# Removing Creativity Restrictions By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2022-11-26 When I think about the "creative class" I often think of painters, musicians, actors, and writers. As children, we are taught that these trades represent prototypical creativity. After all, in grade school, you can finger paint whatever you want in art class, but there are exact ways to add two numbers together. As a result, we begin to exclusively associate creativity with art. If you are not good at art, you must not be creative. However, creativity exists beyond a particular trade or field of study. Creativity is the ability to create something new and push the boundaries. There is no reason why the scientist, the mathematician, the janitor, the teacher, or the analyst cannot be creative. Creativity is critical in all fields of study. If you aren't creative or trying to be creative, you are just following the recipe and being a cog in the machine. There is value in following the recipe as it still produces value, but the point isn't that we all need to be creative. Being creative is risky. It requires putting yourself in a position to continuously fail with no guarantee that [[success]] will ever happen. The point is that creativity is a value not restricted to the arts. Removing this paradigmatic restriction may allow you to be more creative and find a purpose worth pursuing. The "creative class" no longer exists within the well-defined box of ages past. Creativity exists everywhere, and analytics is no exception. We are doing humanity a massive disservice if we restrict creativity to the weird and uncontrollable. It served the industrial era ideals to have people act and behave as machines, but this is no longer our reality. Creativity is our humanity and the path to something greater. Nowhere is creativity needed more than in management, organizations, and business. We think creativity isn't valuable in the working world because of bygone industrial and organizational theories of humans as machines and slaves. Nothing could be further from the truth today as we now have the robots and machines to do much of the grinding work, yet we've done little to reduce suffering beyond the physical in the last 100 years. Crises abound, and creative work is needed to resolve them. Humans as machines and machines themselves will not magically come up with a solution. The might and force of creative organizations powered by the industrial forces of old must rise to the occasion. #### Related Items [[Creative]] [[Analytics]] [[Business]] [[Organizational Analytics]] [[Art]] [[Economics]]