. So what are some exercises that you recommend using here?

I think one of the thoughts here is everything is fine, everything's going okay, everything's good enough.

But what if you really express that from someone else's point of views? So that could be the customer? Or IT could be, Frankly, an alien lands looks at your supply chain and goes, why on earth would you do like that? Or IT could even be, you know, what would your grandmothers say? So I think really expressing what's going on from someone else's point of view can be really, really valuable.

Katherine, you also talk about looking outside the organization to social media trends, to your consumers, to your competitors. But if you're doing not, how do you make sure that you're not just copying others?

Well, all that is, is it's just external guidance, isn't it's just telling you where things going? And and if IT is what your competition are doing, then do you want to be ahead of them? Or what's your version of what their improvement is or their expression is? Because every organization has, although IT sounds very strange, has a personality in a way of being the way that coca cola talks to is a completely different way than the way that push talks to you or jackeline driver talks to you.

So how do you take something that seems begining momentum and turn into something that is uniquely you and your company? How do you take a change in consumer behavior where now what's happening is that, you know, consumers aren't drinking this anymore. There's much more of a trend for that.

All that want to drink ordinary british t anymore, but they really like the idea of drinking matcher or something slightly different. How do you take your product and tweak IT a bit to make IT different? So in the U K.

We have A T brand caul york shui that was the third biggest brand in U. K. And they've turned IT round and turn themselves into number one by talking about the fact that they really love tea and it's all they care about. They're not part of a multi national and then they're done really, really wear things like biscuit tea, you know that so when you dunk, you probably do this in amErica .

because I lived in london for five years, so I drink milky t at two P M every single day.

Very good biscuits that people in the U K. dunk. Ah so yoga, I have done a variation of that because it's not like typically it's slightly sweeter and IT appeals to a slightly different market and IT doesn't feel like the tea that your parents drank.

So they've taken that whole thing about the flavors and have adapted IT for different markets without alienating their strong and existing love points that exist for them. That's what really well for them because it's another reason to reassess IT doesn't have to be exactly the same as your competitor. It's your interpretation .

of a trend to is the real advised test, you know a bunch of these fifty hooo techniques and see what works best for you individually or you as a team or you as the organization? Or is IT to cycle through as many of them as possible so that you know that you're looking at the problem or even finding new chAllenges to address from all angles?

The reason that we made IT lots and lots of techniques is because those techniques themselves can become stale. You continually ask, you know, what would the competition do? You're gonna eventually be coming up and rotating with the same answers.

So try lots of different techniques and and different months will suit different teams. Don't go here on top three. There are so many different ways of Sparking creativity. You know, some of them are simply about leaving your desk or over as you work and getting outside the variety of the ideas is important as anything else.

I mean, one of the ideas is be lazy, like a summer afternoon now this afternoon, where you land a tree with the strong to like a yog relaxation. So, you know, with the sun deming on your face, and just let your mind wonder. And one of the examples we have gotten the book is our in salin, who is said that he got his best ideas in the shower.

Because you're not doing anything, you not thinking. I need to think of something. There is nothing that is designed to kill creativity more than people going. We've got to be really creative because literally your mind empty, sometimes just letting your mind drift and thinking, I haven't gotten thing and letting your of resting mine function say, but we've never thought about doing IT that way, have we? I wonder why just do that.

But also within an organization, you might be at different stages of IT may be that you need to come up with some new ideas and reinvigorate your process IT might be that you need to work root and destroying go OK. We need to start all over again because our world is being disrupted. The key thing is to have a view about where you think you are and to use a couple of those techniques and to see how they work for you.

If i'm doing this as an individual or as the manager of a team, how do I make sure that the good ideas that do emerge then get purchase within the team or organization? You know, how do I express them? How do I introduce them? How do I get buying?

That has to be growth mindset. And one of the things that we talk about is how important IT is to move from absolute efficiency to a situation where you can come up with effective change as well. Now everybody is busy all of the time, but not everybody is busy all of the time with things that are driving either they work or the business forward.

So you have to do look about the situation analysis to carve out maybe an hour, maybe two hours a week where you can focus on thinking creatively and then executing creatively. What people will find if they move to that growth mindset, if you can find a way of empower ing the team. And I would suggest, again, with my experience of managing teams that quite often that simply about making the efficient part time sent more efficient and then that will free up time, don't have that sucked into doing more of the same, but allocate that time in that energy for improving things.

You know, that's what people love at work, right? They love mastery. They love being able to make things Better. They love the sense that they've had agency to help the business or or the company to improve and that they've got some ownership over those changes. And I would chAllenge that anyone is so hundred percent efficient the whole time that they can't just improve efficiency a little bit and free up some time to make effective change, but then make sure that you emotionally acknowledge and reward the people that are making those changes happen.

Katherine, talk about how you sell the ideas of the organization.

You talk about how more motivated your team is. You talk about how it's not involving you spending, you know three million pounds on a new computer system and you use the guard rails as your reasoning about why IT will be effected for the organization. The reason why so many new initiatives fail is because IT starts off with a score of sick and then someone else for more people, and then someone else for more people.

And then you have fourteen people around the table. No one makes a decision. And then something that was meant to take six months goes on for eighteen months, and no one ever does anything, because everyone's trying to manage your own stakeholder.

What you do is say, you break IT down into bite size pieces. So you go in the first three months of us doing this. This is what we need, and we need that and they will need that.

We're going to work on a squad rotation system. So IT won't involve three hundred and fifty people from the organza coming to every meeting, you know a two our meeting every week that they want to come to. It's going to be a relay system.

And this is what we think the end point will be. And we'll check in. And we've got on a greed level of goals of points. You know that we're onna hit and if we haven't, then will change IT. But all too often the reason why you don't get by and these people get scared because IT looks risky. But if you point out the fact it's not risky because you've thought IT fully through and you've got a very clear delivery timeline, that's all people want, I think.

So other examples. So other businesses have they ve stepped out of, you know doing what they were recently doing on what the gains are from that haps businesses who have been chAllenged. So examples of businesses have been chAllenged by startups because they didn't do that.

And also an understanding that IT is important. Step out of your comfort zone, but you don't have to leap of a building to step out of your comfort on. You'd have to jump out of a helicopter or or bunge jump. You just need to step out of your comfort zone a bit for an hour to a week. And that, that will have a disproportion impact on the outcomes and in the future and the happiness of the team actually.

So how do you think that organizational leaders could do a Better job of making this kind of creativity, muscle building or exercise practice more a part of the culture? I think you do see IT often in creative organizations like a pixar or an apple or an idea design consultation. Cy, but how do you make sure it's happening in banks and car makers and accountancy?

I think we've probably got a set of business leaders out there in the world at the moment who are very wide to left thinking. And you know, I know is more complicated than left brain, right brain, but i'm going to use that as the analogy. So logic, logic, if this plus this, then that you'll definitely get that outcome.

Just thinking about incremental gains from doing what you're already doing, but slightly more efficiently. And I think that it's incumbent on leadership now to embrace the right brain, to think about emotion, to think about, got instant to think about if you are leader of the business. The fact that you have experience, that you have a understanding of, you know what's right that purely comes from, you know your heart and what you've been three before, that kind of thinking has become a bit unfashionable as being, you know, characterized as props, bit mavering.

People want everything to be cut and dried. Well, you know what? Life is messy. You need to embrace some of that messy. Not so the things get out of control, but so that you can actually make a real step change. And so my view would be that this is about letting humanity and and in a world when we are increasingly our lives online and online is now so much of the world that we live in are being created by one algorithm or another, where new learning is being reduced to new learning, that the large learning models can find if what's already happened. So it's not really new at all, then really igniting that Spark of humanity is absolutely what we need to do as leaders.

Katherine, what if i'm working for a manager or in an organization that really doesn't seem to want new ideas or fresh thinking?

I think that you maybe could create a little memory greek that says, have we ever thought about doing this? Because trust me, if you're working in organization where no one likes ideas, you're probably sitting amongst a bunch of very unhappy other people you know, who aren't getting as much full film from work.

And I say the other things that might not be your manager, why don't you have a little you could create a little group at lunch time, you sit together and say, I read this book, have we have thought about that and you, you know have coffee together once we can just come up with ideas or use the techniques because who's going to turn around? The thing about managers is you they're managing various different things. The idea that creativity might just be a thing they're uncomfortable with that they ve don't feel that there the master or the missile.

And if there are a particular attitude, they don't film threatened you don't have to once permission you as long you're not setting far to the board dream in a frenzy of creativity. He's not gonna ve people turning around and saying, I think i've got no idea about how we might make the. That's Better or all sues just joined from another organization and they had a really interesting way of doing this.

And could I just talk to the group about IT in the regular monday meeting? Or shall we have a look at IT? Or i'll go and do IT presented to them as something which will be Better rather than as a chAllenge. And if you are happy and other people are happy by doing something different and doing more creative work, he wasn't gonna love that I need you going to state the company for longer and you're onna generate Better ideas for the company.

Well, that's a great note to end on. Hopefully, we can all be more creative as we move into twenty, twenty five, Katherine. So thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you having this.

That's catering Jacobin sue unma, marketing executives and authors of the book, a year of creativity, fifty two smart ideas for boost in creativity, innovation and inspiration network. We have many more shows. Help you manage your team, your organization and find them at h br dot org slash podcasts or search H B R in apple podcast potiphar's wherever you listen.

Thanks for our team, senior producer mary do, associate producer herbage, audio product manager ean fox and senior production specialist rab ecard. Thanks to you for listening to the H B I. Deas will be back with a new episode on tuesday. I'm Allison beard.