We are entering a brand new era – a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ – which promises to fundamentally change everything about our lives, including our work. It is a technological revolution that will outpace and dwarf anything in our previous experience (i). These new technological advances offer organizations opportunities as well as significant competition and plenty of disruption. To be successful in this complex world, businesses won’t be able to cut costs as a path to growth, rather they will need to innovate in order to grow. This increasing drive for growth and innovation is causing a macro shift in the need for more creative work.
But we may not have the skills we’ll need to thrive in this new world.
The critical skills have everything to do with creative confidence. We’ll need to tap creative cognition, inspire creative collaboration, foster creative communities and leverage creative action. Designing and solving for creative work matters – a lot. In fact, 77 percent of workers believe creativity will be a critical job skill in the future (ii). Yet, fully 69 percent of employees believe they are not living up to their creative potential (iii). This gap is more important than ever – a challenge for people, teams and organizations as we deal with increasingly complex challenges, greater necessity for networked collaboration and the coming age of artificial intelligence. In fact, advanced computing and AI will take over rote, process-oriented tasks leaving humans with new requirements to solve problems, generate ideas, and discover new opportunities.