Think about the most highly valued people at your workplace. They probably have one thing in common: the ability to consistently come up with great, "non-obvious" ideas, says bestselling author and marketing expert Rohit Bhargava.

Employers place a high value, especially in the artificial intelligence era, on "somebody who's able to see around the corner, someone who's not stuck doing the same things and someone who's able to anticipate what's going to matter for the future," Bhargava tells CNBC Make It.

Reliably devising great ideas that other people haven't considered is easier said than done, of course. Bhargava — whose resume includes stints as a marketing executive at global firms Ogilvy and Influential, and an adjunct professorship at Georgetown University — recommends a four-step process, which he calls the "SIFT" method.

SIFT stands for "space, insight, focus, twist," Bhargava writes in his upcoming book "Non-Obvious Thinking: How to See What Others Miss," co-written with investor Ben DuPont. The idea is to train your mind to think creatively, instead of instinctively recycling old ideas and repackaging them as something new.

"It's more work to come up with something new and original. It feels really intimidating. And I think part of the reason is because our minds aren't in shape to do that," says Bhargava, adding: "[But] it allows you to be flexible for the future, and to make yourself indispensable."

Here are the four steps you should take to become more creative and reliably come up with great ideas, according to Bhargava.

1. Give your brain a break

You don't necessarily need a vacation to give your brain a creative break and more space for new ideas. Try "just taking two minutes to pause" and step away from your daily distractions, says Bhargava.

"A lot of times, we feel like our lives are so crowded that we don't have time for new thinking. We don't have time to do something different," he says.

His second recommendation: "Re-evaluate how you breathe. There's some really fascinating breathing research that says ... we should actually take longer [and deeper] breaths, and that would help us oxygenate ourselves more and encourage our minds to do something different."

Mindfulness and wellness experts often recommend breathwork to relieve stress and anxiety. It can also help increase creativity, research shows.

2. Put your phone down

The more observant you are, the more you can think deeply about a subject and potentially uncover something that had previously gone unnoticed. Bhargava recommends something simple, yet potentially challenging: Put down your phone and "pay attention to the world," he says.

"It actually works," he adds. He points to former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, whose grand vision for turning the business into a global giant was inspired by a stroll he took in Italy — during which he saw the allure of Milan's many espresso bars. 

"Imagine if [Schultz] was sending that text message walking down the street," Bhargava says, adding: "We might be walking by a billion-dollar idea, our billion-dollar idea, because we're just not paying attention to it."

3. Isolate the real problem you want to solve

Once you've observed something that might lead to a great idea, "hone your focus" so you can isolate the most important details and better understand the problem your idea could solve, Bhargava says.

In their book, Bhargava and DuPont advise people to "follow your frustrations" by thinking about the everyday things that annoy them or don't work perfectly. Then, they can brainstorm ways to improve them.

If you want to impress a boss who values efficiency, think about the regular projects and processes that take up the most time for you and your co-workers. Work your way through different explanations for why they take so much time, and see if any unnecessary steps could be skipped or reorganized.

The book also recommends the "five why's method," invented by Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda: Ask yourself why something imperfect is the way it is, then follow the explanation with the question, "Why?" Do that five times to discover the most basic, underlying issue you need to address.

4. Identify a twist

Plenty of people do the first three steps. The final one is the missing piece, says Bhargava: Take the insights you've curated, and identify a twist nobody else has seen before.

"We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to come up with something that no one's ever done before," but it's easier than it sounds, he says.

You might, for example, try some "reverse thinking," a creative problem-solving strategy that involves doing the opposite of what conventional wisdom would suggest. Imagine the "worst idea possible," and then figure out how to actually make it work. It's a way of finding a completely unique solution from an idea that's likely already been dismissed by everyone else, Bhargava says.

Another option is "to do something better that, maybe, very few people have done before [and] that we could do uniquely," he adds.

Bhargava and DuPont cite the story of Dyson founder James Dyson, who got the idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner after watching a huge machine — called a cyclonic separator — clean a sawmill with an air vortex. Rather than inventing a completely new technology, Dyson took something that already existed and put a new twist on it, shrinking it down to make a revolutionary new product.

"That's often enough to make that new idea succeed, to make that side hustle succeed, [or] to make the job that you currently have into the job that you want," Bhargava says.

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