I have just spent 5 great days at London Business School with 150 CEOs from all over the world doing an
exec education course focused on scaling your business.
One of the recurring themes throughout the week was the emergence of new technologies that will automate routine takes . Futurist Gerd Leonhard talked about a mega shift over the next 20 years; signaling the end of routine tasks for many workers that will elevate the importance of creativity in work solutions. Gerd suggested if you have kids make sure the future for them is in a creative industry or job.
Greg Orme, project director for our course at LBS also stressed the importance of creativity. He showed research that indicates we all have creativity in us – at age 5, 98 per cent of us have high levels of creativity – but over the years it seems to dull.
Greg saw creativity as the process of generating ideas of value – and for this process to work, you need to foster experimentation.
This was also the theme of Dan Cable – who took us through the concept of “learned helplessness”. It is easy to resign yourselves to a task and a role and not be prepared to challenge the system – but it won’t help to improve your business. Dan also stressed the importance of experimentation and curiosity as building blocks for innovation and improvement. There are great ideas in all of us – we just need to find a way to draw them out.
What was readily apparent was that there is a great opportunity that will come from artificial intelligence – however the best businesses will use those processes to augment their value proposition rather than replace it.
Written Jon Broome
