Sue Unerman (2:51)

Yeah, I think so. I mean, we are used to it might sound like a cliche, 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 in 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 (3:25)

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?

Catherine Jacob (3:39)

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 consumers 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, you know, when they're in kindergarten or up until they're about 7, and you say, are you creative? They say, yeah, I am. You know, look at this square with square eyes in and you know, one ear, that's my mum. And people go, yeah, it is your mum, that's right. That's a really, really great photo. And then by the time people are 14, unless you're executionly 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 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 (5:01)

Sue, you mentioned off site brainstorming sessions, this idea that we all go 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 (5:26)

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 will take everybody off, show them a good time, put them in a, you know, 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 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 and 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, you know, a year or two years later. This is a waste, it's a waste of time, it's a waste of talent and also it's a waste of, 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 (7:08)

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 (7:48)

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're doing. I don't know anybody, you know, in work, in kind of my 30 year plus career, where the practices that you're 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 recognise 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 in 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're 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 (9:25)

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?

Catherine Jacob (9:45)

The fact that you have so much knowledge about where you work and what you do and look at just tiny things, 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? Why is it we're 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 (10:31)

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. Sort of. 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 sort of 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 (11:08)

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 there's just a, you know, 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 barbieheimer. So as you know, Alison, the foreword of the book was written by Josh Goldstein, who's the global CMO at Warner's Entertainment. And the idea that you would release the Barbie movie, a movie that everyone thought was a children's movie, but it wasn't a children's movie. And in fact, Catherine, the first time you said to me, you know, you're going to go and see Barbie, I said, well, I haven't got a child to take. You said that you're not supposed to take a child.

Alison Beard (12:26)

You're supposed to take all your women friends. Feminist movie.

Sue Unerman (12:29)

That's right. And so a movie that people wouldn't understand to then release it, you know, huge expensive movie on the same day as another huge expensive movie that it 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 (12:58)

Even Mattel itself, to choose to do instead of a cartoon version of Barbie or something incredibly lighthearted, you know, fully happy ending, etcetera, 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 (13:25)

No. And I think all of us, our jaw dropped a bit, didn't it, when we watched the Mickey out of Mattel Zone Management.

Catherine Jacob (13:31)

Exactly.

Sue Unerman (13:32)

It was one of the great joys.

Catherine Jacob (13:33)

Of that film and the fact that they were willing to do that for a company that had been so closely associated with childhood to say no. 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 paid off for them. And then the audience reaction as well, which was, thank you for surprising me. And then the whole thing where both companies, both Universal and Warner Brothers, 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're 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, Gen AI would not have come up with that.

Alison Beard (14:52)

Yeah.

Sue Unerman (14:52)

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 that there is out there, has just grown and grown and grown. But truly creative step 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 (15:21)

You also talk about this idea of refresh as being important. You know, 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 (15:34)

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 lens, looks at your supply chain and goes, why on earth would you do it like that? Or it could even be, you know, what would your grandmother say? So I think re expressing what's going on from someone else's point of view can be really, really valuable.

Alison Beard (16:08)

Katherine, 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?

Catherine Jacob (16:21)

Well, all that is is it's 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, you know, consumers aren't drinking this anymore. There's much more of a trend for that. 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? So 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 make biscuit tea. You know that. So when you dunk, you probably don't do this in America because I lived.

Alison Beard (17:57)

In London for five years, so I, I drink milky tea at 2pm every single good.

Catherine Jacob (18:02)

But you know that 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.

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Alison Beard (19:59)

So is the real advice to test you know 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 that you're looking at the problem or even finding new challenges to address from all angles?

Sue Unerman (20:21)

The reason that we made it lots and lots of techniques is because those techniques themselves can become stale. You continually ask, you know, 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. You know, some of them are simply about leaving your desk or wherever it is you work and getting outside. The variety of the ideas is important as anything else.

Catherine Jacob (20:59)

I mean, one of the ideas is be lazy like a summer afternoon. You know, those afternoons where you lie under a tree with the starting to sound like a yoga relaxation technique so, you know, with the sun dappling on your face and just let your mind wander. I mean, one of the examples we've got in the book is Aaron Sorkin, who 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 kind of 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 (22:15)

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 purchased within the team or organization? You know, how do I express them? How do I introduce them? How do I get buy in?

Sue Unerman (22:34)

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 situation 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. Time, don't have that sucked into doing more of the same, but allocate that time and that energy for improving things. You know, that's, that's, that's, that's what people love at work, right? They love mastery, they love being able to make things better. They love the sense that they've had agency to help their business or, or the company to improve and that they've got some ownership over those changes. And I would challenge that anyone is so 100% 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 (24:24)

Katherine, talk about how you sell the ideas up the organization.

Catherine Jacob (24:29)

You talk about how more motivated your team is. You talk about how it's not involving you spending, you know, £3 million 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 else four more people, and then someone else 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 U.S. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 (26:06)

I think also other examples so other businesses, how they've stepped out of, you know, 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 startups because they didn't do that. And also 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 that will have a disproportionate impact on the outcomes and the future and the happiness of the team, actually.

Alison Beard (26:52)

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 carmakers and accountancies?

Sue Unerman (27:22)

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 you know, I know it's more complicated than left brain and right brain, but I'm going to use that as the analogy. So logical shorthand. Yeah, logic. If this plus this, then that you'll definitely get that outcome just thinking about incremental gains from doing what you're 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, you know, your heart and what you've been through before. That kind of thinking has become a bit unfashionable. It's been, you know, 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. And 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 (29:25)

Katherine, what if I'm working for a manager or in an organization that really doesn't seem to want new ideas or fresh thinking?

Catherine Jacob (29:34)

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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 threats. You don't have to ask permission. You know, as long as you're not setting far to the boardroom and 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. And 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're 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 (31:12)

Well, that's a great note to end on. Hopefully we can all be more creative as we move into 2025. Katherine, sue, thank you so much.

Sue Unerman (31:20)

Thank you, thank you, thank you for having us.

Alison Beard (31:25)

That's Katherine 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 Du, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhart. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Alison Be.

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