12 Ways to Boost Creative Problem Solving in the AI Era

We are living in the AI age and it’s transforming the nature of daily lives and jobs—from automating tasks to revamping industries. Amidst this whirlwind of change, one factor remains essential—creative problem solving.

Personally, I have felt AI seep into my every day with things like chatbots for customer service, ChatGPT to write initial drafts, self driving cars to for a taxi, and algorithms to process and model data.

Call centers that handled incoming customer needs are being augmented with a frontline chatbot. Developer jobs that focused on building simple, low-cost websites are now facing disruption as companies like Squarespace and GoDaddy provide consumers with AI-enabled website builders. Financial planning jobs are being enabled and challenged by stock market trend models.

In this information overload, we are also living an an era where most ideas are largely plagiarized and mimicked. It’s easy to replicate, repeat, and steal the playbook from others—and then reproduce it quickly with AI.

That's where creativity struts onto the stage.

Human judgement and creative thinking has an x-factor that AI can’t (yet) replicate. Great minds challenging the front edge don’t exactly problem solve in a predictable, mathematical manner that an algorithm can produce. The jobs of the future will require ethical compasses, innovative thinking, and creativity in collaboration with AI.

If you’re sitting in a role that has one too many tasks that can be automated with AI, listen up. There are some key ways that we can prepare to find our footing in the AI world:

1. Diversify your experiences: Gather diverse and unique world experiences that fill the senses and generate curiosity

2. Build your life story: Challenge yourself to create defining memories each quarter and year to shape an inspiring story

3. Lean into empathy: Spend time connecting with others to understand solutions that solve real, emotional needs

4. Tell stories: Use storytelling to communicate, inspire, imagine, and foster trust and shared visions

5. Embrace ambiguity: Create time and space to live in the gray areas of uncertainty to explore new solutions

6. Foster cross-disciplinary collaboration: Bring different backgrounds and expertise together to spark new ideas

7. Encourage divergent thinking: Mix talents and perspectives to break through traditional patterns

8. Experience creativity: Get involved in the local arts and community to open up the way your mind thinks

9. Leverage creative techniques: Brainstorm, mind map, role play, and conduct design thinking to think outside of the box

10. Take risks and fail fabulously: Create a culture of experimentation to turn mistakes and failures into learning

11. Learn, unlearn, relearn: Stay hungry to learn across disciplines and adapt to new evolutions

12. Embrace AI: Let AI handle the repetitive tasks while you focus on the mind-bending, boundary-pushing stuff

The more well rounded you are as AI changes the landscape of jobs, the more you’ll be ready to adapt to the problem solving of the future. The more experiences and learning you take in, the more creativity you’ll have available to draw upon to solve those problems.

As award-winning visual concept designer Michael Curry shared recently at TEDxPortland he has found that even experiencing creativity such as going to a Lion King show can open mental pathways to more opportunity in our jobs such as performing better or selling more homes. In his former talks, he has shared that powerful people have confidence that the creativity will come and spontaneity of creative thought is practice that makes us more successful and interesting in what we do.

In the AI era, creativity isn't a luxury; it's a necessity. I would venture to say “creative problem solving” will start becoming an imperative skill employers look for in applicants. AI will return the notion of the renaissance man and woman—where we value a background with diverse skills over narrow specialties.

So, put on your thinking cap, grab your virtual paintbrush, and let's prepare to find innovative ways to solve problems in a way a bot can’t.

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