Abigail Posner, director of artistic works at Google, provides speeches on creativity to organizations which have included accounting corporations and electrical energy distribution firms.
Her message: All persons are inherently artistic. It’s a high quality that’s not simply the area of artists and musicians and designers. Her aim is to decode the artistic course of in order that, for instance, at YouTube (which Google owns), engineers can collaborate to develop and leverage content material that’s entertaining and profound.
I first met Abigail after we had been on a panel collectively at Cannes, and I used to be instantly impressed by her means to maintain asking questions versus positing concepts. She retains asking: Why? How? What’s the connection? In that approach she achieves insights, and arrives at options, that nobody else has imagined.
Abigail believes in what she calls “the ability of not like notions.” When these notions come collectively they’ve the potential to uncover one thing each novel and useful. The mixtures can manifest themselves at each a person and an organizational degree, and whenever you harness each ranges collectively, they will have an exponential affect.
She not too long ago gave a monumental instance of this: the reversal of harm to the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Within the Eighties, scientists started warning that sure industrial chemical substances had been depleting the ozone layer and threatening the setting. It was a collaboration of not like minds—together with scientists, politicians, and businesspeople—that led to an answer that initially appeared unreachable, Abigail famous. In 2023, a United Nations report introduced that the ozone layer was therapeutic and that it was on observe to recuperate inside 4 many years.
As many specialists on creativity have acknowledged, not understanding a lot a couple of topic is usually a nice instigator of novel concepts, significantly when it’s mixed with the ability of experience. Abigail herself is an instance of this. She got here to Google with a Harvard diploma in anthropology {and professional} expertise within the promoting world. She didn’t know a complete lot about know-how, and that was the purpose.
When Abigail arrived at Google, she got here to see that the corporate was receiving a great deal of information about what folks had been doing on-line, however not as a lot data about why. Utilizing her anthropology and promoting background has helped the corporate shut that hole between what and why.
One other factor about Abigail, which she readily admits, is that she’s one thing of a ham: She loved performing in performs in her youthful days. Google executives rapidly realized that they may harness her stage presence to Google’s benefit by encouraging her to pursue alternatives to precise her concepts to shoppers and different teams; by means of speeches, her concepts about creativity and the digital panorama might have extra affect.
As Abigail put it, “I couldn’t compartmentalize myself. I might have failed.” First she mixed not like notions in her personal pondering, after which she prolonged that expansiveness to others on her groups. That meant attending to know the various sides of her staff members—their hobbies, their pursuits, their backgrounds, their earlier work expertise—not only for the sake of creating chitchat, however as a result of there may be real worth to be derived from this data.
Individuals then have a way of their very own worth: “What I’ve to supply issues. Not as a result of I’ve this one lane of pondering. However as a result of I’ve this prolonged sense of myself, whether or not it’s as a result of I studied ballet, or realized Greek, or I’m an important mom, or ran a marathon. My entire self is being embraced. Which makes them really feel extra heard, however you truly develop into extra progressive in consequence. And it’s innovation that solely your staff can exhibit, as a result of solely your staff has this mixture of individuals with these totally different sides.”
A giant a part of Abigail’s job is to assist advertisers run the best promoting and branded content material potential. Analysts on her staff have developed finest practices for numerous sorts of promoting channels, however she generally has bother convincing shoppers to go together with a distinct strategy. Utilizing the standard routes, akin to an oral or slide presentation, doesn’t at all times reduce it.
Because it occurs, one in all her analysts is a prolific traveler who creates YouTube movies that includes highlights of his journeys, akin to erupting volcanoes in Iceland. When one specific consumer was reluctant to present the go-ahead on a brand new concept, the analyst determined to provide a rudimentary YouTube video as a “proof of idea” to indicate how the proposed new promoting would look. The consumer noticed the video and was bought. “After they see it come to life, it’s more durable for them to say no,” Abigail mentioned.
This strategy was so profitable that the staff determined to show it into a complete new gross sales providing. The analyst reached out to a former journalist on Abigail’s technique staff to jot down advertising and marketing supplies for the brand new companies in order that it may very well be successfully communicated to shoppers.
Once you embrace your personal expansiveness, “after which whenever you do it with others on the staff, it turns into far more of a possibility to essentially improve the innovation,” Abigail mentioned.
GE activated the ability of its extremely numerous companies when it got here up with new merchandise in the course of the “Creativeness at Work” period. The corporate’s health-care division knew it had an issue with its anesthesia machines, which had been so difficult and distracting with numerous dials and beeping noises that it was arduous for anesthesiologists to focus on their jobs.
As former GE Chief Advertising Officer Beth Comstock recalled in her ebook Think about It ahead, “So folks at GE requested: ‘Who else finds themselves in such life and loss of life conditions, navigating every kind of inputs and monitoring gear?’ And so they had a startlingly helpful realization: An airplane’s cockpit is remarkably just like an working room. So that they invited pilots to look at surgical procedures and assist GE establish the issues. That turned out to be pretty straightforward, as their business had confronted an nearly similar drawback years earlier than.” The technique labored, and with the pilots’ assist, GE’s engineers designed a brand new and improved machine.
You possibly can’t see a jar’s label from contained in the jar, Comstock famous. Due to this fact, “We needed to get ‘exterior the jar.’”
Excerpted from THE CREATIVE SHIFT by Andrew Robertson, copyright © 2025 by Andrew Robertson. Used with permission of Primary Enterprise, a division of Hachette E-book Group, Inc.
