LinkedIn puts it best: While robots are great at optimizing old ideas, creative employees are the ones that will conceive the ideas of tomorrow.

With innovative technologies and artificial intelligence, we’ll no longer spend our time working in soul-sucking spreadsheets or combing through heaps of user data. Technology is transforming the workplace and has replaced human jobs. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, as it will result in the creation of a large number of empathetic jobs.

And it makes perfect sense. As technology evolves to take over manual tasks, it frees up the time we spend on tasks that require human imagination and understanding.

Hard skills often have a shorter shelf life than soft skills like creativity and empathy. Nevertheless, creativity consistently takes a backseat to technology in educational institutions. As quickly as students learn artificial intelligence and machine learning, however, technology makes significant advances. 

Let’s drill down on the importance of creativity and how it can help brands, teams, and individuals generate the ideas of the future.

Defining creativity

Many people are led to believe that only certain people are natural-born creatives — like the artists, graphic designers, writers, and painters of the world. But it doesn’t mean software engineers or mathematicians aren’t.

On top of that, popular belief has portrayed creativity as a skill humans can’t really get better at, which is far from true. Like anything, some people are naturally more creative than others. But with the right direction and training, people can develop skills to enhance their creativity.

According to LinkedIn Learning, the definition for creativity can be broken down into two parts: 

• Relevancy: The ability to provide an actual solution for the problem at hand.

• Novelty: The ability to solve a problem in an original way.

Essentially, creativity is solving a problem with an original solution. 

Upskilling and reskilling: Training business leaders to be creative

All employees, in technical fields or not, need to hear that it’s okay to be creative. However, organizations continue to box people into static job roles that dictate whether they can be creative or not. Only 31% of people have realized their creative potential, despite it being a surefire driver of business success in today’s world.

According to a LinkedIn study, creativity was the most in-demand soft skill that employers were seeking in candidates in 2019. Out of both hard and soft skills, creativity takes second place right behind cloud computing — an extremely hard skill that only applies to a small section of the workforce.

A global study conducted by Adobe found that 78% of businesses which invest in creativity experience increased employee productivity. Most of these businesses also have happier employees, which for a majority of the time results in happier customers. 

But with increasing pressure on productivity rather than creativity, employers need to rewire their organizational structure to empower creative thinking. By establishing a psychological safety net, companies can encourage employees to take calculated risks. After all, human intuition allows us to see far beyond data sets, patterns, and trends — a capability computers have not yet developed.

Could technology replace human creativity?

No, not entirely — technological algorithms will never replace the human mind, and jobs hinged on care, creativity, and education will remain vital to our society. Not to mention social intelligence, which involves negotiation and persuasion, is a skill machines can’t yet compete with humans at work. But as automation eliminates more and more repetitive jobs, employees will be forced to carry out more thoughtful, creative work. 

“Nothing will take away that human ability to understand the emotive connection,” said Paul Robson, President of Adobe EMEA.

Fusing technology and innate human processes will lead to more efficient businesses and more innovative products. After all, how do we monitor artificial intelligence and automation? How do we train it, and how do we maintain it? That all boils down to critical thinking and creative judgement to adapt continuously to the ever-changing world around us.

What does this mean for the techies of the world? They need to strengthen soft skills to protect themselves from the threats of automation and machine learning. Empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers will be producing the most successful ideas of the future.

Food for thought: strengthening creative skills is a worthwhile investment 

Since technology is only going to advance, creativity is emerging as one of the most coveted skills of the future. As more process-driven jobs become automated, humans will move up the value chain and will need to produce more novel work. Most importantly, creative problem-solving will enable organizations and teams to generate innovation in the workplace and improve upon existing processes.