In a marketplace defined by rapid change, those who create boldly carve their own paths.

As artificial intelligence takes on more tasks traditionally handled by humans, futureproofing our careers requires mastering key competencies that set us apart. Z&A’s research points to five such capabilities: critical thinking, creative thinking, co-creative collaboration, persuasive communication, and leadership and management. Mastery of these skills takes time, but harnessing the basics of any one could be pivotal in seizing new opportunities. For now, we will consider the power of creativity, what it is, and why we need it more than ever.

At work, creative ideas pave the way for new products, services, processes, and business models. From products like Ozempic, which has revolutionized diabetes treatment and weight management, to ride-hailing apps like Uber transforming how we travel and commute – every creative professional and business has the potential for greatness. With innovative models like double-sided platforms, exemplified by Apple’s App Store connecting developers and users, this goal is made even more feasible to achieve.

But what is creativity? Put simply, creativity is a versatile mental tool that helps us generate new ideas in a variety of forms. Concepts, theories, formulas, poems, or even musical compositions represent the cognitive output necessary to solve problems and transform our understanding of the world. To gain a competitive edge in business, your creative ideas will stand out based on how original, simple, clear, beautiful, and – most importantly – useful they are.

Creativity empowers every individual to tackle well-defined problems like reducing accounting errors and complex challenges like identifying new revenue streams for brands. It enables us to design strategies for market access and increase market share by combining inventive thinking with practical solutions. To make this skill even more effective, we must use a blend of practicality and intelligence to sharpen its focus, thereby avoiding unsubstantiated fantasies.

Creativity and intelligence are complementary components of success (see Figure 1). Much like our hands working in tandem to lift a heavy object, both are essential for tackling real-world problems.

Consider a practical example: as a brand manager at a multinational pharmaceutical company in Taiwan, intelligence helps you analyze competing brands, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and identify the hurdles your team needs to overcome to reach a target number of patients. While intelligence clarifies your market landscape, creativity enables you to craft a strategic plan to reach your goals by identifying and exploiting key leverage points.

Creating a brand strategy has no set formula. To futureproof our careers, we must refine our core capabilities: using intelligence to understand business realities and applying creativity to transform insights into effective actions. Together, these skills drive impactful outcomes across diverse aspects of our work.

When working with creative ideas, one of our constant challenges is evaluating the quality of our ideas. There aren’t any prevailing reliable, predictable, or acceptable models or methods for evaluating creative ideas – we often rely on the gut feeling of our leaders.

The value and pitfalls of creative evaluation

In 1998, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approached Yahoo with an offer to sell their company for US$1 million. Yahoo declined the offer, believing their own search technology was good enough. In 2000, history repeated itself when Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings approached Blockbuster with an offer to sell Netflix for US$50 million. Blockbuster executives declined as well.

In 2007, when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was convinced that most mobile phone customers would not buy it. Not only was it too expensive – it also lacked a physical keyboard.

In retrospect, it is easy to judge the executives at Yahoo, Blockbuster, and Microsoft for being unable to foresee the value and success of the products they were evaluating. But when we put ourselves in their place and try to evaluate creative ideas prospectively, we will find that we are confronted with the same challenge.

What makes it so difficult to evaluate creative ideas? Figure 2 provides a framework that helps us make sense of the process. Until recently, most of the work we performed as white-collar workers fell into Quadrant 1. These are well-defined tasks, such as those performed by a bank teller. However, more and more of these well-defined tasks are becoming automated or outsourced to low-cost labor markets, leaving behind two types of ill-defined tasks in Quadrants 2 and 3, and well-defined tasks with unpredictable outcomes in Quadrant 4.

The ideas for solutions to tasks in Quadrant 2 are more predictable and easier to evaluate than tasks in Quadrants 3 and 4, which have lower acceptance, lower validity, and lower predictability.

Let’s use Elon Musk’s success with SpaceX and intractable problems with X (formerly Twitter) as real-world examples. At SpaceX, the work Elon Musk and his team needed to perform fell into Quadrant 2 – the intended outcome was predictably constrained by the objective, stable, and predictable laws of nature. SpaceX’s objective was to find out if there was an engineering solution for getting their rocket’s fuselage safely back to Earth.

Before SpaceX, rockets were single-use: their fuselages and engines, constituting up to 90% of the total cost, would burn up upon re-entry after delivering payloads to space. SpaceX engineers tackled the challenge of safely returning these components to the launch pad, enabling their reuse and significantly reducing launch expenses. This breakthrough has provided the company with a substantial cost advantage over traditional rocket manufacturers. (For a deeper exploration of SpaceX’s strategic approach, Richard Rumelt’s The Crux offers valuable insights.)

Elon Musk and his team haven’t managed to create similar success stories with X (formerly known as Twitter). Their challenge with X falls in Quadrant 4. Unlike the desired outcome for SpaceX – whose possible solutions were predictably constrained by the laws of nature – the solutions for making X successful are dependent on people, such as X’s users, advertisers, and regulators in each country it operates.

Unlike laws of nature, people’s preferences are subjective, unstable, and often unpredictable. They are notoriously difficult to calculate, varying from person to person, place to place, and context to context. This is one explanation for why generating a solution to satisfy X’s users, advertisers, and regulators is proving more challenging than the engineering solution for getting SpaceX’s fuselage safely back to Earth.

Challenges that fall into Quadrants 3 and 4 are good news for creative individuals and teams. They provide a path for futureproofing our careers, especially in the coming age of artificial intelligence. Given the sometimes unpredictability of human judgments, there is no reasonable one-size-fits-all theory for satisfying us at a reasonable cost. That unpredictability gives creativity its foothold.

As long as the solutions to many of the problems in Quadrants 3 and 4 remain stubbornly contingent on our whims, artificial intelligence will have no choice but to continuously play catchup, never quite figuring out what it is that truly delights us this time and each time. This means that if we develop our creative capabilities, we will have relatively higher job security than those working with intelligence alone, which artificial intelligence systems can emulate more predictably.

Consider, for example, how many of the low-level routine tasks have already been subsumed by artificial intelligence – especially those requiring analytical skills, such as coding.

Building a culture of creativity

Many organizations are upskilling and reskilling their employees, and a part of that effort is creating a culture that values creativity. However, many organizations fail to distinguish between creative activities with a creative output (see Figure 3).

A creative activity – such as brainstorming, strategizing, role-playing, and so on – is what you or I may personally find deeply engaging and enjoyable. These are, however, creative activities and not creative outputs. While engaging in creative activities may be helpful, it is not sufficient to develop creative outputs. Creative outputs are fresh ideas for products that will sell, promotional ideas that will appeal to our customers, and processes that will improve cross-functional engagement.

Creativity is more than just a buzzword – it’s a transformative force that drives innovation, problem-solving, and meaningful progress in every aspect of our lives. By honing this skill, individuals and organizations alike can navigate complexity, adapt to change, and carve out new paths to success in an ever-evolving world.

Would you like to learn more about creativity?

Recommended Books:
1. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanism, Margaret A. Boden
2. The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler
3. The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas

Free virtual course: Introduction to Creative Thinking
Paid virtual course: Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving

For a fully customized, in-person workshop on creativity, contact the author through the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan.

Would you like to further future proof your career in the 21st century?
The August issue of TOPICS looked at critical thinking in “Futureproofing Your Career in the 21st Century:”