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 can become 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 the difference fascinating.

Agencies are invited in to challenge assumptions, question established thinking and bring fresh perspectives because that’s what they’re being paid to do. They can challenge the brief, disagree with the client and suggest something nobody was expecting, and that is generally understood to be part of the value they bring. Inside an organisation, the same behaviour can feel rather different. This isn’t because companies dislike creativity. Most like the idea of creativity enormously. They like innovation programmes, brainstorming workshops, transformation initiatives and increasingly large investments in GenAI. The harder part is creating an environment where creative people have enough freedom to challenge what already exists without every challenge becoming a negotiation.

The agency paradox

When an agency challenges convention, that’s generally viewed as evidence that it is doing its job. Fresh thinking is part of the contract, and even when an idea is ultimately rejected, the discussion can be useful. The agency presents its recommendations and eventually leaves; the employee remains behind to work within the organisation that has to implement them.

After enough years inside large organisations, you begin to notice that originality and career longevity aren’t always close friends. The people who navigate every restructuring, leadership change and operating model redesign aren’t necessarily the people generating the most interesting ideas. Often they are simply very good at understanding how to adapt, align and work within the system.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether some organisations prefer creativity as a procurement activity rather than an operating model. Hiring unconventional people is one thing; giving them enough space to remain unconventional is another. In an agency, creative challenge is built into the relationship.

Inside a large organisation, creative judgement sits alongside budgets, hierarchy, relationships, risk and competing priorities. A creative person isn’t simply making a recommendation. They may be questioning a familiar approach or suggesting something that requires other people to change course. That is where creative work becomes more complicated, and where good creative leadership matters.

How good ideas become forgettable

Twenty years ago, when I was agency-side, I regularly presented strong, distinctive ideas to clients and watched them gradually change through successive rounds of perfectly reasonable feedback. The colours became safer, the copy more cautious and the design more balanced.

Every individual change made sense; 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, perhaps even more easily because there are so many more people with a legitimate reason to have an opinion.

I’ve seen it repeatedly in healthcare communications. A project might begin with an unusual creative approach, an unexpected visual style or a genuinely distinctive story. Several 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 set out to make a generic film. Nobody made a single decision that obviously ruined it. Instead, the work accumulated benchmarks, stakeholder requests, risk reductions and small adjustments towards the familiar until the original idea became harder to see.

That’s perhaps the most interesting part of creative work in large organisations. Good ideas rarely disappear because somebody simply says no. More often they are gradually negotiated into something that everyone can agree with.

Nobody schedules a meeting called “Let’s remove everything interesting from this concept”, but after enough rounds of review the result can occasionally feel remarkably similar. I’ve been on both sides of those conversations, so I don’t think the answer is to blame clients, stakeholders or creative people. The better question is whether an organisation has enough trust, clarity and creative authority to challenge an idea without automatically diluting it.

What AI might reveal

Which is partly why I find the current enthusiasm for GenAI interesting. Most large organisations were never particularly short of ideas. What they were often short of was the time, confidence and space to develop them.

AI makes generating concepts, exploring visual directions and producing first drafts dramatically easier, which means the difficult part of creativity increasingly moves somewhere else. If everyone can produce ten concepts before lunch, the valuable skill is knowing which one deserves attention, understanding why it is different and having the judgement to develop it.

AI won’t solve a creativity problem that is really an organisational problem. It can make the process faster, but it can’t decide whether another round of feedback has improved the work or simply made everyone more comfortable with it. It can’t decide which idea is worth backing, or create the trust required to let an unfamiliar idea develop.

Perhaps that’s the real challenge for big companies. Creativity isn’t something you can install through a new operating model, buy through an agency roster or generate through software. You can create better conditions for it, give good people the space and authority to do their work, and make the process less painful. But eventually somebody still has to decide which ideas are worth backing.

The organisations that get the most from creative people aren’t necessarily the ones with the most elaborate creative processes. They are the ones that understand that good ideas sometimes need a little room to be difficult before they become useful.