Don’t Forget Creativity Training

Daniel Goleman is author of the international best-seller Emotional Intelligence and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. He is a regular contributor to Korn Ferry. 

You’ve likely heard the advice: Do the things only you can do. A mantra for leaders and entrepreneurs, it’s a call to focus on what matters most—and to delegate the rest.

That same guidance is paramount in the age of artificial intelligence.

For now, AI has matched or beat humans on measures of mental proficiency—and it’s already better at reading comprehension, coding, and speech, handwriting, and image recognition. As time goes by, technology will only get faster and better, leaving humans fervently asking: What are the things only we can do?

As AI picks up speed, many organizations aren't necessarily answering that question. Instead, they’re focusing on upskilling initiatives. According to a recent Korn Ferry survey of 15,000 global workers, over 75% of employees in India and Brazil are receiving AI training, while regions like the US, Europe, and Japan are lagging behind.

But while AI literacy is crucial, it's not the only training that organizations should zero in on. Equipping people only to work with machines misses the deeper opportunity of the moment. To stay truly competitive, leaders will want to go beyond technical proficiency and seek to increase our uniquely human capacities: namely, emotional intelligence and creativity.

Let’s start with the obvious: AI struggles with emotional nuance. "Heart skills"—or, more technically, “durable human skills” such as empathy, discernment, and interpersonal connection—remain human domains. These skills are central to roles in customer service, leadership, education, and healthcare—places where the human heart and real emotional relationships matter to the outcome.

But alongside these emotional-intelligence skills, there’s a growing need for creativity. This is perhaps the most undervalued and urgent skill of all. That’s because AI is built on what already exists—massive datasets and historical inputs. What it cannot do well (at least not yet) is imagine realities that haven’t happened yet. As innovative thinkers know, this capacity to envision the future is essential in bringing about positive change. The human ability to dream, discern, connect, and gather inspiration is critical to intentional evolution.

Scott Belsky, entrepreneur and investor at the creative studio A24, calls this shift the “human productivity parabola.” In the early curve, human productivity increases, thanks to better tools and processes. But as machines grow more capable, that curve flattens, and eventually declines. As it does so, the value of uniquely human traits—creativity among them—continues to rise.

In a sense, Belsky says, humanity has been doing the same thing for centuries: hiring people and machines to take over mundane and repetitive actions that consume our natural human resources. “If productivity, previously scarce and valuable, is increasingly abundant and commoditized,” he writes, “then we must shift our investments—from how we educate our children to how we plan our careers—to creativity, a truly scarce resource whose value is on the rise.”

While originality has always been one of the keys to success, efficiency remains the number-one objective at most organizations.

Future survival may depend on a shift in perspective: Rather than doubling down on reskilling people into the next wave of software fluency, leaders will want to invest more heavily in building a culture that supports experimentation, connection, and out-of-the-box ideas—not only in R&D departments and innovation labs, but also across the entire breadth of an organization.  

Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon

Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.