I
t’s been a year since I stepped away from serving on the executive team of one of my biggest fractional clients. I went from Chief Growth Officer for someone else to being the CGO of my own life.
This last year felt like an exercise of trusting my own vision again. Trusting my own understanding of the world and making sense of what felt good and what didn’t.
One of the biggest things I clung to, but couldn’t yet articulate was a simple word… creativity. I knew I was creative, I’ve written and illustrated 3 (almost 4) children’s books. I have built things with my hands, I usually grow a garden every year. Creativity cannot run from me, for I am faster 😂.
But the way the word lingered, the way it was the lens I started to see most things through, I knew it was bigger than art and design and building and growing veggies.
The Tech Revolution of our Time
One of the most significant happenings I noticed in the last year was that AI is quite possibly the biggest tech advancement of our time. As a millennial, we had a bit of childhood without tech and saw the adoption of the internet in real time.
We might not have understood it all, but we were the ones that learned it the fastest. The ones that had to teach our parents how to print the mapquest maps or Google that thing we were tired of them asking us about.
I think we are seeing that very transformation now with more widespread AI usage. People are scared their jobs are disappearing (they are). Having the information is not enough anymore. People do not get to aspire to greater efficiency because there is no competition between the 1s and 0s. So what now…
Our roles are changing. And CREATIVITY is no long a nice to have. Now, before you start telling yourself the story about how you drew something in 3rd grade and the class bully called it ugly, please know that creativity ≠ art.
Creativity is the ability to come up with something ORIGINAL and EFFECTIVE.
The EXPRESSION of creativity is often seen in art forms, architecture, design. But it is lesser acknowledged as the problem solving abilities of a team, the innovation of a product or the process redesign from the project manager you just ‘love’. Why is this?
Are these roles not creating something original and effective?
Are you not asking your crew to come up with ideas and stop expecting you to have all the answers?
Are you not tired of rolling your eyes because the last person who sent you an email used ChattyB to write it and forgot to remove “Let me know if that matches the tone your were trying to achieve.” at the end?
Upskilling Creativity in the Workplace
Creativity and its tendrils will be the skill you need to over correct for and upskill your team on in this next year.
In January, the World Economic Forum shared the top 10 core skills for 2025-2030:
- Analytical thinking
- Resilience, flexibility, and agility
- Leadership and social influence
- Creative thinking
- Motivation and self-awareness
- Technological literacy
- Empathy and active listening
- Curiosity and life long learning
- Talent management
- Service orientation
(Honorable mention for AI and big data coming in at #11)
This part got me good, “This combination of cognitive, self-efficacy and interpersonal skills within the top five emphasizes the importance ascribed by respondents to having an agile, innovative and collaborative workforce, where both problem-solving abilities and personal resilience are critical for success.”
Creativity is all up and through that determination and data.
Watching trends emerge in real time has been fascinating and I invite you to keep an eye on this newsletter to see where and how you can integrate creativity into your workplace, your life and the future of both.
