Creativity is usually discussed as a personal trait. But it is also a systems condition. After sharing with you the difference between individual versus systemic creativity, I knew there would be questions. In that Thought Essay, I shared that the professional trait, creative thinking, has already eclipsed many others as a key skill to have by 2035, which makes it all the more important to finesse your learning in this. It does not matter whether you are in an ‘creative’ role or industry — those rules have already been rewritten.

Part One of this Q&A explored more elements of systemic-level creativity. Now, let’s deep dive into how to cultivate it at the individual level, starting with yourself.

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Q – You speak so uniquely about creativity and the intangible as a large piece of economic value. Why is it underestimated?

A – For those outside creative or innovation-led sectors, creativity is easily misclassified as decorative or frivolous. The truth is, creativity is far more than expression. It is the energy that shapes products, narratives, experiences, identity, demand, culture, and differentiation. In many markets, these intangible forces create more value than raw function alone. And this trend is accelerating.

We are moving into an era where meaning, originality, trust, taste, and emotional resonance increasingly determine who captures wealth, influence, and impact.

Q – At what point does ‘innovation’ stop being creative work and instead just waste company resourcing?

A – Innovation becomes wasted when experimentation is disconnected from strategic value.

For example, a fashion retailer and an engineering manufacturer should not innovate in the same places. For a fashion brand, digital marketing and social relevance are paramount. For an engineering business, stronger B2B relationships, thought leadership, and trust-building experiences may matter more.

Where does innovation actually move the needle for you?

Q – Is there a relationship between compliance and insight?

A – Yes, they serve different functions. Compliance keeps systems functional. Insight allows them to evolve.

Problems occur when one dominates the other. If you over-index on insight, you create abstract chaos. If you lean too much into compliance, you mute originality and agility to market conditions.

I understand the appeal of compliance. It makes things feel measurable, defensible, and low-risk in the short term. But excessive control slows adaptation over time and suppresses the very thinking required for future relevance.

The real challenge is designing environments where insight can surface without the system collapsing under friction. That’s a leadership design problem.

Q – What must a system optimise for, and what does it sacrifice?

A – Every optimisation decision is also a sacrifice.

Optimise for speed, and you may lose substance. Optimise for efficiency, you may lose soul. Optimise for control, you may lose creativity. Optimise for consensus, you may lose distinction.

This is why intentionality matters so much. Systems reproduce what they reward. Build incentives around the behaviours, thinking, and outcomes you genuinely want more of — not just in the metrics that are easier to measure.

ON INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY

Q – What does a daily creative practice look like for someone with a demanding job?

For someone who is already maxed out, creative practice is not another activity. Instead, look at ways you might build a creative approach to what you already do. You don’t need more time, just different attention.

Q – I am in a very logical, left-brained professional, but I would like to develop my creativity. Where do you suggest I start?

A – First, retire the myth that logic and creativity are opposites.

Creativity is not the absence of structure. It is the intelligent use of structure to produce something new. This is why fields like music, design, engineering, architecture, and coding all require both imagination and rules.

Start somewhere tangible: learn an instrument, design something functional, or write.

Your analytical mind is not a barrier. It may be your greatest creative asset once pointed toward invention rather than optimisation.

Q – I am a highly creative person and I struggle to have my work seen and monetised in market?

A – Creative quality alone does not guarantee market recognition. Your value must be legible before it can generate direct returns. That usually means improving the interface between your work and the market: positioning, consistency, trust, communication, and signal strength.

Talent matters, but translation matters too.

Q – You suggest that one must be ‘regulated’ to access the best ideas. How do I do this if I’m constantly under pressure in work?

A dysregulated mind defaults to urgency, not originality.

Under pressure, the brain narrows its field of view and scans for threats, shortcuts, immediate tasks — the antithesis of creative thinking. This is why creativity can feel inaccessible when you need it most.

Paradoxically, a creative act can also become the regulation tool itself. Writing, music, movement, building. These activities shift attention out of the mental noise and back into presence. Basically, just do whatever you know will move your brain out of its noisy state.

Martha Beck talks about how just putting yourself into a creative state completely alleviates present feelings of anxiety, that you can’t authentically feel both creative and anxious at the same time. So, if you have a racing mind or a lot of external pressure, use creativity to bring you back to homeostasis.

Q – How do I distinguish novelty-seeking from genuine creative depth?

When you are seeking novelty is a state of pushing your creative limits and perhaps experimenting around certain themes. The essence is that you are playing in a zone that’s inherently unfamiliar. This is a key part to innovating.

The other part is seeking depth. This is when you take those novel ideas and start forging patterns and meaning out of them.

The first is improvisation and exploration. The second is building something to be repeatable and implementable. Both matter a lot.

Q – What blocks creativity most often in high-performing people?

Under a healthy work environment, high performers are usually rewarded for reliability, speed, and competence. And yet, these hallmarks can paradoxically get in the way of creativity if they aren’t expressed effectively.

If you are to push these three into ineffective territory, we might see the symptoms both externally or internally.

Internal blockers to creativity might be:

• Perfectionism

• A fear of failure or looking foolish

• Overthinking (which can mask as ‘preparation’)

• An identity attachment to being ‘the capable or strong one’

External blockers to creativity might look like:

• Packed out schedules with no time to think

• Excessive monitoring from others, or towards others

• Constant responsiveness

• Cultures that reward execution but not exploration and healthy risk-taking

All of these named blockers are extremely addressable, so if they start appearing then these are your indicators to be more intentional about the culture you are building — within yourself and within the environments you work in.

Q – Can burnout permanently damage creative capacity?

No, but it is brutal. It is temporary, but burnout significantly impairs your access to creativity.

Creativity depends on energy, curiosity, flexibility, and emotional range. Burnout depletes all four. The issue is rarely that creativity has vanished, it is that the internal conditions required to reach it have been exhausted.

Your job at this point is to just replenish your wells. Forcing ideas or ‘productivity’ will only make it worse.

Creativity loves a void. So, take advantage of the void you are in by just observing what will inevitably reemerge in you.

Q – How do you rebuild creativity after a period of stagnation?

Stagnation suggests that there are things you need to let go of, which you are resisting. Your internal intuitive system is highly intelligent, and you need to honestly ask yourself what it needs you to clear out to make way for the next thing.

When you are courageous enough to let go, you get to enter the said creative void. The absolute place for new ideas and realities to emerge from.

Creativity will be one of the top-five skills to have professionally by 2035. Finesse your acumen intentionally, and understand how it expresses differently at both the individual and systemic levels.

Got a question or idea worth examining? Share it and see that it might be chosen for an upcoming edition of YOUR IDEAS, EXAMINED.

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Learn how I guide complexity like this and capure value for organisations at rachelobrien.work.

Do you subscribe to “removing the emotion” from your decision-making? Particularly if the stakes are high?

I disagree, and let’s talk about that.

While it’s often passed off as an innocuous phrase, “remove the emotion” is usually shorthand for something more reasonable: to not let irrational fear take the wheel. That, in itself, is sound. But it is reductive to proxy that with a suggestive that all emotion is therefore a distraction. Because the moment you do that, you make it significantly harder to listen to your intuition.

A strong gut feel, in business or in life, is undeniably a useful tool in decision-making. So, why would you deliberately reduce your access to it?

My sneaky suspicion is that, particularly in the West, we’ve overcorrected. A long, hard history of suspicion toward mystique and the intangible gave rise to scientific rigour, data-driven thinking, and systems of proof. All extraordinary things. But in the process, we’ve started privileging external markers of decision quality over our internal navigation systems. We trust (and economically back) what is measurable more than what is felt.

Have you ever experienced a key pivot moment in your life where nothing made logical sense, but you moved forward anyway — and it paid off? Perhaps you moved on from a career, accidentally met someone who led you to a dream relationship, or relocated on a whim with absolutely no clear rationale. And yet, those decisions become the most defining for you. This is your intuition speaking.

I suggest this not to entertain the esoteric, but to acknowledge the in-built, subconscious pattern recognition system already within you. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink explores this notion at length. Those seemingly illogical gut responses are usually the result of accumulated information taken in beneath our conscious awareness, and surfacing as instinct before logic can catch up. It is thinking without thinking, to paraphrase Gladwell, and your emotions are its vessels.

Are we seeing now the threads between this aversion to emotion and society’s broader inability to name and quantify intangible value?

In my consulting work, I speak regularly with leaders of cultural institutions and non-profits who are trying to economically harness immense human value, yet operate within cash-strapped business models because that value is difficult to measure. This isn’t a coincidence.

The same instinct that tells us to “remove emotion” from decision-making is the one that struggles to account for value it cannot easily quantify.

To “remove emotion” may once have been useful advice. Now, it feels like wisdom that has hollowed out. It assumes humans are more erratic that they are — and in doing so, encourages us to distrust one of our most sophisticated internal systems.

On the contrary, removing emotion actually degrades decision-making.

Herein is the problem: emotion is being framed as noise, when it’s actually data you need to listen do.

When you collapse emotion, reactivity, bias, and fear into one messy category, that in itself is a distortion. Think of the entire spectrum of human emotional experience. The Emotions Wheel is something you might have seen in a leadership course, or a therapy room. Do we really want to flatten all of that intel when making decisions? Or are we simply avoiding the work of understanding it?

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In my attempt to experiment live with you — raw and unedited — I’d like to share with you a page from my writing journal. Longtime readers will know that I funnel my ideation through the Ideas Reservoir. It’s structured and enables me to capture all my inspirations on a whim, and then slowly build on a piece of writing in increments.

This is a creative approach I take across many avenues. It is how I write, yes, but also how I design and art direct, and how I create music. Much of it starts as a written journal entry.

In my own curiosities, I often find myself parsing through old journals. Sometimes to track patterns within my own psyche. (Intense, you might say, I know. I would make an entertaining dinner guest though). Sometimes, it is purely out of boredom.

This list below might be a few years old now, but something about it caught my interest. I’m sure it would give you a lot of tells about me if you see that something like this still resonates. But, despite whatever embarrassment I might feel in sharing the vulnerabilities of my mind so publicly, I push forward instead out of an even deeper curiosity: how might any of these resonate with you?

Please do tell me what statements most intrigue you, in the comments, or in your private email replies.

Here are thirteen things you might need to hear. I did.

1. Look for beauty in mundane things, in unexpected places. It is your gift as a human to see it, but also your duty.

2. Rarely cringe at other people, or yourself. Feel compassion towards each of our human experiences.

3. No need to shape-shift yourself to belong, or to comfort others. Allow yourself to embody what you wish to see externally.

4. Accept compliments with ease.

5. Let others misunderstand you. Your journey is unique.

6. Seek advice, not validation.

7. Allow silences to exist without feeling compelled to fill them.

8. There is comfort in both standing out and anonymity.

9. If you don’t know, ask.

10. Risk public failure.

11. Go solo, sometimes, or even often.

12. Be kind — to yourself first, then to others.

13. Tell the truth.

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Learn how I work with organisations to build their creative and cultural fluency at rachelobrien.work.

Previously, I shared that the most important skill to learn by 2035 is creative thinking. Naturally, this raised many questions: What does creative thinking look like? How does creativity behave in individuals versus in systems? And why is creativity now the most important skill, especially with the rise of AI? Every company and brand, no doubt, will attest that they strive for more innovation, but we know you cannot just drop a few high performers in a room and hope for the best. So, let’s examine what might be done.

Below is a collection of answers to your questions on creativity: how it manifests at a systems level, and how it might be cultivated from within.

Got a question about creativity, business, value creation, or culture? Submit it anonymously.

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ON CREATIVITY ITSELF

Q – What do you actually mean when you talk about creativity?

A – Think of the late Sir Ken Robinson’s definition of creativity: the ability to generate original ideas that have value.

The implication is that there are two components of creativity: originality + value. Both are required for an idea to be the fruit of creativity.

So, how are ideas generated? Through your imagination, yes, but imagination alone does not create value. Converting ideas into meaningful outcomes is the crux of what we explore throughout Ideas Economy.

Q – What does creative thinking look like in highly regulated industries (e.g. banking, law, government)?

A – Constraints can be very useful to stimulate ideas but they must not suffocate. Too much rigidity will inevitably kill creativity totally within a system. In sectors, however, that require more rigidity, we see creative thinking unfold amidst social tasks — things that require navigating the complexity of people.

Creativity is what enables you to prompt others to learn, think differently, or feel intrinsically tied to their outputs. All imperative to a high business acumen, such as in negotiation, stakeholder management, and the like.

Q – If AI can generate ideas, what makes human creativity meaningfully different?

A – There is an old trope that beauty is evidence that something was touched by humanity. Humans can naturally imbue a deep level of soul into their work which is, thus far, incapable of being replicated by AI.

As they say, taste is becoming more important than ever.

Q – If execution is becoming cheap (thanks to AI), won’t systems that execute better still outperform creative but messy ones?

A – Execution is critical — but only if the underlying idea is strong. The brilliant execution of a poor idea is still a poor idea.

Q – How do you measure creativity without reducing it to something shallow?

A – Measuring outcomes has its place, but much of creativity’s value can only be appreciated when viewed holistically. Take brand, for example. It conveys cultural meaning and connection, and its impact often cannot be measured immediately in dollars. But it can be tracked in other ways.

Q – If creativity is a “difficult intelligence to cheapen,” what does that look like in practice?

A – Practice looking at visual art and you will see. Many works contain immense creative intelligence and a ‘soul’ that is difficult, even impossible, for a machine to replicate precisely. The difference is perceptible.

ON SYSTEMIC CREATIVITY

Q – You talk about the difference between individual creativity and systemic creativity. How is it possible to have a room full of creative people not be a creative company?

A – Companies must master two capabilities:

1. Attract highly creative individuals (individual creativity).

2. Build systems that lift that talent collectively (systemic creativity).

If a company’s outputs are not routinely imaginative or original, at least one of these is missing. A room full of creative people without systemic support will fail to produce consistently innovative work. Addressing this requires intentionally building environments that enable creativity to thrive.

Q – How can you tell if stagnancy is a leadership problem, a structural issue, or an identity trap?

A – It’s often a combination of all three. Further investigation might identify the core cause, but sometimes, as the saying goes, the fish rots from the head. Other times, leadership merely inherits structural issues that are endemic across an industry.

Q – What prevents creative individuals from influencing systems?

A – Compliance and social smoothing.

Q – You write how artistic environments sometimes become creatively stagnant. How?

A – It does not matter how artistic the product, service, or talent are. Creativity needs certain conditions to breathe sustainably. Upkeep your creativity hygiene factors to mitigate stagnancy.

Q – How is it that creativity needs constraints, and at the same time cannot operate under too much rigidity?

A – Healthy constraints define a space for ideas to move freely.

Constraint requires:

• Knowing what you don’t want.

• Being willing to reject misaligned work.

In short, cultivating good taste.

Too much rigidity comes from hyper-procedural environments. Processes are valuable, but the more volatile, uncertain, chaotic or ambiguous (“VUCA”) a situation is, the less process will help you. In these circumstances, it is more valuable to adopt an exploratory approach, rather than high-conscientious procedure.

The dance is: be organised enough to build some predictability (through frameworks, structures), but leave yourself unconcerned with finessing details — at least to start.

Q – Can one highly creative individual meaningfully shift a rigid system?

A – No. People need people for a sustained ripple of change.

Q – When should you leave a system that constantly kills creativity?

A – KPI-only cultures struggle to capture or value meaning, which is increasingly important for brands. Signs of a suboptimal workplace include:

• Everything must map cleanly to a metric.

• Long-term cultural impact is dismissed as unquantifiable.

• Discomfort with ambiguity.

Creativity is inherently intangible. By giving it structure, its value becomes visible and harnessable. Ideas are not inherently valuable until they are activated, contextualised, and embedded in systems. This is how imagination converts into real-world outcomes.

To continue in Part II: Systemic Creativity.

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I speak to so many people across professions. Software engineers, accountants, lawyers, engineers, designers, strategists, executives at large. My job requires me to infuse creativity across pretty much everything I do. But that’s not the case for most of us. Most people will have some memories of taking on ‘creative’ activities when they were at school — even being very talented at them. Maybe you were an excellent pianist, guitarist. Maybe you would create your own comic books, or baked a lot. Younger days, when you had more time.

With the mass extinction of the white collar job pretty much imminent, creative thinking will be a top skill to learn for your advantage, particularly in the next ten years as society at large scrambles to find ways to create the next thing that will succeed our current economic systems.

So, we know creativity is a professional advantage. It also enriches your life. And the very good news is that you don’t need to make a dedicated weekly scheduled endeavour to build your creativity. You can infuse it already with highly mundane activities you probably already do.

Much of creativity is exercised in the in-between moments where your mind can wander. Here are some ways you can more intentionally infuse creative practices into your already-busy life.

1. Cook dinner with a constraint (e.g. using only three ingredients, or only what’s in the fridge).

2. Move your body, physically. (Gym, sports, pilates, etc.).

3. Have a cinema night at home, and remain fully present in the experience.

4. Play music in your car, and hum, sing, tap along to it.

5. Eat your lunch outside, away from your desk. Give your mind negative space to process and synthesise.

6. Ask yourself a pressing question before bed and see what emerges by morning. Let your subconscious do some work.

7. On your walk or run, imagine the stories of the people who live nearby.

8. Talk to a stranger. Ask them a peculiar, revealing question.

9. Curate your social feeds to follow inspiring accounts.

10. Draft an email with a creative constraint, such as a two-word subject line, or one-sentence body. (We all love a one-sentence email.)

11. Imagine the place you’re in 100 years from now.

12. Explain something you’re working on using a metaphor or analogy.

13. Generate five ideas in 60 seconds for a problem or opportunity. (A mini version of the Hundred Idea Sketch.)

14. Keep a quick journal of one interesting idea per day. Does not have to be a good idea.

15. Practice your pattern recognition. Next time you travel for work, consider what you’re seeing in that region that’s the same or different to your home.

16. Read before bed.

17. Play Nintendo games to wind down.

18. Speak your thoughts aloud to yourself.

19. Notice what people complain about. Friction points are often the seeds for innovation.

20. Rename something mundane — a task, process, meeting — to reveal its essence.

Many people say they don’t have time for creativity.

The real issue is attention, not time.

Build your curiosity. Enable blank mind space. See what you can play with in your day-to-day.

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Shall we examine the most frequented grievances between executive leadership and the Business Development function? The same suggestions repeated across strategy meetings, board discussions, and hallway conversations. The perennial: we just need to find another sponsor. Or, perhaps, more overtly: do we know any well-endowed philanthropists? (Yes, I’ve heard this line a few times in board discussions…)

On the surface, fine. These are practical questions, sort of. But they reveal something deeper about how most organisations understand revenue.

Business development is not about finding money. It is about designing value.

The way an organisation attempts to generate revenue often reveals far more about how it truly understands value than anything written in its most recent strategic plan. The difficulty in treating business development practices as a tactic is that it’s not. It’s a living system. Revenue outcomes are structural reflections of how an organisations designs value.

We see this so clearly in the industries which inherently operate in spaces of intangible value — those which rely on relational and cultural capital over pure transactions. Think of sectors like:

• cultural institutions,

• performing arts organisations,

• museums and galleries,

• charities and foundations,

• membership associations,

• sports organisations,

• lifestyle and premium brands that rely on collaborations for cultural relevance.

For organisations like this, their lifeblood is not pure product or or service sales. They rely on a curated mix of revenue streams — something like sponsorships, philanthropy, memberships, and ticket sales — because their largest value source is intangible. Here, intangible value includes things like cultural meaning, affiliation, and collective identity. (Any accountant reading this who might like to quantify this on a balance sheet, please do share your insights in the comments. We are still in the early days of measuring this.) Because cultural capital is difficult to quantify, we often find ourselves in senior or executive discussions debating endlessly over where they value truly lies in the organisation’s latest brand collaboration or partnership agreement.

Herein is the sticky point. Organisations frequently try to extract value from systems they have never intentionally designed.

The problem

The systemic consequences are familiar, of random sponsorships, different departments selling pieces of the organisation, no unified commercial story, all the while servicing overhead quietly grows. Without acknowledging the depth of the issue, brands slowly become a collection of disconnected commercial promises. This then creates three structural failures at once:

1. Brand incoherence, where partners struggle to understand the platform they are actually affiliating with.

2. Operational inefficiency, where many small deals require disproportionate servicing.

3. Revenue ceiling, where organisations stay stuck in £10,000 sponsorship tiers when, with the same resourcing, they could easily pull 10x that.

When sponsorship becomes inventory

One of the most common structural failures I see appears in how organisations approach sponsorship. It so easily becomes mistaken for selling media assets. Naming rights for events, rooms, programs. Access to activations. Hospitality tickets. And, yes, this is obviously a core part of sponsorship agreements. But what differentiates them from regular media buying is the deeper relational layer. If you stay at the transactional layer, this is where deals struggle to break beyond tiny figures.

Revenue systems operate at three levels: (1) transactional, (2) relational, and (3) generative.

This brings us to this month’s Mental Model: The Revenue Seed.

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How many leadership clichés can you list?

Let’s start with one: fail fast, fail often.

It’s repeated so often that is has the rhythm of wisdom, but it has always given me some discomfort to hear. It’s not quite wrong, but it quietly assumes a condition that most organisations, and leaders, have never actually built. So, let’s debunk it.

Startup clichés like this fail for a simple reason: they misunderstand the system they are operating inside. Most leadership advice operates at the wrong layer of the system. Fail fast is a behavioural instruction, and whether that behaviour produces value depends entirely on the psychological and cultural architecture underneath it.

That is the invisible system.

Consider the conditions required for learning to occur inside a complex organisation. The fail fast mantra only works when people’s sense of worth and belonging are not threatened by failure. If that condition is not present, failure cannot be metabolised as information. Instead, it becomes something to defend against. When this happens, people tend to do very predictable things.

They rush forward performatively, creating the illusion of speed without actually progressing. In doing so, they emotionally bypass themselves and the uncomfortable work of reflection and internal processing. People in this state cannot help but to collapse complexity into tactics and, when the pressure becomes too great, someone on the team eventually gets scapegoated.

We see this all the time amidst boards who wrestle with a ‘problematic executive’, or a senior manager dealing with a someone who ‘just didn’t perform’. But this is human nature. Even down to family systems and human connectivity patterns. In business, the executive who becomes the new convenient explanation for deeper systemic issues gives the organisation at large a preserved illusion of safety — that the problem was a person rather than the beloved system itself.

The result is movement without learning. And systems that cannot learn will not produce real value.

Guess what happens to systems that don’t produce value?

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We see in modern leadership literature that the gold standard of leadership requires — empathy. You might find endless articles which dote on empathy as a “core leadership skill,” or insist that it is imperative to managing people. (All true.) Beyond cerebral literature, good MBA programs teach the practicalities of it, and executive coaches platform it. Yes, empathy matters. But it is also a precursor, not the pinnacle skill. Empathy is the beginning. Compassion is the required end goal.

Compassion is what elevates empathy from emotional connection into moral discernment.

Empathy is not ‘being nice’. Far from it. It is the equivalent of psychological x-ray vision. High empathy is an unbelievably effective way to sharpen your perception, in business and in life. It reveals motives, power dynamics, ego structures, insecurity. In essence, it gives a leader diagnostic capability.

The absence of empathy creates a particular kind of weakness in leadership. People who lack empathy tend to:

• oversimplify others,

• instrumentalise people,

• push outcomes unrealistically.

Lack of empathy is clearly a problem. But so is the shadow-side of unintegrated empathy.

When underdeveloped, empathy mutates into people-pleasing, harmony addiction, and weak boundaries. It is what turns people to be overly accommodating at the expense of what matters. Ironically, this is the flint for deeply toxic work environments. By contrast, when integrated effectively, empathy becomes discerning wisdom.

Strategic empathy is different to being indiscriminately empathic. The latter assumes goodwill and cooperation. Strategic empathy understands and considers power dynamics, manipulation, ego, insecurity, and hidden agendas. It does not collapse in the face of them.

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How do you apply creativity to your work?

It goes far beyond aesthetics or artistic expression. Creativity is the prerequisite to innovate. Today, as AI accelerates, execution and optimisation is cheap. Those in the workforce already feel the sweat as our economies adapt to exponential access to knowledge. With that, more people are deferring their critical sense-making to the outside world. To put another way, people are becoming less equipped to think.

Creativity is a skill that restores and strengthens that capacity. It sharpens your ability to discern what is valuable within a specific context — your community, organisation, your city, this moment in time. It aligns you with deeper meaning and other people. It also a difficult intelligence to cheapen.

It is no wonder then that, by 2035, creative thinking will be one of the most important skills for employment[1], and has already outranked technological literacy[2] as a future-proofing capability.

There is no career to which this does not apply. A banker can be creative. A musician can be deeply uncreative. The raw skill is evident wherever you can see, in action, the fruit of what it produces.

One unusual pattern I see, after over a decade of working across sectors, is this: some companies are very good at attracting creative people, and still fail to innovate their output. Creativity itself does not automatically translate into value. Not every environment knows how to harness creativity, even when it appears.

The least creative culture I had witnessed, for example, was in a theatre group. The performing arts industry is naturally a magnet for very artistic, expressive people. Only sometimes, this is captured at leadership and administrative levels.

When creativity flourishes, so does value creation. And if innovation is the goal, there are two dimensions to address:

1. Individual creativity

2. Systemic creativity

First, your personal well of creativity must be flowing (individual creativity). Next — particularly if you lead teams, organisations, or communities — the environment in which you are in must be capable of harnessing what emerges (systemic creativity).

This distinction matters most when leading between traditionally ‘creative’ or ‘non-creative’ industries, which happens all the time.

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While lumpy outputs are a very natural charm of the overall creative process, needless to say, this is not particularly practical. When applying it to business, organisations, or any other systems, what creativity needs, paradoxically, is constraints.

Enter this month’s Mental Model.

The instinct people have — if they don’t already have their own creative process — is to try to summon creativity during deliberately blocked time. This only elicits unnecessary pressure to come up with something ‘good’, now. Predictably, the well more often runs dry.

Instead, work with creativity’s natural behaviour instead of fighting it. Understand that it will natural incline to wander at random moments. Your job is not to control creativity, but to capture it whenever it arrives.

By getting into a regular practice of capturing ideas, without judgement or force, you quietly build your own personal taste; your creative inventory. This is a library you can return to at any moment, and gives you more to work with at any given time than a blank page.

The result is simple but powerful:

What this means is that you remove the pressure to be brilliant on command, and replace it with a system that makes creativity available when you actually need it.

Here is one way to do that.

This month’s Mental Model: The Idea Reservoir

Key idea: Capture ideas as they emerge, so innovation is never dependent on timing, mood, or pressure.

Use it for: Strengthening your personal aptitude for creativity — particularly strategic, conceptual, and lateral thinking.

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Despite being nearly six years past the global pandemic, the debate on work-from-home productivity refuses to settle. Some argue for the moral and cultural necessity of human connection in offices. Others more desperately bid for a return to pre-pandemic norms (”it’s good to spend some time in the office”). Meanwhile, WFH has quietly embedded itself as a new baseline, boosting autonomy, strengthening the employee value proposition, and reshaping how talent evaluates employers.

Out in the wild, this tension plays out far from think-pieces. One executive described to me their latest HR dilemma involving an employee who claimed a WFH day while getting tattooed a full arm sleeve — arguing that being responsive to email from their phone constituted a day’s work.

Depending on your perspective, this is either the logical edge of flexible work, or the fairly rude breach of an unspoken social contract.

Watching organisations navigate WFH, one might be forgiven for thinking it’s just a typo away from another three-letter acronym. One letter separates flexible work from organisational chaos.

All this wrangle, not enough consolidation, and yet we still seem to tiptoe around the crux of it:

Is our problem really that we are navigating the growing pains of work-from-home culture? Or is it that the autonomy propagated by WFH exposes the creative bankruptcy of systems built for compliance?

Enter creativity.

Many corporate workplaces already struggle to integrate creativity into their core operations — particularly those reliant on rigid hierarchies, risk aversion, and highly specialised roles. (This necessarily exists across legal, medical, and some engineering domains.) These systems are usually optimised for efficiency, conformity, and immediate output, which are perfectly reasonable priorities. Some level of conformity breeds organisational harmony. Cost efficiencies are favourable to the bottom line. The tension emerges when those organisations structurally built for compliance also expect sustained innovation.

Creativity requires certain conditions to thrive. If those conditions are systematically constrained, innovative output won’t change, regardless of the calibre of talent involved. At the centre of these optimal conditions sits autonomy.

For creativity to propagate sustainably, the required environment is specific:

1. Intrinsic motivation must be prioritised. External rewards (pay, titles, job security) matter, but they are hygiene factors. As the need for creativity increases, meaning, cultural coherence, and narrative clarity become decisive. People don’t innovate because they are told to. They do so when the work feels internally consequential.

2. Enough workflow constraints for structure, but no more. Your WFH parameters might require availability during agreed common times or in person at key moments, but do not let this slip into rigidity for the sake of optics.

3. Make it easy to adopt an identity as an idea generator. Employees must first give themselves the internal permission to view themselves as creators, not just executors.

In the realms of creativity and innovation, autonomy is not just an intangible preference for companies to reach. It is actually a fundamental prerequisite for producing original, high-level strategy.

Autonomy, by its nature, demands trust, which is what really makes people nervous about establishing WFH norms. It means building enough faith in teams that physical absence from the office won’t reduce them to meandering loiterers on paid time.

It’s not that organisations don’t want creativity. They want risk-free creativity. But creativity without risk is simply optimisation. Useful, but not capable of producing originality needed for lasting innovations.

The answer is certainly not to remove rigid structures, but to design them differently: strong enough to sustain order, yet fluid enough to dance with the creative process.

Strong like a tsunami. Adaptive like a river. Both are water.

Allow the autonomy WFH brings to reveal what your current systems are actually built to do.

How do you harness creativity in your company? Does it follow a reliable process, or is it adopted informally and without structure?

I recently caught up with a founder of a consumer goods brand who found themselves in an IP itch. Their brand name, for a venture yet to launch, could not be legally protected in its core region of business. The name was considered too close to a popular phrase and therefore was not ‘distinct enough’ to be owned.

This is a common enough story for brands that lean on colloquial slang. Language, aesthetics, and shared references are effective tools for building cultural capital because they create immediate recognition and emotional resonance with their audiences. The art of differentiating well, however, is to hook people in with familiarity and hold their interest with novelty.

Trying to trademark a phrase like “old mate” in Australia, for example, would almost certainly collapse under scrutiny. (That said, Aussie comedy duo Hamish and Andy did manage to launch Australian-themed ‘Old Mates Pub’ in New York City. More on this later.)

After all the time and investment that goes into developing a resonant brand identity, it can feel devastating for a founder to go back to square one. But, often, this isn’t even necessary. What separates an idea as undeniably distinct is just a little more creative processing.

Your idea might only be under-processed.

Differentiation is not necessarily the output of a quirky personality with a rare creative gift. Distinctiveness is created through treatment. And because treatment can be designed, creativity can be applied as a business system that is predictable, repeatable, and scalable in its own right.

This month’s Mental Model addresses exactly this.

Use The Cultural Value Five to build process around your creativity — to be replicable and systemised. In doing so, you can build cultural capital intentionally, under the very real parameters of time, budget, resources, that businesses contend with daily.

This month’s Mental Model:
The Cultural Value Five

Key idea: Distinctiveness is not created through ideation alone, but through processing depth. Ideas become defensible, ownable, and economically useful when they are systematically treated across multiple components.

Use it to: Apply creativity as a repeatable business system rather than an ad-hoc capability.

Core components:

1. Cultural signal — the raw idea, phrase, trend, or reference.

2. Context — where, for whom, and under what conditions the idea operates.

3. Narrative framing — the role or meaning the idea is assigned.

4. Specificity — deliberate constraints, exclusions, and focus.

5. Defensibility — legal, cultural, and economic distinctness.

Distinctiveness in creative output is usually the result of just enough minor shifts across these five components. Push an idea too far into originality (there is such a thing) and it risks obscurity, entering avant-garde territory that audiences may not yet have the language or appetite for. Equally, leave an idea under-processed and it crumbles before it can be sustainably applied.

As for Hamish and Andy’s ‘Old Mates Pub’ in New York. Would it have worked in the middle of Sydney? Likely not so well, as you remove its context as a nostalgic haven for Aussie expats living abroad.

Old Mates Pub relies on all components of the Cultural Value Five:

1. Cultural signal — the brand name plays on a well-loved Australian phrase. High recognition, deeply embedded in everyday vernacular.

2. Context — New York City, not Australia. Geographic displacement creates asymmetry.

3. Narrative framing — a food and drinks venue suddenly becomes a cultural outpost and a playful, tongue-in-cheek expression of Australian identity.

4. Specificity — the concept is tightly bound to Aussie pub culture and reinforced by founder-led cultural credibility (Hamish and Andy).

5. Defensibility — these signals compound to accrue cultural capital as a gathering place for anyone seeking connection to Australia.

How do you harness creativity in your company? Establish the conditions that allow it to be captured. Consider your brand’s Cultural Value Five. The more markers you can meaningfully activate, the greater leverage you have to build enduring brand equity.

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The New Year can often feel hijacked by resolutions which assume progress is linear. In this state, discipline must be rigid and hyper-consistent, and the necessary ambiguities of life are tempting to view as failures at worst or inconveniences at best.

But creativity, and life, does not move so predictably.

If the Chinese zodiac dubbed 2025 the Year of the Wood Snake (deep shedding, foundational integration) and 2026 as the Year of the Fire Horse (acceleration, bold momentum), then consider this list your transitional instrument between the two.

Let us enter a New Year with a much more fire-horse-oriented premise: that confusion is often a prerequisite for actualisation; that aesthetics and deep beauty function as strategic tools more than we are taught to admit; and that joy and play are perhaps the penultimate states from which meaningful work emerges.

It’s one thing to propel forward into your year of accolades and achievements. But you can only act on an opportunity if you can first perceive it. For every month of fire-horse running ahead, here are twelve primers for you to channel your creativity for good.

If you are a subscriber, save this as a flagged email in your inbox, so you revisit it over the year.

1. Play is the same thing as problem solving. The former is just not yet knowing what it solves.

2. Ambiguity and uncertainty are companions of creative process. Know this signals progress, not error.

3. Things often look chaotic before they look refined. This is normal.

4. The moment you force an idea (or person) into a predetermined mental framework, innovation stops. First, witness it without archetype. Then, allow a new category to form.

5. Effort is not always proportional to value. Some ideas demand friction before clarity. Others arrive unannounced. Trust both.

6. Aesthetics usually communicate what logic and data cannot. Harness beauty as strategy.

7. To access intelligence beyond logic, invite in somatic practices that temporarily bypass the mind (e.g. journalling, physical movement). This is where raw insight emerges.

8. Never dismiss an absurd idea too early.

9. Be brave enough to frankenstein together unrelated concepts, just to see what happens. (This is the instinct of the inner child.)

10. Deliberately choose joy, daily. Flow and creativity emerge more reliably from this state than from force.

11. Treat every small move as a prototype. Even partial opportunities generate momentum.

12. Think of your creative practice — whatever it is for you — as a compounding investment. As in finance, get the fundamentals right, and growth follows.

Congruent across all twelve is a deeper remembering: before anything else, we are human. You must give yourself permission to be one, and use your humanity as your advantage.

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The holiday season typically disrupts our usual routines. Within that forced pause, in the small serendipities of shared meals or quiet mornings, mental space opens up. If you allow it, this is precisely the condition from which your imagination might surface.

Creativity is often intuitively valued, yet easily misunderstood in its rawest form. Fleeting, delicate, sometimes messy, it shows up as a thought, a feeling, or a string of moments that build on one another. It only becomes tangible once it is tended and refined.

The festive season reminds us to appreciate the intangible: wonder, play, generosity, connection. Generosity can extend beyond gifts. You can be generous with your time, curiosity, attention, the care you bring to shared experiences. And, if you are alone, even extending that generosity or awe to a stranger carries its own quiet magic.

Understand that these moments, innocuous or grand as they may be, can be tended intentionally to grow your creativity. The rawest form of value often lives in a playground of imagination. Ready for you to enter and explore.

For much of the last century, the World Health Organization classified introversion as a personality disorder. See the ICD-9:

• Code 301.21 “introverted personality”

• Code 313.22 “introverted personality disorder of childhood”.

It wasn’t removed until the ICD-10 was released in 2015.

This history mirrors a broader cultural pattern: Western societies have long favoured extroverted traits as indicators of strength, health, and leadership potential. And that bias still shapes how organisations identify talent, promote leaders, and design their cultures. Extroverts get visibility. Visibility is interpreted as readiness. Readiness gets rewarded.

Meanwhile, an enormous reservoir of cognitive, creative, and cultural value sits under-leveraged. It’s not that introverts lack capability — they simply don’t perform the personality style we’ve artificially coded as “high potential”, so there is propensity to be overlooked.

Nobody here is debating “whether introverts should lead” (I hope).

But we should ask:

How much organisational value do we leave on the table by designing leadership pipelines around a single personality aesthetic?

Our next era of economic growth will be shaped by ideas, depth, and cultural intelligence. So, we need leadership architectures that surface, develop, and legitimise the multitude of ways that divergent thought takes.

The organisations that figure this out will unlock talent that their competitors can’t even see.

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Cities evolve faster than their stories. We see that looking at the world city network, as defined by The World According to GaWC.1 The British think tank’s hierarchy measures how well each global city connects to the wider constellation of urban nodes, from the deeply integrated Alpha cities to the regionally oriented Gammas. London and New York City, for example, sit atop the ranks as Alpha++ cities, as leading hubs of commerce, talent, and culture. But it’s the Betas that reveal a more interesting story. Big enough to matter, small enough to be just a little insecure.

Beta cities are the crucial connectors of a region — plugging their state or territory into the global flow of commerce. They include Rome, Dallas, Ho Chi Minh City, Perth, Cairo, Manchester, Copenhagen, among others. What you might call the middle children of global urbanism. And like middle children, they’re often caught between who they once were who they’re already becoming. Their self-narratives lag behind their realities. In post-monoculture cities, especially, identity lingers in yesterday’s industry long after the ecosystem has diversified. Case in point: what is Austin after its post-tech high? Manchester beyond its longstanding manufacturing centre? It’s what you might call an awkward adolescence. No longer the global-city babies, not yet fully-fledged hubs. Naturally, growing pains ensue.

Beta cities tend to follow an unusually curious growth curve.

Perhaps the best exemplar of this is Australia’s own sunny Perth. Once a sleepy mining and resources town, Perth is evolving faster than its collective identity can process. Out of all global Beta cities, it is the most geographically isolated. It is surrounded by ocean to its west, desert to its east, and its nearest major city, Adelaide, is about 2,100km away (approx. 1,300 miles). Perth is the world’s largest globally-connected city that is also absurdly far from almost anything else. And it is here that we see our common Beta-city dynamics most exaggerated.

Perth, purveyor of the flagship Beta-city hang-up.

Economically, mining still dominates, alongside healthcare, construction, and education. The city has benefited from sustained infrastructure investment, resulting in well-planned precincts, new public amenities, and a rising urban polish. Salaries are high — especially across legacy industries — yet the city remains comparatively affordable. Vibrant festivals, including Fringe World and Perth Festival, have only become signature features in the last 15 years. Major precincts — including Elizabeth Quay, the Perth Cultural Centre, the State Buildings, and WAAPA at ECU City — have only taken shape in the last decade, with several yet to fully open through 2026 and beyond.

Yet, time and time again, locals still reference it as a ‘big, sleepy mining town’, make a comment or two about its ‘nice beaches’, and affirm that it’s culturally a little ‘dull’.

A classic dissonance between a region’s current and future orientation, held down by its lingering cultural narrative.

The bottlenecks of a cultural insecurity.

Like many Betas, and true to its teenaged form, Perth is also a bit too preoccupied with external validation. Once again accentuated by its distance, the city is constantly looking to the other world cities for trends, benchmarks, and standards. Always seeking outward, rarely inward. For a city that built much of its wealth from mining, culture develops reactively, with global influences ferried in from New York, London, and Europe held as the gold standard. It’s a persistent bent toward an import-first mentality for creativity, innovation, and cross-disciplinary ideas. To exacerbate this narrative, high wages and relaxed coastal living pave the way for lower risk appetites, a slight aversion to ambition (”tall poppies”), and a subsequent reduction of entrepreneurial pressure. Comfort over integration.

When everything begins with an external reference point, local creativity defaults to remixing and mimicry over originality.

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Creativity is abundant. Commercially complete ideas, however, are rare. Ideas typically die when the infrastructure to scale or monetise them is weak. While a moment of inspiration must be captured and celebrated, strong architecture is still required for good ideas to survive in market.

Ideas die when they lack:

• Containers — a designed habitat for the idea to live.

• Repeatability — a means of replicating an offer without the founder’s oxygen.

• Translation — a bridge between the original imagination and market adoption.

• Value design — an economical engine that protects the idea’s essence.

Across my work, I see a trending disconnect: some people breathe ideas (”creatives”), others breathe infrastructure (”operators”). Both are brilliant. Neither thrives alone.

The Continuity Complex solves for this gap. A three-point reminder of how you might consider evolving your ideas after the moment of inspiration.

This month’s Mental Model:
The Continuity Complex

Key idea: Ideas earn longevity when their creative integrity and commercial viability grow together, not in opposition.

Use it to: identify the scaffolding your idea needs to endure.

Core components:

1. SPARK: harness the idea’s truth. What cultural tension does this idea resolve? Clarify the non-negotiable essence. The part of your idea that must not be compromised or diluted for convenience. If the spark is not protected early, the structure will distort it.

2. STRUCTURE: build the idea’s habitat. How does the idea function as a repeatable system? Define the container that enables the idea to operate and scale. Codify formats, rituals, IP, and the team required to deliver consistently.

3. SCALE: design the value accumulation. Where does energy (money, attention, reputation) pool and reinvest? Build permanence around your idea. This might look like distribution pathways, network effects, commercial engines. Whatever is necessary for the idea to be renewable.

Example: a live music experience turned commercially-repeatable model.

A music artist develops a distinctive live show. It has a unique production quality and setup, immersive audience energy, and a clear aesthetic. Artistically, it’s exceptional.

Here’s how the Continuity Complex stimulates the considerations for this to become a repeatable model:

1. SPARK: protect the creative soul of the project.
   The artist dissects the show’s essential elements, and includes the emotional charge, sensory design, signature moments. The conceptual DNA of the work.

2. STRUCTURE: give the art an operational backbone.
   To evolve beyond one great show to a sustainable performance vehicle, they then map out:

   1. The production demands, both technical and creative.

   2. The support team, so that the show is not operated by one person.

   3. Venue or touring partners aligned with the concept.

   4. A revenue model (tickets, merch, content capture, partnerships).

3. SCALE: extend the lifespan of the idea.
   Next, the artist defines:

   1. What is ownable — IP elements of the show such as formats, audience lists, rituals, production design.

   2. Style guides and technical assets — for consistent delivery.

   3. Expansion pathways — across residencies, festivals, venues, cultural collaborators.

   4. Audience pathways — for them to remain invested in their artistic journey.

A one-time performance now becomes:

• A recognisable live experience format.

• A creative identity that travels.

• A lean commercial engine.

• A cultural asset with compounding momentum.

Continuity is how creativity survives success.

If your ideas deserve more than applause, if they deserve architecture, let’s design the infrastructure they need to endure.

• Brand and Cultural Strategy

• Partnerships and Commercial Model Design

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Co-authored by strategy consultants, Des Kennedy (Applied Creativity) and Rachel O’Brien (Ideas Economy), connecting insights across the UK and Australia on business and creativity.

While many leaders rightly discuss the importance of ‘maximising shareholder returns’ to their staff, effective leaders are able to communicate exactly why their work matters. The pressure is real, but what truly motivates your people to deliver each day is not the bottom line.

As perhaps a surprise to nobody, 66% of the global workforce is currently disengaged, representing an untapped $9.6 trillion in economic value. If captured, it would translate to a 9% increase in global GDP.1

Good storytelling acts as the bridge between intention, activity, and value. If you, as a leader, can articulate your company’s intent clearly, this reflects in engagement and ultimately, in shareholder value. If you can’t, your organisation risks discord, your people tuning out, and both productivity and potential returns diminishing.

For a story to be strategically effective, it must clarify three things:

1. Why we exist.

2. Key drivers for value.

3. How everyday activity contributes.

The ‘why’ is your company’s purpose. Rather than reciting a bland statement, leadership must bring it to life so your people can see themselves in it.

That ‘why’ guides your ‘key drivers’. Every business has specific activities that really move the needle, as well as a lot that don’t. People focus on what they believe matters most. What is said, modelled, and rewarded.

For some, value is built through close client relationships; for others, relentless innovation. What truly matters for your business must be articulated clearly, so employees can focus on where they know the value lies.

Once the ‘why’ and ‘key drivers’ are clear, the ‘how’ follows naturally. Decision-making becomes simpler and alignment sharper.

Compelling storytelling serves as your proxy for clarity, acting as the communication pathway that ultimately drives shareholder value.

Metrics alone can’t do that.

A dashboard can report activity and progress, but it can’t solely reinforce direction. Frameworks like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) help, but they must be communicated with context; otherwise, they risk becoming noise. This leads to misunderstandings, causing innovation to stall and effort to drift.

Consider your company’s story as a flowing river that forks into many directions. You, as the leader, decide where the strongest current flows. The story you tell determines where the energy goes and how much shareholder value it creates.

Numbers measure and stories mobilise. But when numbers live inside a coherent story, value endures.

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Few brands would argue against the economic value of building loyal communities around what they do. Few cities would overlook the power of civic vibrancy and engagement. We all want cultural relevance, but what makes it so elusive to even name, let alone address? This roundup of Q&As circle a common tension: why relevance can be hard to build, and what the implications are for a brand or organisation to even have that kind of presence.

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Q – Why do strategies that work in one industry often fail in another, even when the problems seem identical?

A – The context is different. Each industry operates within distinct ecosystems of culture, incentives, constraints, and interactions. Think of each like an individual person with their own personality. If you were to ask for a story or recollection from them, each would come up with something distinctly different. Strategy, therefore, is context-dependent on a few things:

1. Different value drivers — what creates success in one industry may be irrelevant in another. (E.g. consider the importance of social media influencer marketing in fashion versus industrial tech.)

2. Organisational culture and capabilities — a strategy assumes certain behaviours, skills, and structures. Execution is everything. Even a brilliant strategy cannot save weak implementation.

3. Regulatory and market constraints — industries differ in rules, norms, and customer expectations. A brand or marketing strategy that works in one legal or cultural environment may backfire elsewhere.

4. Interdependencies and feedback loops — industries have different networks and supply chains. A tactic that works in a linear supply chain might fail in a highly interconnected one.

5. Hidden assumptions —every strategy relies on assumptions about timing, incentives, risk tolerance, and customer behaviour. Seemingly identical problems often hide subtle differences that invalidate those assumptions.

Q – What common mistakes are brands, cities, and cultural institutions all making in trying to engage people today?

A – I think there’s a lot of talk on community, connection, and (the big one) authenticity but, if you were to press, many strategists and operators alike won’t know what that tangibly means. We see larger brands gain visibility with experiential design stunts. I typically see this in larger brands who have enough market presence to leverage that brand equity. It’s tougher for more localised brands to play on in this way. Regardless, any brand of any size can still focus on this question: what move will make us more societally relevant? This inevitably translates into your bottom-line.

Q – Both the sports and arts industries rely heavily on sponsorships as a major revenue stream. What can either party learn from each other?

A – The sports sector, in many ways, is still leaps and bounds ahead of arts in how they approach sponsorship revenue. The arts, particularly on a global front, do however show quite strong opportunity to deliver deep cultural resonance through pop-culture collaborations.

In sports, there is typically more commercial clarity around sponsorship assets. Those properties are defined — naming rights, broadcast inventory, talent access, hospitality, content bundles — and arts companies will likely expand their revenue if they adopt this level of clarity.

That said, when I look at the globally-leading arts organisations — the Louvre, Sundance Film Festival, Tate Modern, the Met — they are the ones who truly excel at harnessing cultural storytelling for economic gain. We’re now sports shift in this direction too, with individual athletes deepening their personal narratives and using that storytelling to secure brand deals that leverage their image.

The arts sector enormous storytelling potential to work with, but it hasn’t quite slipped into the cultural zeitgeist the way sports has. In Australia, for example, sport is part of the national identity. (There are exceptions, as I do speak generally. In France, for example, the arts are woven into its national philosophy — museums, cinema, fashion, architecture.) When a sector reaches that level of cultural relevance, the economic leverage that follows is huge.

Got a question or idea worth examining? Share it and see that it might be chosen for an upcoming edition of YOUR IDEAS, EXAMINED.

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