In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Andrew Robertson, chair of BBDO Worldwide, about The Creative Shift: How to Power Up Your Organization by Making Space for New Ideas (Basic Venture/Hachette Book Group, September 2025). Robertson argues that familiar practices—drawing on whiteboards, brainstorming around a conference table, and requesting a limited number of ideas—may be steering your teams in the wrong direction. He explains why unlocking true creativity may require a complete rethink and shares practical ways to reset your team’s ideation process. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.
Why the need for yet another book on generating new ideas?
Over a 40-year career in advertising, I’ve worked with clients in just about every industry vertical in the US, and internationally. I’ve watched a lot of big and small clients struggle. How do we simultaneously run a very good business, one with predictable results, operational and executional excellence, and brilliant compliance?
How do we run those businesses and at the same time generate the ideas we need—the big ideas that will help grow our businesses? I’ve watched clients try all the things that don’t work, and I’ve watched some of them try some that do.
I’ve taken what I have observed and learned from being on the inside with these clients, plus what I’ve learned from running a company whose life depends on generating ideas. I’ve compiled it in what I hope is a useful format to help companies resolve that dilemma.
You define creativity as coming up with completely new solutions.
There’s a lot of emphasis placed on “innovation.” But a lot of the innovation we see is actually what I would call improvements rather than breakthrough inventions.
I’m not diminishing the concept of innovation. It’s really important for every business to constantly innovate in that sense, to look at improving their offering, services, and product. All of those things are very important, and they will add incremental revenue and profit for those businesses.
Yet I distinguish between a continuous improvement and innovation process, and the creation of completely new solutions, as opposed to the improvement of existing ones. If PepsiCo introduces a new flavor of Pepsi or a new flavor of Mountain Dew, that’s what I would call an improvement or an innovation that will generate incremental business.
That increment will be measured in percentages. By contrast, we can look at what Red Bull did when they introduced a high-energy drink that was packaged in a very small can and charged a very high premium for it. That was a creation, not an improvement of something that already exists. That was a completely new solution to an existing need. Likewise, every 18 months or every year, there’s a new iPhone, and the new iPhone has a better camera, a better lens—good, valuable improvements to an already great solution.
But when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, it was a completely new creation. You measure the success of that not in percentages but in orders of magnitude. That’s the distinction between the creation of a really big idea and continuous improvement and optimization of the solutions that we already have to existing problems. They’re two slightly different things. Both are valuable, but different. You don’t need many big ideas, but you do need ideas.
There’s a lot of emphasis placed on “innovation.” But a lot of the innovation we see is actually what I would call improvements rather than breakthrough inventions.
A simple example of this is Sun-Maid Raisins’ packaging of raisins in small boxes. Raisin consumption was in decline. People weren’t baking anymore, so raisins weren’t being used.
People were scratching their heads, trying to figure out, “How do you sell more raisins?” The obvious answers that might have improved the situation would have been to showcase recipes for different uses of raisins beyond cakes and desserts. Maybe you put them in salads.
Yet somebody somewhere spotted that, on the other side of the supermarket, mothers were desperately seeking healthy snacks for their toddlers. They put those two ideas together and packed raisins in little boxes that became treats for kids.
Mothers thought raisins were healthier; kids loved them because they were sweet. They were packaged in a format that was perfect for tiny fingers. That was a brilliant creation. It created something completely new—not a new product; just a different idea.
Because it is hard, should companies outsource creativity?
There’s a misperception among a lot of company leadership that they and their people just don’t have the creativity necessary to generate breakthrough ideas. They do.
I believe their people really do have the creativity. However, the culture and operating systems of most organizations, especially the most successful ones, actually suppress that creativity. They create a behavior inside the organization that suppresses it.
Inside most companies, the people have the creativity. Yet a lot of it is squeezed out of them. It’s a missed opportunity.
At the same time, the people who know the business best, who are often on the front lines and are closest to the customers, usually have a very good perspective on what’s working and what’s not working. They may well be able to come up with ideas that will create completely new solutions.
Inside most companies, the people have the creativity. Yet a lot of it is squeezed out of them. It’s a missed opportunity.
What do you mean by ‘begin with the answer’?
They don’t call it a “creative leap” for nothing. Nobody talks about a series of steps that lead to a creation, a genuinely creative idea. We have a phrase in our language: the creative leap.
In order to generate really great ideas, you need to generate lots of ideas, most of which will be terrible. The process of generating ideas and doing so in volume is what will open up the mind to new possibilities and new connections. The concept of divergent thinking, or “going wide,” is key to creating truly new ideas. Most of what we typically do is convergent thinking: reducing, criticizing, judging, deciding.
You may have a very good question that you’re trying to answer, a beautifully defined problem that you’re trying to solve. By going wide and asking people not to work through the steps to an answer, but to come up with answers—most of which will be terrible—you open the aperture for more divergent thinking, more ideas. You’re more likely to come up with a breakthrough. This is inductive rather than deductive logic. Once you have an answer, that’s exciting. Then you can usually work back through it to prove it should work in theory.
That’s what I mean by starting with the answer. Everyone likes to think that you can start with an analysis of the data and come up with an insight. Then you can start talking about possible solutions, proceed in a linear process of steps, and arrive at a great idea. I just haven’t experienced that ideas happen in that way. Great ideas come out of generating lots of ideas, most of which will be bad, one of which—just one of which—could be brilliant.
When you’re trying to generate an idea to solve a problem that has been beautifully defined, you want to have as many ideas as you can. To do that, you need people to think in a very divergent way. Part of that is, “Don’t worry about how we get to it. Just get to it, and then we can figure out if it works in theory.”
I think it was Einstein who said, “If I only had one hour, I’d use 50 minutes to define the question and ten minutes to come up with the answer.” I believe in the importance of defining a great question. It’s probably the single biggest issue I see most companies and teams grappling with.
Everybody’s desperate to try and come up with solutions, but not enough rigor and time are really put into defining a fantastic question. What you usually see is a description of the situation that’s presented as the problem.
Asking a very smart question will become one of the most important skills in fully harnessing the benefits of AI.
“We’re losing share with Gen X” is not a definition of a problem or a question. That’s a description of the situation. “We want to grow our share among Gen Z” is also not a definition of a problem. It is a declaration of intent.
A truly well-defined question begs you to try to start solving it. You can’t resist it when it’s really well articulated, though very few of them are. Asking a very smart question will become one of the most important skills in fully harnessing the benefits of AI. To some degree, getting information, assembling information, forming an argument, coloring in the spaces, that’s all going to get easier. Asking the smart question remains very important.
Where does AI fit in with creativity?
In the time that I’ve been running an agency, there have been three seismic shifts in technology. There have been several little changes as well. Yet the three most significant were the widespread adoption of the internet around 2000, the introduction of smartphones—initially with the iPhone in 2007—and the application of generative AI in the last 18 months or two years. The first two shifts were really about how you reach people. The third one, which is the one I’m most excited about, is about how you make things. If you look at what happens in our business today, for our clients and for consumers, there are barriers to making ideas come to life.
For example, I have a great idea. I’d love to see a polar bear ice skating in Rockefeller Center holding a beverage. If I had that idea two years ago and somebody liked it, there would have been a barrier of time, cost, and, in some cases, a barrier of impossibility.
Thanks to generative AI, the barriers that create the gap between having an idea and bringing it to life are collapsing. That means that if we can generate them, we’ll be able to put increasingly compelling work in front of consumers, which they will value more. They will respond by buying more, which will build the business of those brands that we will then use to fuel even more of those experiences for consumers.
We’re taking away the gaps between ideas and bringing them to life. If we only see it as a way for everyone to have an infinite amount of average material for free, we will do our consumers the worst possible disservice. That’s the last thing they need. That will harm the brands and damage our business.
I don’t think that will happen. Rather, we’re going to use AI to reduce the amount of work and human input required through the development cycle in our business. We’ll do this to concentrate more and more resources into asking smarter questions and devising more creative solutions. Those are the two things that can create value.
We genuinely can end up in a place where people enjoy their experiences with brands more than they do now. That will create extra value, business, sales, and revenue. That’s what I’m excited about.
What is with the ‘secret drawer’?
This term dates back to my earliest years in business, when people literally had a drawer full of ideas that had been presented, rejected, or accepted. Now they have a folder on their computer, their phone, or something.
The fact that these ideas were never accepted, approved, or never made it doesn’t mean they were bad ideas. They could have been brilliant ideas. One of the important things that everybody should do from time to time is look in that metaphorical drawer that’s now probably on their computer or phone screen. There are good ideas sitting in there that may not have happened, may not have worked then for whatever reason, but would work today for a different brand on a different problem.
I bet people have ideas that they just don’t know what to do with, or worse, they’re afraid of articulating these ideas because they fear they may not be good. The challenge that most people and most companies have is the expectation: “We want you to have a good idea.”
That puts an enormous burden on the individual who has an idea. Instead, if you say, “We just want you to have lots of ideas. Nobody’s going to judge the ideas while you’re having ideas. Once we’ve got lots of ideas, we’ll judge the ideas and figure out if any of them are good or not.”
That change from “Please, can you give me one idea?” to “Please, can you give me ten ideas, and I don’t care if all of them are bad?” is a big shift in the way people think and operate. What you’ll find in that drawer are a lot of ideas that just weren’t judged appropriately in the moment they were presented but may still have enormous value. It’s a shame if they end up sitting in a drawer. As I said, you need ten ideas to have one good one.
Why did you want to rethink ‘brainstorming’?
Bizarrely, I didn’t know that Alex Osborn [BBDO cofounder] had invented the brainstorming session until years after I started working for BBDO. A lot of the brainstorming time is not used well; it’s not necessarily used for the right things.
Brainstorming is not managed and facilitated the way it needs to be to generate the right results. So we decided to codify how we want to approach “workouts”—the name we gave brainstorming sessions to help us generate ideas. It was really a question of recodifying—rather than codifying, for the first time—how we wanted to make brainstorming work.
Brainstorming is not managed and facilitated the way it needs to be to generate the right results.
You are not a fan of whiteboards.
That’s part of what I meant by preparing and running brainstorming sessions properly. As is often the case with processes like this, lots of small things make a big difference when you add them together. The purpose of a workout is to generate a lot of ideas.
In the generation phase, you accept that a lot of ideas will be terrible. Yet you need to have that outlook and think, “We’re here to generate lots of ideas to try and solve a well-articulated, crisply defined problem or question.”
A table setup—at which people think, “We’ll get ’round the table and solve the problem”—actually gets in the way of solving the problem. Tables give the opportunity for some people to hide and other people to dominate.
We all know how a table works. There’s somebody who’s at the head of the table, even if there isn’t a head of the table. If you get rid of the table, that problem goes away. Also, I want people to have to get up and move around the room when they’re trying to generate ideas. A table prevents this. I want people to be able to place something on the wall and say, “I love this,” or “I hate this.”
One would think whiteboards would be helpful, but they’re not. Whiteboards are brilliant for mapping out a process or figuring out a structure, because you can make changes. Yet for generating, storing, and recording lots of ideas, they don’t work. If you’re trying to generate lots of ideas, the only way you can put a new idea up on a whiteboard is by erasing one that is already there. You end up with whatever you can fit on a whiteboard. By contrast, if you only have giant Post-it notes that you can just stick on the walls and the windows, you can keep sticking them everywhere and cover the room with ideas.
Some of these practical steps make a big difference in the outcome once you understand how much you have to overcome to properly unlock the creativity that exists in our brains.
Watch the full interview
