The diversity and inclusion (D&I) landscape in the U.S. is facing a perfect storm of challenges. The For decades, artificial intelligence was little more than a quirky concept from science fiction or, at best, a fringe technology. Then, seemingly overnight, the advent of generative AI allowed the technology to become a go-to resource for organizations. According to Gartner, just 4% of CEOs in 2023 considered AI a top-two technological priority. By 2024, that figure had jumped to 24%, and it’s surely climbing higher.
Organizations are using AI for all sorts of tasks, including programming, admin work, and generating ideas to become more innovative. For innovation, in particular, many leaders wonder if AI can help employees unlock new creative firepower thanks to its supercomputing capabilities.
But a lingering question for these same leaders is, can AI actually help us become more creative — or will it make us the least creative, most generic versions of ourselves? Fortunately, there’s cause for hope. By understanding and applying the science of creativity — namely, by accelerating, deepening, and activating the experience of insight — research suggests teams can use AI to boost innovation.
How creativity and innovation work
To see how AI can best support employees’ thinking, we need to understand how creativity works in the brain. Within organizations, creativity can be defined as the process of generating something that’s both novel and useful. And when we apply those creative ideas in the right ways to solve problems, that’s innovation.
The hard part is having creative ideas in the first place. We need the right conditions, in which our minds are open and free to wander so that we can make novel connections. We also need the right level of understanding about a topic. Creativity emerges in what cognitive scientists call the “zone of proximal development“ (ZPD). This is the sweet spot between what we can accomplish on our own without help, and what we can’t do even with help. Outside the ZPD, we can’t make sense of new ideas; we’re lost at sea. In the ZPD, however, we can stretch our capabilities with the help of a guide that’s more knowledgeable about a topic than we are.
It’s also in the ZPD where we experience moments of insight — those “Aha!” moments where we suddenly see a familiar problem in a brand-new way. These insights are intrinsically motivating; they energize us to keep pushing and learning more.
This is important because learning and creativity are intimately linked. “Creativity is a self-directed form of learning,” cognitive scientist Christine Chesebrough said at the 2024 NeuroLeadership Summit. In other words, when we’re being creative, we’re discovering previously unseen connections in real time, which is a form of learning we initiate ourselves.
Having moments of insight in the creative process is essential because we need the energy of intrinsic motivation to push us through difficult challenges. New possibilities don’t always emerge on their own; often, the process requires intentional effort. Therefore, if we want to use AI to become more creative, simply asking a bot for answers won’t work. It robs us of the chance for insight.
For AI to assist us in the creative process, our relationship must live in the ZPD, with AI as the guide, so that we can move through a three-part process of insight generation. Used correctly, AI can help us accelerate insight (get to “Aha” moments more quickly), deepen insight (feel “Aha” moments that are more profound than without AI), and activate insight (experience a stronger motivation to act immediately on the “Aha” moment).
But there’s still the matter of how to use AI toward these outcomes. How can we tap AI’s superhuman intelligence while still preserving our own precious moments to discover something new?
Using AI to Be More Creative
Many times, it’s tempting to ask AI for answers. We want to create a bridge from not knowing to knowing as quickly as possible. But this eliminates any possibility that we’ll experience a moment of insight — which means we might get an answer, but the solution almost surely won’t be creative, or at least as creative as it could be.
Researchers discovered this in a recent study in which people prompted AI to give them ideas for a short story. While the researchers found AI did make people who initially scored low on creativity more creative, the AI-assisted stories were all rather similar to each other, and none were particularly groundbreaking. Thus, when it comes to human creativity, AI could cause a disturbing regression to the mean.
Instead, the science of creativity suggests the following:
- Bring your ZPD to the conversation with AI by giving it context for how knowledgeable you are about the topic. Then, let the AI know you’d like its help expanding your knowledge base.
- Next, adopt the strategy of prompting AI to ask you questions, to spark your own thinking in the way a more knowledgeable mentor might guide a student. For example, try prompting an AI bot with the following: “Ask me some questions to help guide my thinking on this topic.” Through prompts like these, new ideas can originate in your own mind and encourage further inquiry.
- If you already have some solutions in mind, ask the AI to evaluate them against ones it would generate. For instance, you can ask AI, “I’ve identified X, Y, and Z as possible solutions. What could I be missing in my thought process?”
AI can support our own, human-driven creative process by stretching our understanding and helping us see connections between disparate concepts or ideas. At the same time, AI can stifle our creativity if we take its answers at face value, without exploring any further. This is especially true when there’s no single “right” answer but many possible solutions.
Using AI this way, we stay curious, in a learning mindset, and motivated to keep working to solve problems. Instead of handing over the control to AI, we can preserve our own human creativity and ingenuity by using AI in a supporting role, where it guides our thinking in helpful directions. Through the savvy use of technology, we can tap into more of what makes us unique and special — we become more human, not less.
