Second City Works presents "Getting to Yes, And" Getting to Yes, And… | Andrew Robertson – Creativity Unlocked
Nov 4, 2025
Andrew Robertson, Chair of BBDO Worldwide and Advertising Hall of Famer, shares his take on making creativity a repeatable organizational practice. He discusses training creativity, engineering it into processes, balancing experimentation with reliability, using 'yes, and' to generate ideas, and how AI can accelerate—but not replace—human invention.
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Creativity Is Suppressed By Convergence
- Companies suppress innate creativity by optimizing for convergent processes as they scale.
- Apply the same discipline used for operations to create space for divergent creative work.
Don’t Run Shallow Focus Groups
- Run research sessions with deep preparation and highly skilled moderators to surface diagnostic insights.
- Avoid simplistic put-it-in-front-of-eight-people focus groups that yield shallow conclusions.
Mandate Building, Not Just Avoiding Criticism
- Use an explicit rule like “yes, and” to require building on ideas rather than merely forbidding criticism.
- Require multiple ideas (e.g., ask for nine bad ideas) to increase the chance of finding a good one.
