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In a world where artificial intelligence is rapidly absorbing the task-based, procedural and analytical work that once defined professional expertise, there is a knowledge gap and need to better understand the human competencies required for leadership to be more sophisticated in driving change, managing risk, and creating new value – if the goal is to meaningfully improve outcomes.
To get better at Creativity, know how to look at it
A big mistake is to treat creativity as a single, undifferentiated quality. We say someone is “creative” the same way we’d say someone is “athletic”. But athleticism isn’t one thing. For example, a marathon runner and a power lifter train completely differently, excel in different contexts, and coaching them requires a different approach entirely.
Creativity works the same way. Research in cognitive science, neuroscience and organizational psychology has consistently shown that creativity is not one skill but a system of distinct, interrelated capacities. When we collapse all of them into a single label, we end up coaching for “creativity” the same way a trainer would coach for “athleticism” – without distinguishing between strength, endurance and agility. The coaching isn’t effective and creative development doesn’t occur !
The human qualities needed to be good at creativity include – ” Creative Skills ” , “ Creative Expression ” , ” Creative Application ” and ” Creative Thinking ” . Each serves a different function and each requires different conditions to develop. As well, recognize all four working together are what produces the outcomes needed to have – an innovative culture, better look ahead, a more open mind about opportunity, and greater risk tolerance – to make innovation more rewarding.
The human qualities needed to Innovate for Impact with AI
- Creative Skills are the technical foundation of creative work. In any domain, there are learnable, practiced abilities that enable creative output. A software developer’s command of programming languages, a designer’s mastery of visual composition, a strategist’s facility with financial modeling. These skills are concrete, measurable and teachable. Most organizations are reasonably good at developing them, which is always why they over value them.
- Creative Expression is often viewed as ornamental, but is consequential. Expression is how an individual’s unique perspective enters the work. It’s the writer who finds the precise analogy or phraseology that makes a strategy legible or insight resonate. It’s the product leader who insists on an interface that respects the user’s intelligence. It’s the CEO who gives a speech that people remember. Expression is what makes an activity work or feel distinctly human rather than generically competent, and it is what begins to give our humanity the advantage in the AI era.
- Creative Application is where ideas meet constraints. This is creativity as a decision making capacity – the ability to integrate incomplete information, competing signals and human insight when established models have limited relevance or no longer apply. It’s not the ability to generate ideas in a vacuum. It’s the ability to make good creative decisions under real conditions – regulatory limits, resource constraints, time pressure and the messy unpredictability of actual markets and actual people. Interestingly, this is one human competency that AI cannot replicate.
- Creative Thinking is where cognitive complexity lives and encompasses 3 modes –
a. Divergent Thinking – generates multiple possibilities without judgment.
b. Convergent Thinking – evaluates and refines ideas towards viable solutions.
c. Lateral Thinking – challenges the assumptions people take for granted. For example, the ride-sharing economy didn’t just improve transportation, it asked “ Why do we need to take a taxi or own a car ? ”. That’s Lateral Thinking at scale.
What makes creative thinking so valuable, and so difficult to cultivate, is that it requires cognitive flexibility – the ability to shift deliberately between these three modes depending on what the situation demands. fMRI research confirms that during creative tasks, the brain’s default mode network and executive control network, which normally take turns, begin to synchronize. That neural collaboration is associated with the kind of insight that can’t be forced or scheduled. It has to be cultivated.
WHERE Al STOPS AND HUMAN CREATIVITY BEGINS
There’s a version of the AI conversation that goes like this – AI will take our jobs, so we need to be more creative. That framing is less useful than the one that asks – What specifically can AI not do? Because the answer is precise enough to guide how to develop people.
AI is genuinely impressive at Convergent Thinking. Given a defined problem with sufficient data, it can generate, evaluate and rank solutions faster than any human or team. It can recognize patterns across datasets that would take a person years to process. It can’t shift between Divergent, Convergent and Lateral Thinking the way humans can, in real time, in response to signals that weren’t in the training data ! The World Economic Forum has identified this cognitive flexibility, along with creativity and emotional intelligence, as among the skills AI cannot replicate.
More specifically, AI struggles with what researchers call Creative Application – the judgment to decide which problems are worth solving, the wisdom to know when an innovative approach introduces acceptable risk, and the capacity to read the human considerations or dimensions of a situation that don’t show up in any dataset. A language model can produce a thousand marketing concepts. It cannot tell you what one will resonate with your customers, or is the best strategy that respects context, culture, relationships, etc.
A research team at Cornell Tech put it plainly – The future of creativity isn’t about Humans versus AI, but Humans with AI. That framing matters, because it provides perspective, insight and clarifies the actual competitive advantage with Humans and AI. The leaders and organizations that fare best are not those who resist AI or outsource their thinking to it. They’re the ones who develop the human creative capacities that AI makes more valuable.
In 2023, McKinsey Global Institute projected that by 2030, roughly 30 % of currently worked hours could be automated. The roles that remain will cluster around two categories – Creativity and Care. Both require judgment, imagination and complex human decision-making. They are, almost by definition, the things that can’t be automated or routinized !
THE CREATIVITY MYTH
The most stubborn obstacle to building creative capacity in organizations is the belief that creativity is an innate trait. Some people have it, some don’t. And if you weren’t born with it, no amount of practice will change that !
The research simply does not support that belief. In a 2015 study published in Personality and Individual Differences, researchers followed identical twins raised in separate households, allowing them to isolate the effects of genetics versus environment on creative ability. Twins who grew up in environments rich in diverse experiences, artistic exposure and complex problem solving consistently developed stronger creative skills than their counterparts raised in more rigid settings. The study concluded that while certain cognitive traits may have a genetic component, creative thinking itself is primarily shaped by experience, environment and mindset.
Neuroscience reinforces this. Every time we engage in creative thinking, we build new neural connections. Scientists call this neuroplasticity. It’s the brain’s ability to reorganize and strengthen its own pathways in response to practice. Research shows that adults over 60 still exhibit robust connectivity between imagination and executive networks. Creativity doesn’t peak in youth and decline. It grows with us, as long as we keep working it.
This has enormous implications for people and organizations. If creativity is trainable, then the question isn’t – “Do we have creative people ?” The question is – “Are we building the conditions in which creative competencies and capacity can develop ?”
WHAT CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT REQUIRES
One of the more counterintuitive findings in creativity research is that our most creative moments rarely arrive when we’re pushing hardest. Neuroscience reveals that creative breakthroughs tend to emerge when the usual mental chatter quiets down. The brain enters what researchers describe as a synchronization between its default mode and executive control networks. This is a state associated with increased pattern recognition and what neuroscientists call ” Neural Inhibition ” – the quieting of the mental processes that may otherwise interrupt creative thinking.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi documented this state extensively in his research on flow – The experience of complete absorption in a challenging activity where self-consciousness disappears and performance peaks. He found that flow emerges when the challenge of a task is closely matched to a person’s skill level. Too easy, and attention drifts. Too difficult, and anxiety takes over. The conditions for flow are also, it turns out, the conditions for creative insight !
For leaders, the practical application is structural. Flow requires uninterrupted focus. It requires challenges calibrated to current capability, not static job descriptions written years ago. It requires environments that reduce distraction and increase the signal-to-noise ratio for creative work. And it requires organizational cultures where experimentation is safe, not just with lip service or rhetorically encouraged.
Companies like Google and 3M have structured parts of their operations explicitly around these conditions. In 2004, Google introduced its 20 % rule, allowing engineers to spend one-fifth of their work time on self-directed projects. The policy didn’t always produce innovation directly, but it built a culture of experimentation that shaped how the company thought about creative work. 3M had been practicing a similar approach since the 1940s, giving employees 15 % of their time for passion projects – an environment that gave rise to the Post-it Note. These aren’t stories about individual flashes of brilliance. They’re stories about firms that deliberately structure the conditions for creative thinking to occur.
THE 4 THINGS TO DO TO BE BETTER AT CREATIVIITY AND INNOVATION
Recognize that while theory is great, implementation is better. To be better at execution –
A. Audit your Creativity Competency balance. Most organizations over-invest in creative skills and under-invest in creative thinking, creative expression and creative application. Skills are the easiest to train and measure, so they attract the most attention. But skills alone don’t produce breakthroughs. Take an honest look at where your professional development budget actually goes, and whether it’s developing the competencies that drive genuine innovation and new value.
B. Design for Cognitive Flexibility, not just output. The goal of creative leadership isn’t to produce more ideas. It’s to develop teams that can move fluidly between generating possibilities, evaluating them rigorously and questioning the assumptions that contain both. That requires deliberate practice. Build divergent thinking into your strategic planning process. Schedule time explicitly for lateral questioning.
C. Create the conditions for Flow. This is structural, not inspirational. Neuroscience is specific about this – The brain enters its most creative states during 60 to 90 minute blocks of uninterrupted focus. That means organizations must focus on protecting time, not just scheduling it. A meeting dropped into the middle of a deep work block doesn’t just consume that hour – it collapses the conditions that make the whole session possible.
The levers that matter most at the organizational level are –
- Flow requires that the task stretch a person’s current capabilities without exceeding them. The research calls this the ” flow channel “. Most organizations assign work based on role definitions, not on where a person’s skills and challenges are in dynamic tension. That mismatch is one of the quiet-er reasons creative breakthroughs don’t come.
- Environmental Design research on office workers found that access to natural elements, intentional spatial layout and designated spaces for different kinds of thinking all measurably improve creative out-put.
- Psychological Safety. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson’s research on organizational behaviour is clear on this point – Flow and creative risk-taking require environments where experimentation is genuinely safe, not just rhetorically encouraged. People won’t enter the vulnerable, exploratory states that creativity demands if they’re worried about how it looks or could fail.
D. Stop waiting for creative people, Encourage Creativity and Entrepreneurship.
Creativity is not a personality trait you recruit for. It’s a practice you build. That means small, consistent creative engagements matter more than occasional inspiration events. Even brief creative exercises, the kind that take minutes rather than days, have been shown to increase divergent thinking capacity over time. The brain builds neural pathways through repetition, not breakthroughs. The breakthroughs follow the repetition.
THE REAL DIVIDING LINE
Recognize – Creativity is about decision making capacity, not an innovation process.
Innovation processes have steps. They have gates and timelines and deliverables. They’re designed to be replicated. And AI is increasingly capable of executing them. Decision making capacity is something different. It’s the ability to hold ambiguity without collapsing it prematurely. To integrate signals that don’t fit existing models. To ask which problem is actually worth solving when the data points in three directions at once. To bring human judgment into the space between what we know and what we need to figure out.
That capacity lives in creative application, and it’s the hardest to develop precisely because it requires all the other creativity competencies to be working together. Creative skills give it ground. Thinking gives it range. Expression gives it distinctiveness. Application gives it consequence.
The World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, Creativity will be among the top three most valuable workplace skills globally, alongside Critical Thinking and Complex Problem-Solving.
The leaders who understand creativity as a system, who can name its components and build deliberately towards them, are going to have a meaningful advantage over those who keep hoping it shows up on its own. On the other side of that line are organizations watching their most capable people execute increasingly automatable work, wondering why the breakthroughs aren’t coming. The practice doesn’t follow intention. It follows design.
The thing about creativity that rarely gets shared plainly – It has always lived inside the questions we’re willing to ask. Not the ones with obvious answers, but the ones that make us uncomfortable, the ones that require us to look squarely at what we’ve been doing and ask whether it’s actually working.
In the age of AI, that capacity – to question, to wonder, to resist the comfort of established models – is the thing that matters most. Machines can optimize. They cannot be genuinely curious. They cannot decide which questions are worth asking in the first place. That judgment, that willingness to not-yet-know and keep going anyway, is what creative thinking looks like in practice.
The organizations that will lead are the ones that start treating curiosity and creativity as the same imperative – not a disposition some people have, but a practice every team is built to support. The question of what to do about it has always been the right way. What’s different now is the cost of not answering it.
Sept 30, 2026 By Susan Riley / CAIL CAIL Innovation commentary
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