How to Increase Creativity in Your Business Career: A Practical Toolkit

You don't need to think of yourself as "a creative person" to get better at this. Creativity in a business career is a set of habits and techniques you can practise deliberately, the same way you'd learn to read a spreadsheet or run a decent meeting. It's a skill, not a personality trait, and skills respond to practice.

Where Creativity Actually Pays Off

Before the techniques, it's worth being honest about why this matters, because "be more creative" is vague enough to ignore. Here's what it actually buys you:

• Lower costs, higher revenue -- through solutions a standard process wouldn't have surfaced.
• Better problem-solving -- more genuinely different options considered before you commit.
• A stronger brand -- standing out requires saying or doing something a competitor hasn't already done.
• A better customer experience -- new ways to engage that a generic playbook doesn't cover.

This isn't just a hunch. In the UK Innovation Survey 2025, run by the Office for National Statistics for the Department for Business and Trade, 34% of UK businesses with ten or more employees were "innovation active" between 2022 and 2024 -- meaning they'd introduced a new or meaningfully improved product, process or way of working in that period. That figure has been falling, down from 36% two years earlier. Most of the businesses outside that 34% aren't short of imagination. They're short of a repeatable way of turning ideas into something usable, which is what the rest of this article is actually about.

The Six Thinking Hats: A Structured Technique Worth Knowing

Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats -- first published in his 1985 book of the same name -- is one of the most widely used structured creativity techniques in business. The problem it solves is a familiar one: in a normal meeting, facts, gut feelings, risks and wild ideas all get argued about at once, and the loudest opinion in the room usually wins regardless of how good it is.

Think of it like sorting laundry before you wash it, rather than throwing everything into the machine together and hoping for the best. De Bono's fix is to separate the different "types" of thinking a discussion needs, and work through them one at a time, wearing a different "hat" for each:

• White hat -- facts and data only, no interpretation.
• Red hat -- gut feeling and emotional reaction, stated openly rather than smuggled in.
• Black hat -- risks and weaknesses, examined honestly before you commit.
• Yellow hat -- genuine upside and opportunity, not just enthusiasm.
• Green hat -- pure idea generation, no filtering yet.
• Blue hat -- the process itself: are you approaching this in the right order?

Working through each hat in turn, instead of letting a discussion blur facts, feelings and ideas together, tends to surface options a normal meeting misses. You don't need formal training to run it. Just agree with your team beforehand which hat you're wearing, and stick to it until it's the next hat's turn.

Osborn's Brainstorming, and Why Groups Don't Always Help

Advertising executive Alex Osborn coined the word "brainstorming" itself in his 1953 book Applied Imagination, setting out founding rules still taught today: generate quantity, withhold judgment until later, welcome unusual ideas, and build on other people's contributions rather than shutting them down.

Here's the part most training courses leave out. In a widely cited 1987 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe found that face-to-face brainstorming groups actually generated fewer and less creative ideas than the same number of people working alone and pooling their results afterwards. They traced the effect largely to something they called "production blocking".

Production blocking is easier to picture than it sounds. Think of a single-lane road at rush hour. Only one car can move at a time, so everyone else queues, and a few drivers give up and turn back before they reach the front. A group brainstorm works the same way. Only one person can speak at once, so while they're talking, everyone else is either half-listening, waiting their turn, or quietly losing the idea they were about to say. By the time it's their turn, the moment, and often the idea, has gone.

The practical fix is simple. Generate ideas alone first, on paper, before you bring them into a group. Use the group afterwards for the black-hat scrutiny above, where more voices genuinely help.

SCAMPER: A Checklist for When You're Stuck

If Six Thinking Hats organises a discussion and Osborn's rules govern a brainstorm, SCAMPER gives you something to do when you're staring at a problem with no ideas at all. The acronym was created by Bob Eberle in 1971, building directly on a checklist of idea-spurring questions Osborn himself had used years earlier. It stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse -- seven different questions to ask about whatever you're trying to improve.

Take a product, a process, or even a meeting, and run it through each question. What could you substitute for one part of it? What could you combine it with? Could you adapt something from a completely different industry? What happens if you modify its size, speed or cost? Could it be put to a use nobody's tried yet? What could you eliminate entirely? What happens if you reverse the order it normally happens in? You won't get a good answer to every question, but you rarely ask all seven without at least one useful idea falling out.

Other Practical Techniques

1. Commit real time to it. Creativity that only happens "if there's time" rarely happens at all -- block it like any other priority.
2. Build depth in your field. Genuine expertise gives you more raw material to recombine into something new.
3. Take calculated risks. A new approach that might not work still teaches you more than a safe one that definitely will.
4. Keep a working record of ideas. A dedicated place to capture half-formed thoughts on your own, before a group discussion blocks or dilutes them -- a Morning Mindset Journal works well for this -- means fewer good ones get lost before they're developed.
5. Explore more than one solution before choosing. The first workable idea is rarely the best one; it's just the fastest to arrive.
6. Look outside your usual sources of inspiration. Ideas transfer across fields more often than you'd expect -- a painter, a chef and a logistics manager are all solving versions of the same problem: what to leave out.
7. Take a genuine break. Your attention works a bit like a phone battery. Push it flat out all day and it drains fast and charges slowly. Step away properly, even for twenty minutes, and it comes back quicker than you'd expect. Stepping fully away from a problem, rather than grinding on it, is when a lot of real insight actually arrives.
8. Debrief mistakes properly. A specific, honest look at what went wrong beats a vague resolution to "do better next time".
9. Use your network deliberately. Different backgrounds and experience consistently surface angles a single team can't reach alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need formal training to use techniques like Six Thinking Hats? No. The framework is simple enough to run informally in a normal meeting once everyone understands what each hat represents.

How much time should I actually dedicate to building creativity? Even a short, protected slot each week, used consistently, compounds faster than occasional long sessions.

Does this apply if I'm not in a "creative" role? Yes. Operations, finance and customer service all benefit from structured techniques that generate more options before a decision gets made.

What's the difference between Six Thinking Hats, brainstorming and SCAMPER? Six Thinking Hats structures a group discussion so it doesn't turn into an argument. Osborn's brainstorming rules govern how you generate raw ideas, ideally solo before a group gets involved. SCAMPER gives you a checklist of questions to ask when you're stuck on a specific problem. They solve different problems, and there's nothing stopping you using all three at different stages of the same piece of work.

Somewhere to Actually Capture the Ideas

Most of the techniques above produce more raw ideas than most people have a system to catch. The Morning Mindset Journal gives that a daily home, so a good idea generated on a Tuesday doesn't quietly disappear by Friday.