Creativity As Your Leadership Advantage in GenAI Leadership
When the cost of building is negligible, having the creativity to innovate becomes the strategic advantage. Here's how to increase creativity in yourself and in your teams.
GenAI is changing what individuals can do at an unimaginable pace and the pace of change itself. It can now help you conceptualize and build entire apps in 15 minutes. It can write and produce written and video content in your voice and tone. It passes for a decent first-line analyst, doctor, lawyer, and parenting expert. On top of this, change is the only constant as companies release significantly better new models and technologies seemingly every month.
As a result, the barriers to entry for new technology-enabled businesses continue to drop. Individual functional lines are becoming blurred as people can use GenAI tools to expand their knowledge into historically different functions.
In product, rather than pods of 8-10 engineers, PMs, and designers, AI-native companies are adopting small groups of 2-3 generalists who can conceptualize, prototype, and iterate in the order of weeks rather than months. The best workflows involve prototyping quickly using GenAI tools and then pruning quickly.
This is the age where management and leadership will focus on coming up with innovative ideas and then motivating highly skilled and sophisticated individuals to chase them down (I will cover motivating experts in a future post).
A good analogy is having a powerful 3D printer. While it is now easy to print almost anything, you still need to figure out what to print and why. And everyone else can also equally easily print what you come up with, so the innovation needs to be continuous to stay ahead of competition.
Creativity becomes the critical underlying skill that all aspiring executives need to make a core strength.
Yue’s Coaching Corner
I am incorporating leveraging Gen AI tools into my course, Mastering Executive Presence & Communication (about time, I know). Whether it is preparing for a high-stakes meeting, improving your verbal communication, or drafting executive communications, GenAI is a powerful tool to increase speed and quality.
Get a sneak peek with my FREE lightning talk on “Using GenAI to Nail Questions from Executives With Confidence” on May 14. Grab a spot or get the recording here.
Interested in the course?? Now enrolling for the next cohort on June 9th. Grab a spot here.
I gave a talk on Incorporating Coaching Techniques into your Leadership Toolkit to Sidebar members this past Tuesday. Sharing the slides here for those of you who want to learn how to better empower your teams. DM if a similar talk is of interest to your leaders.
I am (finally) putting together an Asia & Europe-friendly cohort for The Uncommon Executive Leadership Accelerator. If you haven’t been able to join due to time zone differences, this is your chance! Apply here. This is the only one I will run this year, and it’s already 40% filled!
Those interested in the US-friendly May cohort, we’re now over-subscribed(!!) If you are keen, please put in an application so I can see about forming a second cohort in the May- July timeframe (and keep you posted for future cohorts).
I am hosting a free Meet The Coach session next week on April 8th.
Looking for a discount? The only one available is for Paid Subscribers, and it pays for itself! Upgrade of Paid for $200 off.
Creativity As The Competitive Advantage
With GenAI, the competitive advantage for businesses relies on the creativity of its leaders. Creativity to drum up innovative products to delight customers. Creativity to imagine and try out new ways of working. Creativity to reinvent themselves continuously to stay ahead of the competition.
Why? Because GenAI removes software building speed as a competitive moat. For the last 20 years, it took non-trivial time for the competition to match your feature set, implement the same cost-saving technology, or localize their product to your country. GenAI reduces this down to months for all but the most technical products.
When you can prototype 50 ideas in a few days, the bottleneck becomes customer attention. While you can prototype many variations, few customers will stick around to try all of them. If you flood the market with 99 versions of products that miss the mark, you will lose your customers.
Therefore, the challenge circles back to what to prototype and why. Where are you going to point the precious attention of your customers? Here is where creativity makes the difference. Creativity empowers teams to dream up new possibilities. Creativity encourages teams to look at old problems in a new way. When you can 3D print anything for almost free, it becomes about who can come up with the most delightful concept to print.
How To Increase Your Creativity
I have consistently found that creativity is one of the hardest skills to teach. Like Charisma or Luck, it often feels like some people are just born with more of it. Their brain just connects the dots differently. However, even if people have different ceilings on creativity, leaders can work on becoming more creative and drastically improve how close they get to operating at their personal peak creativity. Some of my go-to tactics to increase creativity individually include:
Lower anxiety levels: Bring yourself out of the “go-go-go” mentality through physical activity, meditation, or walks around the block.
Engage in play: Allow yourself to engage in activities (not necessarily work-related) that bring out playfulness and a sense of wonder.
Be curious with others: Brainstorm, discuss, and debate with others who see the world differently from you.
Challenge assumptions systematically: write down assumptions and then intentionally hold the opposite as true. Notice what changes.
Connect different dots: Seek to draw analogies between different concepts regularly. Read broadly and look for patterns across industries, activities, and historical moments.
As you can see, increasing creativity comes down to being in a low-stress, playful mindset and getting exposure to a different set of ideas, concepts, and approaches. Much of creativity comes down your brain’s ability to connect patterns from one environment to another and then use it to drastically change an aspect of the other environment.
Building A Creative Team
An even more powerful approach for leaders is to build a highly creative team. Even if you are not very creative, you can build a team of creatives. Creativity also compounds in a group. In a brainstorming session, team members build upon each other’s ideas and come up with solutions that no single individual could come up with on their own.
Consider bringing in these elements how you operate your team to foster creativity:
A diverse set of perspectives, skills, and ways of thinking. Creativity is born from contrasting points of view and divergent thinking.
A mentality of “Yes and”. The fastest way to nip creativity is criticism and judgment.
Encourage boundary-pushing ideas: these ideas that take an aspect of something to the extreme and give it shape and form, even if it may not be ultimately feasible.
These three simple elements make it more likely that new ideas are conceived and heard on a team. The ability to continuously draw this out of a team becomes a leader and company’s competitive advantage.
That’s all folks. See you next week at 3:14 pm!
Yue
I appreciate you talking about this. I've seen numerous PMs endlessly banging the "PRDs are dead, just build prototypes" drum. But the hard part of PRDs has always been the P part---why are we building this product, why now, and for whom?
You don't find PMF by random walks over the product space.
Design has been banging this drum and sharing these methods for over a decade. Design Thinking was a means to increase the creative output across disciplines by uncovering customer problems, generating opportunities and then saying, “yes, and…” over and over again. GenAI just speeds up the cycle.
But while what you say is very true, I’ve witnessed the push towards efficiency and self preservation in the face of increased competition internally at organizations has not bred psychological safety nor trust. In environments such as these, creativity is all but snuffed out.