Despite AI and the rapid technology development, we still live in a human-powered world. However educational institutions, organizations, and governments do not embrace humanity’s superpowers, and have an imagination deficit.

While I often stress the need for imagination – and other human skills – in higher education, the same need applies to any organization. Nurturing imagination can bring transformative benefits to both employees and leadership. Some of them include an increased ability to navigate uncertain situations, to adapt to changing market conditions, and to imagine positive futures, rather than catastrophic ones.

Slowly, organizations are acknowledging that training employees in – or only hiring employees with – specific technical skills will not help them succeed in the future. A workforce with only advance knowledge in AI, coding, or programing will struggle to tackle unframed challenges, engage in deep conversation with other humans, and understand the specifics of clients’ challenges.

AI cannot replace humans; specially, it cannot replace human skills, like imagination. AI has immense capabilities to optimize certain tasks and automate tools that support creativity, like changing colors, testing media, or exploring with multiple materials and techniques. However, there is compelling evidence (here and here) that AI cannot replicate core ingredients of human imagination, including curiosity, empathy, conceptual thinking, daydreaming, exploring the unknown, collaboration. Human skills cannot be automated.

This is why, having employees able to harness their imagination is what will set an organization apart. Organizations should focus on cultivating human skills that equip their employees with the confidence to respond to rapid changing conditions and imagine worlds beyond limitations of the present.

There is already global recognition of the importance of human skills, and imagination in particular. So, how can organizations nurture imagination?

• Create conditions for investing on human skills. Focus on developing the conditions for employees to train, grow, and embrace imagination, empathy, curiosity, experimentation, and forging human interactions. Like in education settings, organizations can help cultivate human skills by providing employees with the safe spaces to ask questions and experiment, and the tools to explore, play, and imagine.
• Leverage on the imagination-well-being benefits. Focus on boosting people’s resilience, emotional well-being, and mental health. Stronger emotional wellness will help employees experience more positive feelings and broader cognitive flexibility. These feelings create the conditions to generate new patterns of thought that enhance imagination. Creating opportunities for individual and collaborative imagination will enrich dialogue, accelerate learning, and increase value.

By empowering employees to ask questions, challenge the framing of problems, and have a role in decision making, leaders will be prioritizing imagination, adaptability, and resilience, rather than acceptance, power dynamics, and unilateral decisions. Supporting these behaviors and building habits that foster imagination require a paradigm change from leadership and reorientation of internal norms.