The problem with creative people

One of the stranger things I’ve observed during my career is that large organisations will happily spend millions hiring agencies to be creative on their behalf, yet often seem considerably less comfortable when similarly creative people appear on their own payroll.

I’ve spent enough time on both sides of that equation to find it fascinating. Agencies are routinely invited into organisations to challenge assumptions, question established thinking and bring fresh perspectives because that’s precisely what they’re being paid to do. Yet when employees inside those same organisations exhibit similar behaviours, the reaction can occasionally be rather different.

This isn’t because organisations dislike creativity. Most like the idea of creativity enormously. They like innovation programmes, brainstorming workshops, transformation initiatives and increasingly large investments in GenAI.

What they often like rather less are awkward questions, uncomfortable observations and people who insist on pointing out that a popular idea may not actually be a very good one. The difficulty is that creativity and organisational comfort have never been especially close friends.

The agency paradox

When an agency challenges convention, that’s generally viewed as evidence it’s doing its job. Fresh thinking is part of the contract. If the agency provokes debate or suggests a completely different direction, most clients consider that a worthwhile use of budget.

The same behaviour coming from an employee can feel rather different.

The agency presents its recommendations and leaves. The employee remains behind to navigate the consequences.

After enough years inside large organisations you begin to notice that originality and career longevity are not always close friends. The people who survive every restructuring, leadership change and operating model redesign are not always the people generating the most interesting ideas. More often they’re the people who understand how to adapt, align and avoid creating enough organisational friction to become a problem.

Originality can be an asset in large organisations; predictability is often a safer career strategy. I’ve occasionally wondered whether some organisations prefer creativity as a procurement activity rather than an operating model. Hiring unconventional people is one thing; continuing to appreciate them after they’ve started behaving unconventionally is quite another.

Building creativity by committee

I’ve also watched organisations spend months creating internal agencies while barely consulting anyone who had actually worked in one. There would be steering committees, governance frameworks, operating models, capability maps and launch plans. The PowerPoint slides were immaculate.

The irony, of course, was that many of the people who had spent years running creative teams or agencies were nowhere near the room. Nobody would build an R&D function without scientists or a finance team without finance professionals, yet creativity remains one of the few disciplines where organisations seem remarkably comfortable ignoring practitioners while enthusiastically embracing process.

Part of the challenge is that creative authority often becomes surprisingly ambiguous inside large organisations. In an agency, everybody generally understands who owns the creative judgement. There may be debate, disagreement and the occasional dramatic presentation, but when difficult decisions arise somebody with recognised creative expertise ultimately makes the call.

Inside matrix organisations, that clarity can disappear. The creative lead may be the most qualified person in the room to evaluate an idea, yet still find themselves outranked by stakeholders whose expertise lies elsewhere. Creative decisions rarely fail because people stop caring about creativity. More often they become collective decisions made by people with very different objectives, which is not always the same thing.

Some organisations appear convinced that creativity emerges naturally once enough governance, workflows, approval stages and operating models have been assembled around it. My experience has generally been the opposite.

How good ideas become forgettable ones

Twenty years ago I was agency side and presented strong, distinctive ideas to clients only to see them gradually weakened through successive rounds of perfectly reasonable feedback. The colours became safer. The copy became more cautious. The design became more balanced.

Every individual change made sense in isolation; collectively they often produced work that felt considerably less interesting than what had originally been presented. What surprised me later was discovering that exactly the same thing happens inside large organisations.

I’ve seen the same phenomenon repeatedly in healthcare communications. A project might begin with an unusual creative approach, an unexpected visual style or a genuinely distinctive story. Six months later it has somehow acquired a minor-key piano soundtrack, a family member describing a difficult diagnosis, a scratchy American voiceover and an uplifting crescendo in the final thirty seconds. Nobody planned for that outcome. Nobody asked for a generic film. Yet somehow the process often arrives there anyway.

That’s what makes this so fascinating. Strong ideas rarely disappear because somebody rejects them outright. More often they’re gradually reshaped through dozens of sensible decisions. A benchmark here. A stakeholder request there. A small reduction in risk. A little more reassurance. A little more familiarity. Eventually the original idea remains visible, but only just.

Nobody ever schedules a meeting entitled “Let’s gradually remove everything interesting from this concept”, yet after enough review cycles the outcome can occasionally feel remarkably similar.

What AI might reveal

Which is partly why I find some of the current excitement around GenAI so interesting.

Most large organisations were never short of ideas. What they were often short of was an environment willing to tolerate the friction that good ideas tend to create.

As generating concepts, visuals and first drafts becomes easier, attention inevitably shifts elsewhere; towards judgement, conviction and decision-making. The organisations that benefit most from AI may not be the ones producing the largest number of ideas. They may simply be the ones willing to back them.

AI won’t solve creativity problems that were never really about creativity in the first place.