Having worked for large IT companies for the majority part of my career, I strongly believe that although many job activities will be automated in the future, only few jobs are entirely replaceable by machines.  Instead, technology will free employees and management to tackle high-level challenges, because repetitive, menial tasks will be automated.  As noted in Creativity Rising: Creative Thinking and Creative Problem Solving in the 21st Century: “While much knowledge becomes obsolete, the 21st century skills like learning, innovation, creativity, flexibility, adaptability, critical thinking and problem solving – do not” (Puccio, Mance, Switalski & Reali, 2012, p.23). 

However, despite more than 65 years of scientific study, many misconceptions and myths still exist around creativity.  According to Sir Ken Robinson (2011, para 2): “One of the myths of creativity is that it is often thought that only special people are creative: that creativity is a rare talent. My starting point is that everyone has huge creative capacities as a natural result of being a human being. The challenge is to develop them.”  In their book, Creative Confidence: unleashing the creative potential within us all, David and Tom Kelley (2013) describe creativity “as a muscle that can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience.”  Like the authors above, I believe that creativity is a skill and can be taught and developed.  And like any skill, we need to deliberate practice to bring creativity to its fullest potential.

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