Boost Your Creativity in Any Job

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard. If you ask people in business what drives individual team and organizational success, creativity often ranks pretty high on the list. Yes, you need the skill 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 Gen AI. 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.

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