Creativity. One-Eared and Undervalued.

The most important skill we have is the one we keep putting in a corner.

When I talk about creativity, I don't mean just a painting. A dance. A photo. A film. Architecture. Coding. Cooking. Fashion. Gardening. Khaby Lame the Tik Tok creator. Your mate with a Podcast.

I don't mean just skilled folks at Photoshop. Or entrepreneurship, product design, branding, negotiating with that dickhead in Procurement.

A legal argument. A surgeon adapting mid-operation. Pep Guardiola changing tactics at half time. A therapist finding the right words at the right moment. A farmer adapting to an unexpected season. A nurse managing four things at once with half the resources and not enough sleep.

I mean all of them.

The way we challenge problems and overcome obstacles. The way we think differently. That's creativity and it belongs to everyone.

But we don’t think about Creativity in that way. We put it in a corner. It’s thought about in limited ways, because as a society and as businesses, we don't take creativity seriously enough.

Having worked in business for decades, I've consistently heard Marketing, Creative and Advertising teams dismissed with "you do the colouring in", "get your crayons out", or the slightly more generous "you do the fun part.” (…which is not true). It reveals something about how we've collectively decided to value, or not value, one of the most important human capacities we have. Creativity.

The choreographer Twyla Tharp, in her book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, had a clear view on the role and importance of Creativity. "Creativity is not just for artists. It's for business people looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way." We know this, and yet.

When I went to school in the U.K. in the 1990s, doing art was viewed as a cop-out. Something you did instead of proper subjects like Maths, Science and English.

That attitude hasn't gone away. It is a sleeper cell in our societal thinking. In 2026, the Conservative Party said they wanted to stop creative arts courses at Universities, calling them a "dead end” to job hopes on Graduation. Why should the only measure of success recognised be the individuals contribution to the economy.

Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. So by that logic, he probably should have put the brushes down and done something more productive. The one-eared slacker.

The irony is that creativity is the economy. The World Economic Forum found that creative thinking is the skill most expected to rise in importance between now and 2027. The UK creative sector alone is projected to add over 120,000 new jobs by 2030, growing faster than the wider British economy. These aren't soft numbers. And seem to be something being ignored by Political policy makers.

The dismissal of creativity as soft, decorative, or economically irrelevant isn't just a cultural problem, it shows up directly in how businesses are run. In most organisations, creativity is outsourced or bolted on at the end. The "important" work, the politics (let’s be honest!), ‘stakeholder management’, strategy, finance, is treated as the real substance. The part that consumers actually see, engage with, and remember? That gets treated as the garnish.

Which is odd, because that's often the bit that determines whether people choose your business and brand or not.

Why the hate, mate?

The brain treats the unknown as a threat, and creativity is inherently unknown. We have brain developed a strong preference for the known and predictable, even to the point that those predictable habits might not be serving us.

A study from University of Pennsylvania found that even people who say they are looking for creativity react negatively to creative ideas. Why? Because Creative ideas are by definition new, different, they are the unknown and that triggers feelings of uncertainty that makes most people uncomfortable. People therefore dismiss creative ideas in favour of ideas that are purely practical, that are tried and true. And this bias interferes with our ability to recognise a creative idea.

A Cornell and Penn study put it plainly, people don't just undervalue creativity, they actively filter it out when they feel uncertain or stressed under pressure (a feeling most workers can relate to). Thing is, this bias is hidden. People still believe they're open to new creative ideas. They just can't see them anymore.

Business values, predictable, productivity that drives profitability. It favours control, and unknowns that can not controlled. No reputational damage is spent on known knowns. Creativity, by definition, introduces variables. The systems we build to run organisations are specifically designed to reduce uncertainty, which means they're also, quietly, designed to reduce creativity.

And all this programming and outcomes start at an early age.  Research has consistently shown that school teachers tend to reward students who follow directions and give expected answers, ones that are easy to mark, over those who think differently. Children learn very quickly which one the system values. And they adapt accordingly.

But here's the thing: creativity isn't a personality type. Anyone can be creative. You use numbers to creatively solve problems every day. It's not about which side of the brain you favour. It's about how seriously you take the act of thinking differently.

As Edward de Bono put it, 'Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns”. He spent his career calling this lateral thinking, the deliberate choice to step off the well-worn path and approach a problem from somewhere unexpected. Not a talent. An active decision.

So what do we do with all of this?

We start by taking creativity seriously. Not as a department, not as a personality trait, not as something that happens after the "real" work is done, but as a fundamental human capacity that sits at the centre of how we solve problems.

Here's the contradiction. We’ve spent decades telling people creativity is for a select few, the right-brained amongst us and devaluing it “get your crayons out” …and then we turn around and say it's the most important skill in business. You can't have it both ways.

But we can change.

At work, we can make creative thinking part of everyone's role and call it out as what it is, creative thinking. We should be building psychological safety to allow it. Support and reward it. Slow down to think and stop killing ideas before they're understood. Hire for curiosity, not just competence.

But ultimately we need to take a personal decision to think differently about Creative value. You don't need permission to do that.

Why, because Creativity belongs to everyone.