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 thoughts here is everything is fine, everything’s going okay, everything’s good enough. But what if you re-express that from someone else’s point of view? 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 it like that?” Or it could even be, “What would your grandmother say?” So I think re-expressing going on from someone else’s point of view can be really, really valuable.
ALISON BEARD: Kathryn, you also talk about looking outside the organization to social media trends, to your consumers, to your competitors. But if you’re doing that, how do you make sure that you’re not just copying others?
KATHRYN JACOB: Well, all that is, is its just external guidance, isn’t it? It’s just telling you where things are going, and if it is what your competitors are doing, then don’t 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 and a way of being.
The way that Coca Cola talks to you is a completely different way than the way that Porsche talks to you or Jaguar, Land Rover talks to you. So. How do you take something that seems to be gaining momentum and turn it 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 consumers aren’t drinking this anymore, there’s much more of a trend for that? Or actually if it is that you know that young people don’t want to drink ordinary British tea anymore, but they really like the idea of drinking matcha or something slightly different. How do you take your product and tweak it a bit to make it different?
In the UK we have a tea brand called Yorkshire Tea that was the third-biggest brand in the UK. And they’ve turned it round and turned themselves into number one by talking about the fact that they really love tea and it’s all they care about and they’re not part of a multinational. And then they’ve done really, really weird things like biscuit tea. So when you dunk… You probably don’t do this in America, because-
ALISON BEARD: I’ve lived in London for five years, so I drink milky tea at 2:00 PM every single day.
KATHRYN JACOB: Very good. But you know that thing where there’s biscuits that people in the UK dunk into tea. So Yorkshire Tea have done a variation of that because it’s not like typical tea. 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 flavorings and have adapted it for different markets without alienating their strong and existing love points that exist for them. That’s worked 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.
ALISON BEARD: So is the real advice to test a bunch of these 52 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 you’re looking at the problem or even finding new challenges to address from all angles.
SUE UNERMAN: The reason that we made it lots and lots of techniques is because those techniques themselves can become stale. You continually ask what would the competition do, you’re going to eventually be coming up and rotating with the same answers. So try lots of different techniques and different ones will suit different teams, but don’t go, “Here’s our top three.”
There are so many different ways of sparking creativity. Some of them are simply about leaving your desk or wherever it is you work and getting outside. The variety of the ideas is as important as anything else.
KATHRYN JACOB: And the idea that, I mean, one of the ideas is be lazy like a summer afternoon. There’s afternoons where you lie under a tree with the… I’m starting to sound like a yoga relaxation technique. So with the sun dappling on your face and just let your mind wander. One of the examples we’ve got in the book is Aaron Sorkin who always said that he got his best ideas in the shower. It’s because you’re not doing anything. You’re 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 empties.
Sometimes just letting your mind drift and thinking, “I haven’t got anything.” And letting your resting mind function say, “Oh, 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 uproot and destroy and go, “Okay, 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.
ALISON BEARD: 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? How do I express them? How do I introduce them? How do I get buy-in?
SUE UNERMAN: There has to be a 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 their work or the business forward. So you have to do a little bit of a situational 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 empowering the team, and I would suggest, again with my experience in managing teams that quite often that’s simply about making the efficient part 10% more efficient, and then that will free up time. Don’t have that sucked into doing more of the same, but allocate that time and that energy for improving things.
That’s what people love at work. 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 the company to improve, and that they’ve got some ownership over those changes. And I would challenge that anyone is so a 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.
ALISON BEARD: Kathryn, talk about how you sell the ideas up the organization.
KATHRYN JACOB: You talk about how more motivated your team is. You talk about how it’s not involving you spending 3 million pounds on a new computer system and you use the guardrails as your reasoning about why it will be effective for the organization. The reason why so many new initiatives fail is because it starts off with a squad of six and then someone adds four more people and then someone adds four more people, and then you have 14 people around the table. No one makes a decision. And then something that was meant to take six months goes on for 18 months and no one ever does anything because everyone’s trying to manage their own stakeholder.
What you do is say you break it down into bite-sized pieces. So you go, “In the first three months of us doing this, this is what we need, and then we’ll need that, and then we’ll need that. And we’re going to work on a squad rotation system. So it won’t involve 350 people from the organization coming to every meeting, a two-hour meeting every week that they don’t 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 will check in and we’ve got an agreed level of goals, of points that we’re going to hit. And if we haven’t, then we’ll change it.” But all too often the reason why you don’t get buy-in is 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.
SUE UNERMAN: I think also other examples, so other businesses, how they’ve stepped out of doing what they were traditionally doing and what the gains are from that. Perhaps businesses who have been challenged, so examples of businesses that have been challenged by start-ups because they didn’t do that. And also really an understanding that it is important to step out of your comfort zone, but you don’t have to leap off a building to step out of your comfort zone. You don’t have to jump out of a helicopter or bungee jump. You just need to step out of your comfort zone a bit, for an hour or two a week. And that will have a disproportionate impact on the outcomes and the future and the happiness of the team actually.
ALISON BEARD: 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 IDEO design consultancy. But how do you make sure it’s happening in banks and car makers and accountancies?
SUE UNERMAN: So I think we’ve probably got a set of business leaders out there in the world at the moment who are very wedded to left brain thinking. And I know it’s more complicated than left brain and right brain, but I’m going to use that as the analogy. So logical-
ALISON BEARD: Shorthand.
SUE UNERMAN: Shorthand, yeah, logic. If this plus this, then that you’ll definitely get that outcome. Just thinking about incremental gains from doing what you are 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 gut instinct. To think about if you’re a leader of the business, the fact that you have experience, that you have a understanding of what’s right, that purely comes from your heart and what you’ve been through before. And I think that kind of thinking has become a bit unfashionable.
It’s been characterized as perhaps a bit maverick, and people want everything to be cut and dried. Well, you know what? Life is messy. You need to embrace some of that messiness, not so that things get out of control, but so that you can actually make a real step change. So my view would be that this is about letting humanity in 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 curated by one algorithm or another. Where new learning is being reduced to new learning that the large learning models can find in 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.
ALISON BEARD: And Kathryn, what if I’m working for a manager or in an organization that really doesn’t seem to want new ideas or fresh thinking?
KATHRYN JACOB: I think that you maybe could create a little maverick group that says, “Have we ever thought about doing this?” Because trust me, if you’re working in an organization where no one likes ideas, you’re probably sitting amongst a bunch of very unhappy other people who aren’t getting as much fulfillment from work. And also the other thing is it might not be your manager. Why don’t you have a little… You could create a little group that at lunchtime you sit together and say, “I’ve read this book. Have we ever thought about that?” And you have coffee together once a week and just come up with some ideas or use the techniques, because who’s going to turn around? The thing about managers is they’re managing various different things. The idea that creativity might just be a thing they’re uncomfortable with, that they don’t feel that they’re the master or the mistress of, and if they’re a particular attitude, they don’t want to feel threatened.
You don’t have to ask permission. As long as you’re not setting fire to the boardroom in a frenzy of creativity, who’s not going to love people turning around and saying, “I think I’ve got an idea about how we might make the process better.” Or, “Sue’s just joined from another organization and they had a really interesting way of doing this, 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 away and do it.” Present it 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, who isn’t going to love that? If it means you’re going to stay at the company for longer and you’re going to generate better ideas for the company.
ALISON BEARD: Well, that’s a great note to end on. Hopefully we can all be more creative as we move into 2025. Kathryn, Sue, thank you so much.
KATHRYN JACOB: Thank you.
SUE UNERMAN: Thank you for having us.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Kathryn Jacob and Sue Unerman, marketing executives and authors of the book, A Year of Creativity: 52 Smart Ideas for Boosting Creativity, Innovation, and Inspiration at Work.
We have many more shows to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR on Apple Podcasts Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday, I’m Alison Beard.
