What is being creative and how to boost your creativity? Between praise of mental wandering and invitation to create a real culture of creativity in business, Jules Zimmermann goes around the subject in his latest book and answers all our questions.
Do you have to be a genius to have good ideas? This is the question asked by Jules Zimmermann in the subtitle of his book. Specialist in pedagogy around creativity, he reassures us right away: no, you don’t have to be Picasso or Einstein to be creative. So much the better, because this soft skill is regularly part of the rankings of skills most appreciated by recruiters. But we still have to agree on the definition of creativity and the means to promote it… We take stock with Jules Zimmermann, trainer, speaker, and author on the subject.
In your book, you fight the idea that only artistic activities require creativity and invoke a much broader psychological definition. You speak of the “ordinary creativity spectrum”, what is it?
Jules Zimmermann: We tend to consider only the most spectacular ideas as creative. So that gives us a very binary view of things: either you’ve made a great discovery, produced an incredible work of art, or developed an invention so you’re creative, or you’re not creative at all. This view leads many people to fall into the “I’m not creative” category. On the contrary, the notion of “ ordinary creativity ” opposes this idea by showing that there are many intermediate activities that are also proof of creativity.
Like what ?
Our daily life is full of activities that challenge our creativity . Furnishing your apartment requires being creative since we are in the process of designing something personal to us. Cooking with leftovers from your fridge forces us to deviate from the usual recipes and therefore to be creative under constraint. In fact, creativity refers to any situation in which we have to invent our own responses.
Does that mean we are all creative?
Absolutely, we are all creative. And we can all be more so by devoting time to it. Nevertheless, there are still inter-individual differences in our creativity. And it cannot be denied that some people are distinguished by particularly strong creativity.
Like Archimedes in his bathtub, we have a vision of the creative idea that imposes itself on us like an intuition. Yet you devote an entire chapter to the fact that “our intuitions blind us”, why?
Because we have associated a lot of creativity with spontaneity. That is to say, to say everything that comes to mind without asking questions. This is a particularly popular belief in the professional world linked to the popularity of brainstorming – which appeared in the late 1930s in the world of advertising – whose basic principle is the suspension of judgement .
Spontaneity works well for addressing certain issues. But it can also limit us. If we rely solely on spontaneity, there are plenty of questions that we will not ask ourselves. We are thus going to deprive ourselves of certain paths. However, to be creative, we must question our evidence and our automatisms . We need spontaneity but also to force our thinking to take destabilizing directions.
So, like any skill, creativity has to be worked on, learned and improved?
It’s interesting to use the word competence to designate creativity. Originally, and for a very long time, creativity was considered a mystical phenomenon – a kind of gift from the gods. Later, we imagined it as a talent, something innate, which cannot be provoked voluntarily. It was then associated a lot with personality. Then, we started to talk about creativity as a method – therefore one that can be provoked and activated voluntarily – especially in the professional world. It’s only been talked about for 10-15 years as a skill. We are more and more interested in soft skills and, in this context, creativity acquires the status of competence, which can effectively develop and be valued in a professional context.
Why does creativity have so little place in educational programs at all levels?
We are getting there slowly. For the moment, creativity has been integrated into the PISA assessment tests . This means that the ability to find original and relevant ideas will be part of the criteria for comparing the different education systems on a global scale. If the creativity of students is valued, education systems must foster it. For the moment, creativity still holds little place in school because it is opposed to current teaching methods mainly based on the acquisition of knowledge.
The World Economic Forum, in its latest report, ranked creativity in the Top 5 most important soft skills for 2025. But what does “being creative” mean in the context of a company?
Demonstrating creativity at work means that you don’t have a task to perform but a goal to achieve or a problem to solve. Putting creativity to work means above all ensuring that everyone asks questions rather than considering that the employees would be the executors of a strategy decided on at the top.
So does it require creating a “culture of creativity” in business?
This notion of a culture of creativity is key. A somewhat naïve way of approaching the subject would be to think that it is enough to act on a single aspect for creativity to infuse everywhere. For example, in business, we love to organize collective creativity workshops . These are one-off moments, during which we will generate ideas without changing the rest of the company. In reality, if we want to put creativity into a company , we have to change the culture of management, the relationship to time, the place we give to learning, the segmentation of the different activities… We have to act on almost all the sizes of business. And this is something that takes a long time.
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We must also agree on the definition of creativity. Besides, what is the difference with innovation?
Creativity is a mental process while innovation makes an idea exist in society. It means that we are going to confront the constraints of reality. That’s why in innovation projects , it’s interesting to have a person who will bring the creative side and a person who will be in charge of discussing with investors, thinking about production, distribution , etc. These are very different skills.
In your book, you precisely criticize these start-ups presented as a model of innovation but which are sorely lacking in creativity.
Today, a large majority of start-ups are dedicated to the digitization of a service – delivery of races, subscription via boxes of everything and anything, etc. There are plenty of services that deserve to be digitized, that’s not the problem. The real concern is to establish these startups as a model of creativity. It is sorely lacking in ambition. It’s a shame because we face a whole host of social and environmental problems that need really creative projects to be solved.
You write “Yesterday, creativity was seen as the property of a few rare geniuses. Today, it seems to have become an indispensable part of the citizen’s toolbox. We can also add employees. But is it that because we can all be creative, we all have to be?
If we agree on the idea that we all already show creativity on a daily basis, there is no longer any real injunction. But the real question is: should we encourage more creativity in business ? This is desirable for companies since it allows employees to be involved and makes work more motivating. So why not… Provided you don’t accumulate contradictory injunctions.
For example, in business, there is a relationship to time that is not compatible with creativity . We tend to saturate people with tasks and consider that all empty moments are wasted time. Basically, someone who takes too long a break is seen as a slacker when they may just be someone who needs to take a step back and reflect on their work. It should not be assumed that when we are not actively concentrating on a task, nothing is going on in our head. We need moments of emptiness to digest the information we have just acquired. If we are not able to integrate this culture of mental wandering at work , we will not be able to be creative.
If we are overloaded with tasks when we face a problem, we look for the most immediate solution. And if we are looking for this immediate solution, we rush towards traditional solutions and we are not going to explore original solutions. Creativity in business therefore requires changing our relationship to time and productivity.
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