ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
If you ask people in business what drives individual team, organizational 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 GenAI because while large language models might be very good at recycling and combining old thinking from the content they’ve been trained on, they aren’t actually able to think outside that box of existing data.
For that critically important creative work, we still need humans. And yet, according to research studies, only 20 to 25% of people feel they’re living up to their full creative potential. So how do we jumpstart our own creativity, especially when we’re feeling overwhelmed by the pace and demands of our current work? 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 function or industry to get better at generating new ideas.
Kathryn Jacob and Sue Unerman are marketing executives and authors of the book, A Year of Creativity: 52 Smart Ideas for Boosting, Creativity, Innovation, and Inspiration at Work. Kathryn, Sue, welcome.
SUE UNERMAN: Hi. Thank you for having us.
KATHRYN JACOB: Hi.
ALISON BEARD: Now don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to list all 52 ideas, but the overarching message is that you two think creativity should be a weekly practice, even if you’re just spending a little bit of time and energy on it.
SUE UNERMAN: Yeah, I think so. I mean, we are used to… It might sound like a cliché, 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 away day once a year and generate random ideas and 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, on a weekly basis we believe.
ALISON BEARD: So you both work in marketing inherently creative roles. Why do you see creativity as something that everyone needs to practice rather than only people in specific jobs or at certain kinds of companies?
KATHRYN JACOB: 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 consumer’s needs more quickly.
And the idea that there’s a creative elite is wrong on so many levels. It shuts down a source of a number of ideas and it also shuts down your people from their possibilities as well. So if you talk to a bunch of children when they’re in kindergarten or up until they’re about seven, and you say, “Are you creative?” They say, “Yeah, I am. Look at this square with square eyes in and one ear, that’s my mum.” People go, “Yeah, it is your mum. That’s right. That’s a really, really great photo.” And then by the time people are about 14, unless you are executionally brilliant, no one thinks they’re creative.
And there’s some amazing research that was ironically done by Lego, which says that 80% of people feel that they don’t fulfill their creativity. So if in work, what you can do is if you in 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.
ALISON BEARD: Sue, you mentioned off-site brainstorming sessions, this idea that we all go away 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?
SUE UNERMAN: There seems to be some sort of accepted wisdom that the day job is the day job, but that once a year or once every couple of years, you’ll take everybody off that… You show them a good time, put them in a motel or a hotel, everyone will do a nice warm-up session, which is vaguely embarrassing. And then people will be asked what will be expressed as blue-sky ideas. So no holds barred. We want to transform the company, we want to win against the competition. No idea is a bad idea. And the truth is that it’s not the best way to generate ideas and insights, things that will actually make a difference.
But secondly, there’s this sort of launch and leave mentality that affects lots of places where people will brainstorm ideas, they’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 a year or two years later. And 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 own business. And we are absolutely ready to call for this to come to an end.
ALISON BEARD: So the argument then is to bring it back into the organization, back into the weekly cadence of work. I guess the first step you say is to sort of prepare ourselves to be creative. You know, it is honestly hard to step away from doing your work in a 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?
SUE UNERMAN: So I think the cadence will to an extent depend on the requirements of the job. You’re not going to 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 are doing. I don’t know anybody in work in my thirty-year-plus career, where the practices that you are taught by the people who are handing down to you, where they’ve kept pace with technology, where they’ve kept pace with startups, where they’ve kept pace with challenges.
The importance here is to recognize that you need it. And I think complacency is 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 are 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.
ALISON BEARD: So let’s say I’m 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?
KATHRYN JACOB: The fact that you have so much knowledge about where you work and what you do, and look at just tiny things, which are… Where are the abrasion 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 sheet of paper, what would I do?” Would we be where we are now? And why are where we are now? Why is it we are here and what can we change? Small things, medium things, big things. Because I think we fall into patterns the same way that you fall into patterns sometimes in brainstorms, which is everyone says, “Oh, we’re looking for really amazing ideas.”
ALISON BEARD: It 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. The exercises themselves are designed to get you in the mindset of just, “Let’s think creatively about this specific problem.” You break up those exercises into seasons, but really you’re talking about 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 business is. So what are some specific ways that you recommend to spark change in that scenario?
SUE UNERMAN: So I think one of the ways of sparking change when you’re in a rut is that technique which is what won’t you do and why? So if you’re sitting and you’re going, “How do we improve things?” That’s quite a hard question. It’s much more fun to go through an exercise that goes, “Okay, we’re going to change things. What are the things we’re 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 listen, I don’t think this is why this happened, but the example that springs to mind is Barbie-Heimer.
So as you know, Alison, the full word of the book was written by Josh Goldstein, who’s the global CMO at Warner Entertainment. And the idea that you would release that movie on the same… The Barbie movie, a movie that everyone thought was a children’s movie, but it wasn’t a children’s movie. And in fact, Kathryn the first time you said to me, “You’re going to go and see Barbie?” I said, “Well, I haven’t got a child to take.” You said you’re not supposed to take a child, so here’s a movie-
ALISON BEARD: You’re supposed to take all your women friends. This is a feminist movie.
SUE UNERMAN: That’s right. So a movie that people wouldn’t understand to then release it, a huge expensive movie on the same day as another huge expensive movie that had absolutely nothing in common with. You could easily go, “We would never do that.” And of course, doing that created the Barbie-Heimer phenomenon, which was immensely, immensely successful. So if you’re stuck in a rut, ask yourself what wouldn’t you do. Because the answer might be that’s exactly what you should do.
ALISON BEARD: Even Mattel itself to choose to do instead of a cartoon version of Barbie or something incredibly lighthearted, fully happy ending, et cetera, to choose to allow Margot Robbie and her production company to make a political movie of sorts. That was definitely something I don’t think most toy company executives would think they should do.
SUE UNERMAN: No, and I think all of us, our jaw dropped a bit, didn’t it? When we watched how much they took the mickey out of Mattel’s own management. It was one of the great joys of that film.
KATHRYN JACOB: And the fact that they were willing to do that for a company that had been so closely associated with childhood to say, now actually… It’s a different way of looking at the empowering girls and women piece that they talked about, but everything that they did was different.
So the posters were just pink with a date on, no idea who was in the film, nothing, no logo, just the color pink and the date. And because it was so different, people started talking about it. It was intriguing and building that intrigue around your product of taking the norms and twisting them is paid off for them. And then the audience reaction as well, which was, “Thank you for surprising me.”
And then the whole thing when the whole Barbenheimer thing happened and people were using their skills to create a kind of weird joint poster for Barbenheimer and they didn’t say, “Oh, you’re messing with our IP. We are really unhappy.” They loved it. They just let it go. Because the coalescence of those two films, one about the invention of the nuclear bomb and the other about female empowerment, I mean, GenAI would not have come up with that.
SUE UNERMAN: And absolutely one of the reasons why we thought now is the time to write the book. Because the predominance of logic in organizations fueled by all the data there is out there has just grown and grown and grown. But truly creative changing it’s going to change the course of your business choices. They don’t come from logic, they come from a combination of understanding the data and then using your gut instinct to make a leap.
ALISON BEARD: You also talk about this idea of refresh as being important. So even when the business is humming along just fine, you want to still try to be creative. So what are some exercises that you recommend using here?
SUE UNERMAN: So I think one of the ways of sparking change when you’re in a rut is that technique which is what won’t you do and why? So if you’re sitting and you’re going, “How do we improve things?” That’s quite a hard question. It’s much more fun to go through an exercise that goes, “Okay, we’re going to change things. What are the things we’re 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 listen, I don’t think this is why this happened, but the example that springs to mind is Barbie-Heimer.
ALISON BEARD: Even Mattel itself to choose to do instead of a cartoon version of Barbie or something incredibly lighthearted, fully happy ending, et cetera, to choose to allow Margot Robbie and her production company to make a political movie of sorts. That was definitely something I don’t think most toy company executives would think they should do.
SUE UNERMAN: No, and I think all of us, our jaw dropped a bit, didn’t it? When we watched how much they took the mickey out of Mattel’s own management. It was one of the great joys of that film.
KATHRYN JACOB: And the fact that they were willing to do that for a company that had been so closely associated with childhood to say, now actually… It’s a different way of looking at the empowering girls and women piece that they talked about, but everything that they did was different.
So the posters were just pink with a date on, no idea who was in the film, nothing, no logo, just the color pink and the date. And because it was so different, people started talking about it. It was intriguing and building that intrigue around your product of taking the norms and twisting them is paid off for them. And then the audience reaction as well, which was, “Thank you for surprising me.”
And then the whole thing when the whole Barbenheimer thing happened and people were using their skills to create a kind of weird joint poster for Barbenheimer and they didn’t say, “Oh, you’re messing with our IP. We are really unhappy.” They loved it. They just let it go. Because the coalescence of those two films, one about the invention of the nuclear bomb and the other about female empowerment, I mean, GenAI would not have come up with that.
SUE UNERMAN: And absolutely one of the reasons why we thought now is the time to write the book. Because the predominance of logic in organizations fueled by all the data there is out there has just grown and grown and grown. But truly creative changing it’s going to change the course of your business choices. They don’t come from logic, they come from a combination of understanding the data and then using your gut instinct to make a leap.
ALISON BEARD: You also talk about this idea of refresh as being important. So even when the business is humming along just fine, you want to still try to be creative. So what are some exercises that you recommend using here?
SUE UNERMAN: So I think one of the ways of sparking change when you’re in a rut is that technique which is what won’t you do and why? So if you’re sitting and you’re going, “How do we improve things?” That’s quite a hard question. It’s much more fun to go through an exercise that goes, “Okay, we’re going to change things. What are the things we’re 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 listen, I don’t think this is why this happened, but the example that springs to mind is Barbie-Heimer.
ALISON BEARD: Even Mattel itself to choose to do instead of a cartoon version of Barbie or something incredibly lighthearted, fully happy ending, et c
