How ad exec Jon Haber gets people to be creative — even if they think they're not

On LinkedIn’s video series, This is Working, I sit down with top figures from the world of business and beyond to surface what they've learned about solving particular problems.

My guest this week is advertising executive Jonathan Haber , cofounder of Giant Spoon , an agency known for its innovative campaigns and outside the box thinking. 

Companies want people who can create ideas that have an impact — ideas that are also accessible to everyone. But finding those creative minds is not easy. Or at least leaders think it's not.

My guest this week, the co-founder of advertising agency Giant Spoon, knows a lot about generating innovative ideas and buzz out of those ideas. His belief is that you can generate creativity of any part of an organization. It's just a matter of building the right environment.

If you saw Stranger Things’ Upside Down projected onto the Empire State building or General Electric taking over the pages of the New York Times, then you’re familiar with Giant Spoon’s work. The agency is known for its unusual thinking and groundbreaking campaigns. They were ranked #23 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023.

Jon’s main strategy: Use naiveté as a superpower to bring big ideas to life. 

“If you've been [working] for a long time, you [may] go, ‘well, we thought of that 10 years ago and we couldn't do it’ or ‘they'll never do that…that's not possible,’” Jon said. “Sometimes that experience is what works against you. [When you’re] naive, you might say, ‘What if we did that?’

“Naiveté as a superpower is a critical tool in business, [as is] trying to keep some of that naiveté as you become more senior and more experienced.”

So, how do you do that?

“Cognitive dissonance”, Jon quipped. “It’s not saying no to ideas that I think are not realistic.”

It’s not about just learning not to say No, though. Creativity really comes from: 

1. Being out in the world and staying open to new ideas;
2. Feeling empowered to share those ideas — however crazy they are;
3. Working hard to combine what you’ve seen with what your colleagues have seen.  

Anyone can do all three. Your role doesn’t matter, your mindset does.

“We’ve been studying creativity and what we call an expansive mindset, which is about all of our people — whether they're in the creative department or other area — thinking expansively. And that's a broad way to say, 'What other things besides your day-to-day job can you bring into the office that's going to make us all smarter and inspire something?'," Jon said.

We’re all creative when we’re children, he points out, but over time, we stop being open to creative ideas. Or we think it’s someone else’s domain. Or we hide our creativity from others.

Jon says we have to embrace what we’ve all been born with. “Obviously people's brains work differently and some people are more inclined [to creativity], but I think creative problem solving is something that's inherent in all of us. And then it's how you focus it, how you nurture it.”

Two of the ways Giant Spoon does that is through an open Slack channel called “Spoon Shots” where people are encouraged to post their shower thoughts and wild ideas with no judgments from anyone on the team. The second is a culture fund for Giant Spooners, a stipend his team can use to experience cultural activities — as long as those activities are new for them.

The idea is to have everyone always "collect dots" — to have unexpected insights or ideas that when connected to others' insights and ideas and applied to a client problem can generate something magical. “Go to an opera if you wouldn't have gone to an opera, or go to this museum, or go to the X Games. It could be anything, as long it's something you wouldn't have done otherwise,” Jon said. 

"The brain function of creativity to me is about connecting dots,” he said. “The more unexpected the dots that you connect are, the more creative it is. We treat those moments like curiosity sessions. We're encouraging the process of thinking about the things that you collected and bringing them back into the creative process." 

Harnessing that curiosity is how a promotion for a show turned into a new world appearing on the Empire State Building.

But it doesn’t have to be that creative. Crazy ideas and dots colliding could be how you solve some thorny problem at work, or discover some new product, enter some new space, or just rethink roles and responsibilities. You have to encourage people to get ideas, bring ideas, and then be structured in how they get remixed. It doesn’t take being in the Upside Down to see the world in a new light.

How do you tap into your creativity? And have you ever felt like your ideas were too big to share? Join the conversation on LinkedIn and subscribe to the This is Working newsletter. Be sure to tune into the latest This is Working podcast. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

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