Last updated: May 2026
Creativity is important in business because it drives the kind of differentiation that wins markets. Treated as an applied skill rather than a personality trait, it shows up in the way a team challenges its own rules, brings divergent perspectives into the room, and protects time for non-linear thinking. The seven moves below have driven measurable results across more than two decades of Major Tom client work, and they hold up whether you're a CEO setting culture or a project lead trying to break a team out of a rut.
The short version — seven moves to unlock creativity at work:
Creativity is how organizations stay relevant. It leads to innovation, which leads to growth, but more practically, it's how brands stand out in markets where most competitors look and sound the same. Lateral thinking, the kind that questions assumptions instead of optimizing inside them, is what separates a category leader from a category follower. The challenge is that creativity tends to be treated as either innate or optional, when it should be treated as a discipline. The rest of this post walks through how to build it into the way your team operates.
Naive experts are people who aren't experts on the topic of discussion. Because they don't know what's supposed to be impossible, they ask the questions everyone else stopped asking, which pulls the room out of lateral thinking and the dreaded Groupthink. At a digital agency like Major Tom, that might mean bringing a UI designer to a development planning meeting, or an SEO strategist to a creative brainstorm. The same logic powers the structured ideation sessions we describe in our marketing workshop templates. Workshops only generate fresh thinking when the people in the room aren't all coming from the same vantage point.
Try this exercise: write down all the rules and limitations related to your business, your products or services, and your industry. Then pick one and break it. Notion broke the rule that productivity software has to be a single-purpose app, and ended up with something between a doc, a database, and a wiki. Liquid Death broke the rule that bottled water has to look wholesome, and built a tallboy-can brand that sells water in metal because that's what punk-rock thirst looks like. The reframe is rarely a tweak to the product. It's a refusal to accept what the category considers obvious.
Brand strategy lives in exactly this territory. The decision to rebrand, in particular, is often the most explicit form of "break the category rules" a business can make. We've written about why companies rebrand and what the strategic triggers look like. It's useful reading if you're trying to evaluate whether your own brand is operating inside rules it doesn't need to keep.
Constantly consuming content related to your niche is the catalyst for great ideas. Paul McCartney grew up in a musical family, surrounded by music, whether he was making it or listening to it. In 1964, he woke up with a tune in his head that's now famously known as "Yesterday," one of the most covered songs in history. J.K. Rowling, who said the idea for Harry Potter "fell into her head," was an avid reader. Filling your head with the work you're passionate about is what makes the connections show up later.
That logic applies inside organizations too. Setting time aside for learning, exposing the team to work outside their immediate craft, and treating culture as something you build rather than something that happens: those are the conditions creative output needs. We've shared how we approach it internally in our piece on Major Tom dot Calm and our culture of wellness and productivity.
Without new stimulus coming in, no new ideas come out. Encourage curiosity, and try small new things on purpose. Order a different dish at your favorite restaurant. Walk a route you've never walked. Listen to a podcast outside your category. Read a book your direct reports recommended. These tiny disruptions seem trivial in isolation, but they're how a brain stays loose enough to make the unexpected connections that creative work depends on.
The "win-or-learn" ethos has been popular in the business world for a long time, but do companies actually have a culture that supports it? Risk-taking and rapid prototyping are how teams push the limits of what's possible. To unlock them, you have to give people room to hold onto big ideas and drive them through, even when they're not sure they'll work. Encourage failing forward. If your team never fails, it never grows.
Managers and team leads have the responsibility to foster idea sharing by creating a culture that allows for it. When someone pitches an idea, people should practice responding with additive feedback ("yes, and") instead of reflexively negative feedback ("no, but"). The difference in the conversation's outcome is drastically richer. It's no wonder this improv technique keeps showing up in business team-building exercises. Try it as a group and watch what happens. Not all of the ideas will land, but the ones that do will be sharper for having been built up rather than torn down.
When do you come up with your best ideas? Behind on a deadline, in the shower, on a long walk? Most of us are rarely creative when we're stressed, because of the way stress narrows attention. Help maintain an environment that lets people be playful and relaxed. That's where the next incredible idea actually shows up. It's also where most teams hit their creative blocks every team faces, which we covered in detail with the Major Tom creative team.
Whether you're a CEO or new to the team, taking proactive steps to create an environment that encourages ideas pays off twice: once in better morale and team cohesion, and again in better problem-solving and innovation. Those are the fundamentals of making a business exceptional.
Creativity matters most when it shows up in market. Once the culture supports it, the next question is how it lands: in your product, your campaigns, and especially in your website, which is often the place customers form their first impression. We dig into that in how creativity and technology come together on your website. That's the right next read if you're ready to take the cultural work and show it in your brand experience.
Two-plus decades of Major Tom client work has taught us that creative organizations don't get there by accident. They get there by treating creativity as a discipline and building it into how they hire, meet, and ship. If that's what you're trying to build, we can help. Take a look at how we approach brand strategy, or browse our case studies for examples of where creative strategy has driven measurable business outcomes.
Creativity is important in business because it drives differentiation, which is the thing that determines whether customers remember you. In commoditized markets — and most markets are — creativity is what produces a product, brand, or experience the customer didn't see coming. It also shows up internally as better problem-solving, faster adaptation to change, and higher morale, which compound into long-term performance.
In a business context, creativity is the disciplined practice of generating useful, original ideas — not the romantic version of inspiration striking. It applies as much to operations and pricing as it does to marketing and design. The best business creativity tends to look like questioning a category assumption, then building something practical around the new answer. It's a method, not a mood.
Start by changing the inputs. Bring in someone from outside the discipline — a "naive expert" — for the next planning session. Run a "what would we do if we couldn't do it the usual way?" exercise. Replace "no, but" with "yes, and" in feedback culture. Protect at least a few unstructured hours a week. The pattern breaks when the room stops rewarding the safe answer.
Creative thinking compounds because it makes you the person who reframes the problem instead of just executing on the existing one. That's a senior skill regardless of role. It shows up as better strategic memos, sharper client pitches, and faster recovery when a project goes sideways. In a job market increasingly able to automate the routine, the part that resists automation is the creative reframe.
Creativity generates the idea. Innovation ships it. A team can be highly creative and never produce innovation if it can't turn the ideas into things customers use. Inversely, an "innovative" organization that's just iterating on the obvious isn't really innovating — it's optimizing. Healthy companies have both: people who can produce strange, original ideas, and people who can make them real.
Be both a dreamer and a doer.
