Who belongs at the Creative Table

I’ve spent my entire professional life working in the creative industries.

A few years ago, I was working at a creative agency in London.  Like most creative agencies, it came with a creative department – the much-celebrated heartbeat of the organisation. This creative department, like so many others I’d experienced had its own floor, along with its own kitchen, a kitchen that came with a very swanky Italian coffee machine – caffeine on tap. It had its own sofas, beanbags, balance-balls and so much space to walk around and think up the next brilliant idea.  It also had an assortment of really great stationary; coloured felt tip pens, a variety of giant colourful post it notes, whiteboards, Digi-boards, cork boards and A3 paper galore. And the cherry on the cake, everyone working in the creative department was given a Mac courtesy of the company because back then, nothing shouted ‘I’m a creative person’ louder than working on a Mac.

Meanwhile, upstairs, in the ‘not so creative department’, employees enjoyed the simple luxuries of having a desk, a regular PC that needed rebooting twice a day, an adjustable swivel chair that no longer swivelled nor was it adjustable, and for stationary, a biro pen, courtesy of the company, and the only thing on tap, was the water that came out of it.  People who worked on this particular floor, were just referred to as employees, which seemed entirely appropriate given that’s precisely what they were, except that the employees who worked downstairs on the creative floor were referred to as, The Ideas People. The Talent. The Creatives.

I looked around in confusion. I wasn’t quite sure what was happening. While I certainly appreciated the agency championing and celebrating creativity, cultivating an environment (for some at least) for creativity to thrive, I could see there was something else being cultivated as a result. A toxic by-product was developing. A strange and quiet understanding bubbled just under the surface. In the collective subconscious of the entire agency, was an unspoken belief.

If you belonged to the creative department, you were creative. If you didn’t, then you were not.

It wasn’t just the preferential treatment one department was clearly receiving over all the other areas of the business; it was the labels being used. My confusion and ultimately my concern was that when one group of people are labelled The Ideas People, The Talent, The Creatives, what does that make everyone else?

 Not ideas people? Not talented? Not creative? 

Labelling one, by default, was inadvertently labelling the other. Labelling one group creative, was disqualifying the other group from being creative, or perhaps more accurately, it was encouraging them to disqualify themselves.

 When I think of labelling people, I imagine one of those old metal filing systems from the eighties with the deep draws and the colourful dividers, where everything is categorised and organised into its rightful place, making order from chaos. This is what labels do. They help our brains process and then organise the world around us, by making quick (often incorrect) categorisations that bring clarity and structure to an otherwise confusing and chaotic world. Labels help us to make sense of the world around us and for the people around us to make sense of us. And as humans we like this, or at least we gravitate towards this because it gives us a sense of control in a reality, where we have very little.  Instead of losing ourselves in all the madness where nothing can ever be fully defined as one thing or another, we choose to stick a nice, neat, easy to read label on everything and everyone, so we know exactly who they are and more importantly, where to log them in our mental filing system.

 It’s not just people doing this to each other either, we plaster labels, often really unhelpful ones, labels we’ve likely got wrong in the first place, all over ourselves too. Labels that distort, dilute and limit how we see ourselves and in doing so, distort, dilute and limit our potential and what we’re capable of achieving. These labels then inevitably shape who we will become in the future. That’s the other problem with labels, they’re sticky – once they’re attached to us, they become an ingrained part of our identity, one we spend our whole lives carrying around with us, for better or for worse. If we’ve been assigned the wrong label to begin with, we become trapped. Trapped in a box, in a body, in an identity, in a career, sometimes in a whole life that doesn’t feel like it fits who we truly are or who we are meant to be.

I could see, looking around this particular agency that a peculiar and deeply dangerous hierarchy was forming. There was a creative class system emerging, the much-heralded pinnacle of which, an elite private members club, otherwise known as The Creatives.

You were either in it, or you weren’t.

 You either had it, or you didn’t.

 Just like those old eighties filing cabinets when it came to who was creative there was a divider running right through the middle of the agency.

Very quickly, I began witnessing the results of this, everywhere. Those who didn’t have the word ‘creative’ somewhere in their job title, and weren’t part of the ‘club’, didn’t feel credible or entitled to call themselves creative, and so instead, in the face of so much proven and celebrated creativity, they visibly rejected their own.

 Never was this more apparent to me than the day, Lucy, a young project coordinator working at the agency, came to me for a chat. She was starting to think about her next professional move and wanted to talk through some of her options. After a little while, I asked, ‘Well, what about what I do?’ wondering whether creative show producing might be something that interested her.

 I watched as her whole face lit up. As if, just like that, we’d stumbled upon the answer.

‘Oh my god, YES’ she’d replied enthusiastically. ‘I would love to do that!’

And then, something happened. Just as quickly as the lights had turned on, they went off.

Complete blackout. 

Lucy’s whole demeanour immediately changed. I could tell; something had just occurred to her that hadn’t crossed her mind a few moments before. Lucy then shared with me that as much she’d love to follow that path, she couldn’t. It simply wasn’t an option for her. 'Well, why not?’ I asked, confused by her sudden change of heart and what the unmovable obstacle was, now, clearly standing in her way.

‘Because…’ Lucy said, sounding like a deflating balloon, ‘I’m not creative.’

My heart sank. 

Lucy had put a label on herself that was diluting and distorting how she saw herself and in doing so, drastically limiting what she was capable of achieving. She was rejecting her creativity, and in the process, destroying her creative confidence and all of her creative potential along with it.  

And she wasn’t alone in doing this either. In meetings, where the ‘regular employees’ and ‘the creatives’ would come together, the only people who contributed the ideas, both good and bad, were the people who felt confident and credible enough to share them in the first place – the Ideas People. The ‘regular employees’, said nothing. The block around their creativity so big that their ideas were either not available to them to begin with, or they’d blocked themselves by dismissing and disqualifying their ideas before allowing them to be spoken aloud. Perhaps in fear of ‘getting it wrong’, embarrassing themselves, they’d chosen to say nothing instead. In doing so they were not only dismissing and disqualifying their ideas but themselves too. In the presence of other people’s ideas, they seemed to lose all confidence in their own. They didn’t share their creativity, they simply reaffirmed the limiting belief they had about it, that it was either in very short supply or that it didn’t exist at all. Then, they left the idea generating to the ideas people, the ones who unsurprisingly did believe in their creativity, because these were the people continuously being told that they had it.

Starting from school.

From a very young age, our education system shapes our relationship with our creativity and with our creative identity.

For most of us, school is where the filtering and filing of who we are and what we believe we are capable of, first begins. It’s when we’re first placed into our particular box, with its own particular label on it.

Back in the eighties, when I was at primary school, my box, was not only a metaphorical one, but a physical one, represented by the table, I sat at. I was on the ‘Creative Table’.

There was also a ‘Clever Table’, and a ‘Sporty Table’ and strangely enough, a ‘Mark Table’ which seemed to be a very popular name at the time.

It seems shocking now, to imagine this level of overt discrimination taking place in schools, primary schools no less, but at the time it was never intended with any malice, it was simply considered a fun and playful way of arranging and organising the room. And I remember it being fun too – we had a table with a name – what’s not to love about that.  I didn’t see then of course that this was the beginning of the filtering and filing process. I didn’t see then that I was subconsciously being taught, as was everyone else in my class, who I was, in my case, “creative”, but also, who I wasn’t, clever, sporty, or as it turns out, a little boy called Mark. It’s unsurprising then, that to this very day I identify as a creative person, I still sit at that table, I choose to sit there, I belong there. The ‘clever table’ though? I don't think so! 

Pretty destructive lessons to be learning so early on in education.

It’s not only the labels that we’re given, the boxes we’re placed in, the particular path of schooling we travel down, it’s the value that the education system places on creativity to begin with.

At school, a creative hierarchy still exists, but this time, the pinnacle and much-celebrated heartbeat is not creativity, it’s academic intelligence.

Sadly, the education system struggles to grasp the true meaning, measure and nature of creativity, resulting in a limited and unimaginative approach to the subject, where creativity is reduced to simply being good at art or drama. And even then, only having any value if it equates to a decent grade to prove it. At school creativity or being creative is not seen as having any meaningful value, at least not when measured against the ‘important’ subjects. Most of the time, the word creative usually has less to do with being creative, and more to do with camouflage, a diplomatic disguise for what teachers identify as a lack of aptitude for traditional study. In other words, children who don’t fit the education model and are therefore struggle; struggle in class, struggle in exams, struggle to produce good grades, or even average ones, struggle to cope with the workload, struggle to focus because they’re so overwhelmed by all that they’re struggling with and in the end, struggle with their behaviour because they are struggling so damn hard with everything else. As a result, on parents evening, these children will awkwardly be labelled as creative, simply because they don’t ‘fit’ anywhere else. They don’t fit in the academic box that the traditional education system is built around, and so, they’re plonked into the creative one instead, where being creative becomes the substitute for being academic. Not a celebrated substitute but a second-class one at best, because the education system does not value creativity in the same way it values academic intelligence – they are not of equal importance or standing. And although increasingly more effort is being made, the fact remains, traditional schools still do not encourage, develop, or cultivate creativity to the same extent they do academic subjects because the education system does not value creativity in proportion with how much the world needs creativity.

In terms of the hierarchy, creativity is shunted towards the bottom, at best considered ‘a soft subject’ at worst ‘a total cop out’ and that’s the subliminal message all the children who have been placed in the creative box are receiving.  School will not suit or serve these children. At least, not in the same way it will others.  At best, these children will be gifted the identity of being creative, something, hopefully, they can carry with them throughout their life, and when, in years to come they are sat in a meeting and asked to share their ideas, they will be the ones who do so willingly and confidently because they will believe in their creativity having always been told that they have it.

At worst, what the education system will haphazardly gift to some, it will rob from others. Seeing their creativity through the same lens as those who prescribed the label in the first place, they will associate creativity as meaningless and being creative as being difficult, disruptive, messy, loud, awkward, unmanageable, not fitting in. These children will not see creativity as something to be celebrated but rather, something to be avoided, disowned and apologised for. These children, in turn will reject their creativity anyway. They will abandon their creative selves just as adamantinely as those children who were told or led to believe they were never creative to begin with. All because of the box they were put in, the label that was attached to them, and the subsequent value that label was given. These children are the square pegs. They’re the oblong pegs, the triangular, rectangular, hexagonal, octagonal, star-shaped pegs. They are pegs with shapes and forms so unique there are no names for them. The only common dominator in their uniqueness is that none of these pegs fit neatly or comfortably within the education system - let’s call that, the Round Hole. 

Meanwhile the Round Pegs, the academic children who do, happily, fit into the one size fits all approach to education and appear to be thriving at school, are still being funnelled and filtered through a system where their creativity is at stake. These little pegs have problems of their own.

The first sniff of academic intelligence, and they’re siffled straight down the path sign posted by the advocates of this particular direction, the educators, as the ‘road to all future success.’ As they progress through their school years, demonstrating their academic potential at every turn, passing exams, to pass more exams, to ready themselves for the future, Round Pegs are encouraged to get serious, be serious, to take themselves and their futures seriously by leaving the soft subjects behind.  Subjects the Round Pegs once loved, that would light them up, ones they would actually look forward to and thrive in, all abandoned while these children are encouraged to focus all their time and energy on the subjects that will count, the ones that will really matter later in life. In other words, subjects that prove their academic intelligence and worth by achieving the grades to show for it.

Then, school finishes. Childhood morphs into adulthood. Education morphs into a profession, and we suddenly realise, the world the education system has been preparing everyone for, all of this time, is a creative one.

The very thing the education system has relegated to bottom of the priority pile, is the very thing that fuels, feeds and forms our modern world.

Creativity.

 We live in a creative world, in seriously creative times. We need creativity. Now, more than ever. Creativity is the most powerful and potent agent for change – it is the bedrock for change. Creativity drives innovation and innovation has the power to change everything that needs to be changed. Fix what is broken. Solve the problems we as the human race desperately need solving and make the world a better place for generations to come. The world needs creative thinkers, visionaries, disrupters, artists, problem solvers, innovators, risk takers, non-conformist. It needs people who are prepared to be bold, brave, and experimental, prepared to get things wrong, to fail and fail spectacularly, people unafraid to think outside a box, do away with the box altogether, draw outside the lines, be willing to be difficult, disruptive, loud, awkward, and unmanageable. The world desperately needs all the little pegs that don’t fit the round hole.  All of the creative attributes and behaviours previously discouraged at school, the world actively needs. It needs people willing to challenge the status quo and the old worn-out ways of doing things, people willing to challenge what exists in favour of what might one day be possible. People who can communicate through channels and in ways that speak not only to our heads but to our hearts and to our souls and can make us feel more human, more alive, and more connected to one another as a result.

Our world needs this – it needs creativity. Everyone’s. Yours included. Even if you don’t think you’re creative.

Not being able to identify as a creative person or believing you have enough creativity available is a waste of everything you already are, and everything that is already at your disposal. It’s a waste of one of your greatest, most unique and original superpowers. So, if right now you think you don’t have a creative bone in your body, if you have nothing to prove that your creativity does or ever has existed, and if you’ve spent your entire life telling yourself or being told by someone else that you’re not creative to such an extent that this has now become your truth, now is the time todo away with the inaccurate labels, the outdated filing system, and the divider that runs through your identity, separating you from your creative self. Now is the time to reclaim what is rightfully yours and reclaim your creativity. Because just like I told Lucy that day, we are all creative. Wildly Creative.

I am. You are. We are. Wildly Creative...And we all belong at the creative table!