AI & CREATIVITY

You have probably heard this saying along with many others like it: "AI is going to steal our creativity." Or a version with even more dread, "AI HAS stolen our creativity."

The existential dread that these claims create with the idea of stealing creativity raises an important question if we follow this through.

What will be left?

And the answer to that is simple. More creativity than ever.

I think a lot of people misinterpret what being a "creative" means. They hear the word and immediately dismiss it, saying "I'm not a creative person," because all they can picture is a painter or an artist. While those are creative pursuits, they don't even come close to encapsulating the entirety of creativity. They are just one part of it.

Depending on where you look, the definition of creativity is something along the lines of "having or showing good imagination or original ideas."

You know where you can demonstrate that definition? Solving problems.

Take problem solving at work. How you solve problems and come up with solutions is directly related to how creative you are. There are some scenarios where the solution is just execution and the task at hand is simply analytical. But in fields like Revenue Operations, which is what I am a part of, you are always taking this playground of systems and processes, usually with the foundation being a CRM, and putting pieces of a puzzle in place. Quite literally, you are being creative in how you solve and improve these systems.

Okay, so what does problem solving have to do with AI? Well, everything.

AI is part of the solution to a lot of problems facing companies and RevOps today.

The job is on us to facilitate its use case. Facilitating that use case comes from figuring out how its piece fits into the puzzle.

This is creativity because you are creating your unique solution to the problem. Then usually as you progress you produce more original ideas that contribute to solving more problems.

Now we have to ask the question of what happens when we solve problems?

Simple. More problems arise.

This is the Inbox Zero analogy where you will never reach a state of having no more problems to solve. Think about it. The more original ideas you produce to solve a problem mean you are solving problems more often, which means you have more time to solve problems. You are becoming more capable of churning through problems, which means you have endless opportunities to offer original solutions. If there was a simple one size fits all solution, then why hasn't the problem been solved yet? It hasn't been solved yet because if you had 10 people attempt to solve it, odds are you'd get 10 different solutions. There is a creative element to problem solving.

So what this leaves us with is always having an opportunity to be creative. We will always have problems to solve and opportunities to contribute original ideas.

AI requires us to be creative because it relies on our input and facilitation to construct the solution. Put simply, we as the input are required to produce the desired outcome. The more creative we become, the more powerful the AI outcomes become.

RevOps especially is at the intersection of this right now because of the workload and how many different facets of the business we have our hands in. This gives us endless opportunities to practice our creativity, but we must harness it like any other creative would. This requires a deliberate intention to reduce your inputs daily to allow yourself to think and be bored at times throughout the day. Boredom is required to feed creativity and too many inputs drowns out boredom. Get comfortable being bored and thinking.

All of that to say, AI will breed more creativity, not less. It is just going to look different.

We will always have opportunities to bring our unique ideas and solutions to the table.