Abigail Posner, Director of Creative Works at Google, speaks on creativity to organizations including accounting firms and power distribution companies.
Her message: All people are inherently creative. It's a quality that's not just the domain of artists, musicians, and designers. Her goal is to decipher the creative process so that engineers at YouTube (owned by Google), for example, can work together to develop and leverage interesting and deep content.
I first met Abigail when we attended a panel discussion together in Cannes. And I was immediately impressed by her ability to keep asking questions rather than presenting ideas. She keeps asking “why?” how? What kind of relationship is there? In doing so, she gains insight and arrives at solutions that no one could have imagined.
Abigail believes in what she calls “the power of different concepts.” When these concepts are combined, something novel and useful can be discovered. This combination can manifest itself at both the individual and organizational levels, and leveraging both levels together can have an exponential impact.
She recently gave a monumental example of this. It is a reversal of damage to the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from dangerous UV rays. In the 1980s, scientists began warning that certain industrial chemicals were depleting the ozone layer and threatening the environment. Abigail noted that collaboration between people with different ideas, including scientists, politicians and businessmen, led to solutions that at first seemed out of reach. In 2023, a United Nations report announced that the ozone layer is recovering and on track to recover within 40 years.
As many experts on creativity recognize, do not have Knowing a lot about a subject can be a great catalyst for generating novel ideas, especially when combined with the power of expertise. Abigail herself is an example of this. She joined Google with a degree in anthropology from Harvard University and professional experience in the advertising industry. She wasn't very tech savvy, but that was important.
When Abigail joined Google, she realized that while the company received a lot of data about what people were doing online, it didn't know much about it. why. By leveraging her background in anthropology and advertising, the company was able to bridge the gap between “what” and “why.”
Another thing about Abigail is that she's kind of a ham, as she readily admits. When she was young, she enjoyed acting in plays. Google executives quickly realized that they could use her stage presence to Google's benefit by encouraging her to pursue opportunities to express her ideas to clients and other groups. Through her speech, her thoughts on creativity and the digital environment could have an even greater impact.
As Abigail said, “I couldn't compartmentalize myself. I would have failed.” First, she combined different concepts into her own thinking, and then extended that expansiveness to the rest of the team. That meant getting to know different aspects of her team members, including their hobbies, interests, backgrounds, and previous work experience. Not just for the sake of chit-chat, but because there is real value to be gained from this knowledge.
“What I have to offer matters. It's not because I have this single train of thought. But whether it's because I studied ballet or because I learned Greek or because I'm a great mother or because I ran marathons, I have this expanded sense of myself. Because everything about me is accepted. That way they feel more heard, but they actually become more innovative. And that's the innovation that only your team can show. Because only your team has this combination.” These are people with various aspects. ”
A big part of Abigail's job is helping advertisers run the most effective ads and branded content possible. Analysts on her team have developed best practices for different types of advertising channels, but they sometimes struggle to convince clients to adopt a different approach. Using the usual routes such as oral presentations or slide presentations does not always work.
Coincidentally, one of her analysts is a prolific traveler who creates YouTube videos featuring highlights from his travels, including the eruption of a volcano in Iceland. When one particular client was reluctant to greenlight a new idea, the analyst decided to create a rudimentary YouTube video as a “proof of concept” to show what the proposed new ad would look like. The client watched the video and was sold. “When you see it happen, it's hard to say no,” Abigail says.
This approach was so successful that the team decided to turn it into an entirely new sales service. The analyst reaches out to a former journalist on Abigail's strategy team to create marketing materials for the new service so that it can be effectively communicated to clients.
When you embrace your own scalability, “and when you do it with the rest of your team, you have an even greater opportunity to truly enhance innovation,” Abigail said.
GE leveraged the power of its incredibly diverse business when inventing new products during the “Imagination at Work” era. The company's healthcare division knew there was a problem with their anesthesia machines. The anesthesia machine was very complex, with various dials and beeps that were distracting and made it difficult for anesthesiologists to concentrate on their work.
Beth Comstock, former GE chief marketing officer, recalls in her book: just imagine“So the people at GE asked, 'Who else is in that kind of life-or-death situation, working with all kinds of inputs and monitoring equipment?' And they had a surprisingly useful realization that the cockpit of an airplane is strikingly similar to an operating room. So they invited pilots to observe the surgery, and GE This turned out to be a no-brainer, as their industry had faced much the same problem years earlier.'' The strategy worked, and with the help of the pilots, GE's engineers designed a new and improved machine.
Comstock said the bottle label is not visible from inside the bottle. Therefore, “we had to go 'outside the jar.'”
Excerpt from creative change Written by Andrew Robertson, Copyright © 2025 Written by Andrew Robertson. Used with permission of Basic Venture, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
