Most organisations treat creativity as a place. It lives in a department, usually with a different dress code, and the rest of the business sends things to it. That arrangement is comfortable and it is the reason so many companies are bad at it.
Creativity is not a job title. It is a way of approaching problems, and it is commercially useful in finance, operations and procurement for exactly the same reason it is useful in marketing.
The definition is broader than the job description
The Oxford English Dictionary defines creative as relating to or involving the use of the imagination or original ideas to create something. There is nothing in that about advertising, design or brand.
Read it plainly and creativity is simply the ability to arrive at a new and better solution rather than repeating the existing one. Every organisation says it wants that. Rather fewer organise themselves to get it.
Why it is a commercial skill
The commercial case is not complicated. Businesses compete on doing things differently. If your process, your pricing, your service model and your proposition are all arrived at by copying what the category already does, you are competing on execution alone, which is the most expensive way to compete.
Creativity is the mechanism for producing genuine alternatives before you choose one. It is upstream of strategy rather than downstream of it. Treating it as a decoration applied at the end of a process is what produces the familiar outcome where the answer was decided in week one and everything after that was presentation.
This is the argument behind Kevin Chesters’ work as a strategic consultant and the reason it sits alongside rather than underneath the commercial conversation. It is also one of the clearer signals that a leadership team needs an outside view: when the same answer keeps reappearing.
Everyone is creative, and then life happens
The central argument of The Creative Nudge, Kevin’s first book and an Amazon bestseller, is that every human being was born with the ability to think their way to new and better solutions, and that society and evolution then get in the way of that instinct.
That reframing matters inside an organisation. If creativity is a talent that some people have, the only lever you have is hiring. If it is a capability that most people have and most workplaces suppress, then the lever is how you run the place, which is something you can actually change.
The book uses nudge theory to make the point that small behaviour changes can retrain how people think, rather than requiring a reorganisation.
What suppresses it at work
Three things do most of the damage, and none of them are anyone’s fault.
- Speed. Original thinking needs a gap between the problem arriving and the answer being required. Most calendars have removed that gap entirely, which is why the question of how to create more time keeps turning up as a business problem rather than a personal one.
- Certainty. Environments that reward being right punish the phase where you are provisionally wrong, which is where new ideas live.
- Ownership. If creativity belongs to a department, everyone else is formally excused from it.
What to do about it
The practical move is to stop asking whether your people are creative and start asking whether your process allows a second answer to exist.
Concretely, that means building in the step where alternatives are generated before one is chosen, protecting a small amount of unallocated thinking time, and being explicit that early ideas are not proposals. It also means making the skill teachable rather than mystical. Kevin runs creativity as one of his inspiration modules, and as a keynote based directly on the book, precisely because it is a set of habits rather than a personality type.
The short version
Creativity is not a department, and it is not decoration. It is the commercial skill of producing a better option than the obvious one, it is more widely distributed than most organisations assume, and it responds to how you work far more than to who you hire.
If you want that argument made to your organisation, the practical question is usually which format will actually shift things, and what a keynote should be expected to deliver. If you want to talk it through, get in touch.