In my book, A Year of Creativity: 52 smart ideas for boosting creativity, innovation and inspiration at work (co-written with Sue Unerman), we explore 52 weekly ideas to inspire creative thinking in the workplace. I can’t cover them all here, but I am going to focus on some of them - specifically through the lens of how we can use the simplest ideas to reset and recharge with new intentions as we ease ourselves into the grand old year of 2025.

Now, I know the words “reset” and “recharge” can feel overused and ignite immediate signs of fatigue or boredom, so I prefer to think of it as encouraging a shift towards creativity. It’s about cultivating a mindset and environment that fosters innovative thinking in a workplace where creative ideas can flourish.

Why does this matter? Well firstly, we’re in a time of pretty massive change and in my mind that means that we need creativity more than ever. In 2024, AI use grew by a third - the global market is now valued at over $279 billion and 83% of companies state that it is their top priority in business plans.

But AI, whilst being pretty proficient at using patterns and data to provide analysis, cannot begin to match the depth of human emotion, experience and nuance that comes from harnessing team creativity in the workplace. Human beings reflect personal experiences, cultural understanding and emotions that - in times of complexity and ambiguity - need to be explored rather than ignored.

Within business, it is a mistake to stick to stale, established patterns of behaviour when faced with uncertainty. To secure a competitive advantage, you have to ensure that creative thinking is driving your organisation. Because it will enable workplace satisfaction, boost performances and encourage new ideas throughout all teams.

Take the cinema advertising industry, where I work. At Pearl and Dean, we’ve seen the benefits of creative thinking bolster and transform our industry massively in the last couple of years. Cinema is a brilliant canvas for advertising - you have the audience’s full attention and independent neuroscience research has proven that it’s highly effective as an ad medium for delivering personal relevance and detailed memory. This means that it is key for our team to embrace their creativity in order to ensure they are constantly thinking of new and exciting ways to reach and entertain our audiences. For us at Pearl and Dean, we don’t want cinemagoers to associate cinema advertising with being formulaic or repetitive, so it’s our challenge to come up with new ways to approach storytelling between cinema, brands and consumers. We can’t just ask ChatGPT for the answer - because it doesn’t have it!

One of the most thrilling examples of creativity being used in the workplace is the way in which cinema has been leveraged for experiential brand partnerships. In January 2024, Everyman Cinema partnered with the luxury vehicle brand Jaguar (who has unleashed creativity onto the world in their own special way this year) to host an immersive event as part of their long term partnership with the boutique cinema chain. The screening of Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things, had their very own Bella Baxters immersing cinemagoers into the Victorian world of film complete with set design, live music, and bespoke cocktails. Guests were then ‘treated’ to a demonstration of surgery at the Old Operating Theatre. VIP guests were chauffeured in using Jaguar’s fully electric vehicles. In a world of digital screens, working from home and endless video calls - this was a perfect example of cinema creating a truly memorable, once-in-a-lifetime IRL experience whilst ensuring the Jaguar brand was placed front and centre of their target audience.

Another standout example was Halloween 2024 when we partnered with Beavertown to transform the side streets of London’s Leicester Square into an immersive ‘Dead Carpet’ - the brainchild of a number of excellent team members at our experiential agency DIVE working creatively with Bearded Kitten (Beavertown’s Experience Agency) and The Prince Charles Cinema. As crowds of people gathered around the Prince Charles Cinema watching Frankenstein, the Bride of Frankenstein and other colourful characters stagger down the street covered in blood before being ushered in to watch a special “Screaming” of The Exorcist, it made me think of the sheer power of real, tangible moments like this and how they have the force to unite iconic institutions like the Prince Charles with modern disruptor brands like Beavertown - because the place for them to align is very much the real world and not online. We need real creative minds to realise this.

Both these examples are big and bold and beautiful but think too of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon that took over the cinema world in the summer of 2023. That term - a portmanteau of Barbie and Oppenheimer - was first coined by a human - a critic who tweeted it as a joke. A bot could never have done that. Barbenheimer is, in my mind, a faultless example of how creative thinking can thrive and lead to a proper movement: fan events, communal watching experiences, people donning pink to the first screening of Barbie, memes, t-shirts and even its own Wikipedia page.

So if you want to be more creative, here are some of my top tips for embracing creativity in 2025:

1. Prioritise creativity year-round, not just as a one–off event (even if one-off events are the outcome of creativity!)
2. Make sure you have encouraged a creative mindset in the boardroom which can be traditionally dominated by left-brained thinkers.
3. Don’t purely rely on AI because it makes everything a level playing field - being creative on top of it will give you a fantastic competitive advantage.
4. Consider the dynamics between introverts and extroverts within your teams - both should be appreciated and represented so that they can feel like they’re in a safe space and share authentically
5. Stepping out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be a massive, overwhelming leap - it can just be a little side step or shuffle out of your usual box.

So, as we kick off 2025 and the promise of a fresh start beckons, I encourage you to prise yourselves away from the monochromatic grip of ChatGPT and combine some of these ways of thinking into your organisation, to make sure you have an inventive year and elevate how your ways of working can go to the next level. Hey, you might even be the person who thinks of the next Barbenheimer…