You're more creative than you think
Put the “create” back in creative.
Last week I wrote about whether HR business partners are inbound or outbound, a frame I borrowed from Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of Atlassian, on the Decoder podcast. This week I’m going back to the same episode, because something else Mike said stuck with me.
Here’s the nugget. Mike credits a friend for it, and says it hit him like a bolt:
“We’re moving from information asymmetry to imagination asymmetry.”
In HR, and honestly most of the corporate world, information asymmetry used to be the competitive advantage. What information you knew, and when you could share it, was the value in a lot of organizations and teams. Now we’re moving to a world where AI gives people a lot of that information. It democratizes it. So the advantage moves to imagination asymmetry: what you can think of. The ideas.
I love this.
Why this matters if you’re an HRBP
A couple of things.
First, we’re not quite there yet. I agree with the premise, but especially in HR there’s an element of experience that’s tied to information, and like with any role, experience still really matters. Sometimes just having the knowledge of something someone else doesn’t have is the thing that provides value in your role.
Hopefully that’s becoming less and less true. The same way managers can have the information so they don’t need to go to their HRBP, leaders can have the same information, so they don’t need to start all their basic questions with their HRBP. That’s the inbound queue getting smaller, the whole point of last week’s issue.
Second, and this is the side I’m leaning on. A lot of people don’t see themselves as creative. They hear “imagination asymmetry” and get a little nervous. They tell themselves, “Oh, I’m not creative. Where are my ideas going to come from? I’m used to being able to recall the information, the facts, and that’s what I’m good at.”
I want to challenge that. I think people are way more creative than we give ourselves credit for.
Steal this
Start by reframing what “creative” means. There’s creative in the sense that someone can make a drawing or play a song. But there’s also creative in the sense of putting processes together, putting people together, putting together the right org chart, putting together the right playbook for a leader transition. There’s far more creativity that can abound in this work. Don’t be afraid of the label.
Think far more about the create part of the word creative, instead of the -tive. It’s about what you made.
Then go grab the proof. On Monday morning, ask AI what you created last week. Feed it your week and have it give you back the list of what you actually built. Point it at whatever tool you’re comfortable using: a Copilot instance that can look across your entire Microsoft footprint, Claude, or even a personal instance of ChatGPT or Gemini. The point is the question, not the tool.
The “what did I create last week?” prompt
I’m an HR business partner, and I don’t think of myself as creative. Help me check that.
Look at my week from [START DATE] to [END DATE] using [SOURCE — my calendar and email, my meeting notes or transcripts, or this pasted list of what I worked on: …].
List everything I created, not everything I attended. Count the things I put together: processes, plans, org charts, playbooks, messages, decisions I shaped, people I connected, problems I framed for someone else. For each one, give me one line on what existed afterward that didn’t exist before.
Then tell me which one or two took the most imagination, and name one idea I had that nobody asked me for.
Run it once and look at the list. I’d bet it’s longer than you expected.
What did you create last week? Hit reply and tell me. I read everything that comes in.
-Josh
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