Creativity matters.

This has been brewing in me for decades. It goes back to being the kid who didn't fit the shape the classroom wanted me to fit. To years of feeling almost-enough, almost-the-right-kind-of-clever, almost-taken-seriously. Honestly, that probably belongs on my therapist's couch more than this page. But it's true, so I'll leave it in.

Connecticut. Tuesday morning. Grey, the kind of New England grey that can't decide whether to commit. I'm sitting at my desk with my second coffee, a notebook full of half-finished thoughts, and the feeling I've been carrying for about two years now... the feeling that the rules everyone thought they were playing by have quietly stopped applying.

I drafted this with an editor (yes, an AI one, I'm not pretending otherwise). I cried when I read it back. I almost didn't publish it. I'm publishing it because somewhere out there is the version of me at 22, or 35, or last Tuesday, who needs to hear what I'm about to say.

Which is this.

The world dismissed creatives for decades.
That was a mistake.

Not a small one. A civilisational one. We took the people who think in pictures and patterns, the ones who can't help but reimagine the thing in front of them, the ones who get excited at 4am about something nobody asked them to think about... and we told them the adults would handle the actual decisions. We gave them a department. We called it creative, like it was a colour scheme, and we walled them off from anything that mattered.

Then we put the spreadsheet people in charge of everything.

And here we are.

Properly fucked, in a lot of ways. And not for the reasons most people think.

The playbook people are out of pages.

Look at the world right now. Properly look. Not the news cycle, not the timeline, not the latest piece of theatre. Just look at the actual problems sitting on humanity's desk this morning.

Global politics is unspooling in ways nobody has a script for. Capitalism is being rewritten by a technology none of the architects of capitalism saw coming. The planet is overheating and we're trying to power our way out of it using more energy than we've ever used in human history. The institutions we built to hold all of this together... governments, regulators, the consultancies that whisper in their ear... are quietly admitting, in private, that they don't know what to do.

None of this is in a playbook. None of it.

That's not a small detail. That's the whole story.

For most of my career, the world ran on playbooks. The MBAs ran the playbooks. The consultancies sold the playbooks. The McKinseys, the Bains, the BCGs of the world made entire fortunes by walking into a problem, recognising it as a variation of a problem they'd seen before, and pulling the matching binder off the shelf. "We've seen this. Here's what to do. Here's the slide deck. That'll be 4 million dollars, please."

And honestly? For a long time it worked. The problems looked enough like the previous problems that the playbook bought you something. Not insight... cover. The board could nod along. The CEO could cite the framework. The risk was distributed across enough grey suits that nobody had to actually be brave.

That whole era is over. The problems we're facing now don't have previous versions. There is no binder on the shelf for "what happens when the most powerful technology humans have ever built starts thinking faster than the people building it." There is no four-box matrix for "the climate is breaking and the energy required to fix it is the same energy that's breaking it." There is no McKinsey deck for "democracy is being stress-tested in real time by tools nobody fully understands."

Anyway. The playbook people don't have a playbook. They will not say this out loud. But it's true, and increasingly everyone in the room can feel it.

Which is, frankly, a problem.

Or... it would be a problem, if we didn't already have an entire population of people who've been training their whole lives to deal with situations that don't have a precedent.

You know who I mean. The ones who've always been a little bit out to lunch, in the best possible way. The ones who don't want to copy the thing that worked last time, because the thing that worked last time bores them. The ones who can sit with a problem they don't understand and just... poke at it... until something interesting falls out. The ones who think in metaphors and analogies and "wait, what if we tried it sideways." The ones who get told, repeatedly, by very serious people, that they need to focus.

The creatives.

Not creatives in the "design department" sense. I mean it bigger than that. Creative thinkers. The pattern-spotters, the connection-makers, the ones who can hold two contradictory ideas in their head and not need to resolve them straight away. The neurodivergent kids who got sent to the back of the classroom because they were doodling instead of listening, who turned out to be doodling because that's how their brain processes the world.

These are exactly the people you want in the room when the playbook fails. They've been in playbook-failing situations their whole lives. They are fluent in not-knowing. While the consultancy class is reaching for the binder, they're already three steps into the problem, having an argument with themselves about whether step two might be more interesting upside down.

And for thirty years we kept them out of the room.

Well. They're in the room now.

Finally!

What's actually changing.

Here's the bit that gets me up in the morning.

For the first time in living memory, the most powerful technology in the world is being shaped by creative thinkers, and it is shaping creative thinkers in return. AI isn't just a tool sitting on the desk. It's a collaborator. A peer. A thing that responds to taste, intent, judgment, point of view... all the soft squishy stuff the certainty merchants have spent decades trying to quantify and failing.

I've been writing about this elsewhere on this site, so I won't rehash the whole argument. But the short version is: AI collapses the distance between an idea and the thing. The bottleneck used to be execution. You had a vision, and then you had six months of someone else turning it into a deck, a prototype, a product, an organisation. You also had a queue of people telling you why it wouldn't work, why it would cost too much, why the timing was wrong, why the committee needed another quarter to approve it. The distance between an idea and the thing was paved with judgment, capital approval, risk-aversion, and the slow grinding 'no' of people whose job was to protect what already existed. That distance is gone now. The gap is shrinking by the week. The vision is the bottleneck. The taste is the bottleneck. The judgment about which idea, in which moment, for which reason, is the bottleneck.

That's a creative problem. Always was. We just hid it behind a wall of execution because most people couldn't execute fast enough for taste to matter on its own.

The wall is gone.

Which means the people who've spent their whole lives developing the muscle that actually matters now... taste, vision, the ability to know what's worth building before anyone else does... have just been handed a tool that turns that muscle into output, at the speed of thought.

I've been calling AI "the accelerant" for two years. I genuinely believe it. It is. But I think I undersold it. It's an accelerant, sure. It's also a vindication. It's the thing that proves, in real time, that the people who were dismissed for not thinking like the playbook were the people the future was waiting for.

The creative class is everyone.

Quick aside before we get to the consequence stuff. Because every time I write something like this, I feel the eye-roll forming in someone reading it. "Right, so creativity matters. Sure. But you mean creative people, right? Designers and writers and artists. The 'creative class.' Not me. I'm in finance."

No. I don't.

Here's a study I keep coming back to. In 1968, a guy called George Land, working with Beth Jarman, designed a creativity test for NASA. NASA wanted to identify the engineers and scientists who could do divergent thinking... the people who could imagine many possible solutions to a single problem rather than narrowing in on one "correct" answer. Standard problem-solving stuff, except the assessment was unusually clean. Land and Jarman ran the test on NASA's adult engineers. It worked. Then, because they could, they ran the same test on a sample of 1,600 children aged three to five, and tracked them as they grew up.

At age five, 98% of the children scored at the level NASA classified as "creative genius."

By age ten, that number had dropped to 30%.

By fifteen, it was 12%.

Adult population, when they later tested it: 2%.

Two percent, gang. Two.

Now... I know the science isn't bulletproof. Divergent thinking isn't the whole of creativity. The test rewards quantity of ideas over quality. There are critiques. Fine. The numbers are still staggering, and the direction of the curve is the bit that's never been seriously contested. We're born with this stuff. Most of us get it educated out of us. By the time we're in the workplace we've been told, in a thousand small ways, sit down, stop daydreaming, get on with the work, that's not the answer that was on the sheet.

Sir Ken Robinson, late and brilliant and the holder of the most-watched TED talk in history, built his whole life around this point. "We don't grow into creativity. We grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it." He's been right since 2006 and almost everyone clapped along and kept educating it out of the next generation anyway. Honestly, it's bonkers.

So when I say "the creative class," I don't mean a small protected group of arty kids. I mean everyone who started out as a creative-genius five-year-old and got it talked out of them somewhere along the way. Which is most of you reading this. Probably all of you. The version of you that drew dragons before someone told you dragons aren't real... she's still in there. She got quiet. She didn't leave.

And the most exciting thing about this exact moment in history is that the tool everyone is panicking about happens to be very, very good at coaxing her back out.

The bit that matters most.

The reason I care about this so much, the reason I'm building everything I'm building right now, is not because I want creatives to win. I'm not interested in the trophy. I'm interested in the consequence.

Because here's what I think happens when creative thinking finally moves from the margins to the centre.

We get better answers to the unprecedented problems. The climate stuff. The political stuff. The economic stuff. Not because creatives are smarter than the consultants, by the way, they're not... but because creative thinking is the right shape of thinking for problems that don't have precedents. Steve Jobs once said: 'You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.' That's the work. It's intuition. It's instinct. It's the willingness to make a leap before the evidence is in, and trust that the dots will line up later. Imagination over interpolation. The willingness to be wrong out loud, in public, in a way that the consultancy class, with its quarterly invoicing and its reputational hedge, has never been able to afford.

The companies that get this right will look weird. They will not look like McKinsey case studies. They will be founded by people the playbook people would not have hired. They will measure success in things that didn't fit the framework, the way Tesla and SpaceX and Boston Dynamics measured success in ways the analysts couldn't compute for fifteen years before suddenly, obviously, ridiculously paying off. They will move at speeds the binder-class will keep calling reckless until the binder-class is irrelevant.

The countries that get this right will look weird too.

And honestly? Good. Weird is what we need. Weird is the only thing left that's responsive to the actual situation. The conventional people had their thirty-year run. They optimised the world to within an inch of its life and the world is now visibly cracking under the optimisation.

What I'm actually saying.

I'm saying creativity isn't a soft skill. It never was. It got reclassified as one because the people who couldn't do it needed a way to keep it out of the boardroom. The reclassification is over. The boardroom is changing.

I'm saying if you've spent your life feeling slightly off-pattern, slightly too curious, slightly too willing to start before you understand the brief... you weren't broken. You were early. The world is now, finally, the right shape for the thing you do.

I'm saying the consultancy class isn't going to disappear. They'll just become less interesting. The stories that get told in twenty years won't be about who had the cleanest framework. They'll be about who had the most honest instinct, and the courage to follow it before the data caught up.

I'm saying AI is the accelerant, but the engine is human. It always was. The technology amplifies whatever you bring to it. If you bring a checklist, you'll get a faster checklist. If you bring a point of view, you'll get a point of view delivered at the speed of thought. That's the bet. That's the whole bloody bet!

And I'm saying... look. I ran a creative tools company for fifteen years. I watched a generation of marketers fight to be taken seriously by the bean counters who paid their salaries. I watched smart, sensitive, original people get told to dial themselves down so the room of suits would tolerate them. I'm not interested in watching that happen again. Not in this room. Not in this moment. Not while there's anything I can do about it.

So.

The playbook is out. The frameworks were built for a world that doesn't exist anymore. The binder is closed.

The people the world dismissed for thirty years were the ones quietly building the muscle the next thirty years are going to require. The technology is finally fast enough to keep up with the way they think. The problems are finally weird enough to need them. The renaissance is not a forecast. It's already running. The question isn't whether creative thinking matters. It's whether you're going to bet on it before it becomes obvious.

Anyway. That's where I'm sitting on it. I'll keep writing as the thinking sharpens. There's a book coming. There's a lot more to say. I just wanted, for once, to put the spine of it in one place... so when someone asks me what I actually believe, I have somewhere to point.

Creativity matters. Now more than ever. And honestly, I think we're about to see what that actually looks like, properly, for the first time.

Help me spread the word.

If any of this resonated, share it. Send it to a creative person you know. Send it to the friend who's been feeling small in a room full of academics. Send it to the one who got marked down for daydreaming. Send it to the kid who's still being told to focus.

Send it to as many of them as you can. They matter. You matter. And it matters that we say it out loud, together, until the room is finally listening.