{"id":3916,"date":"2026-09-22T08:00:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T08:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpblog.indigobusiness.co.uk\/?p=3916"},"modified":"2026-09-21T13:57:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T13:57:16","slug":"stop-waiting-for-creative-people-build-the-skill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpblog.indigobusiness.co.uk\/stop-waiting-for-creative-people-build-the-skill\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop waiting for creative people, build the skill."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Most businesses can tell you exactly who on the team is \u201ccreative\u201d. It’s usually the same two or three people with everyone else being quietly opted out.\u00a0That’s a problem, because demand for creative thinking isn’t holding steady while businesses wait for more naturally creative people to turn up. It’s becoming more important and most workplaces are still treating creativity as something you either have or you don’t, rather than something you build.<\/p>\n

The gap between demand and supply<\/h2>\n

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 found that employers expected the importance of creative thinking to grow faster than the importance of analytical thinking over the following five years, by 73%<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

That’s not a minor shift in priorities. It’s businesses signalling that the ability to generate genuinely new ideas and approaches is becoming increasingly valuable, and that they expect that value to grow.<\/p>\n

More recently, the Future of Jobs Report 2025 ranked creative thinking fourth among the core skills employers say their workforce needs most. The report also identifies creative thinking as one of the skills expected to continue increasing in importance through 2030.<\/p>\n

Put those findings together and the picture is straightforward: businesses need more creative thinking, and they need to develop it across their existing workforce rather than relying on a small number of people who already identify as creative.<\/p>\n

The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of creative potential. It’s a lack of creative thinking skills training.<\/p>\n

Why \u201cyou either have it or you don’t\u201d is the wrong question<\/h2>\n

Ask most managers how they’d increase analytical thinking in their team and you’ll probably get a plan: a course, a framework, a measurable skill or a development pathway.<\/p>\n

Ask how they’d increase creative thinking and the answer is often less structured.\u00a0It might mean hiring someone described as \u201ccreative\u201d, running a brainstorming session or booking an away-day and putting some sticky notes on a wall.<\/p>\n

That’s the actual problem.\u00a0Businesses aren’t short of belief that creative thinking matters. They’re short of a process for building it in the people they already have.<\/p>\n

Treating creativity as a fixed trait rather than a trainable skill doesn’t just under-serve the people who assume they’re \u201cnot creative\u201d. It quietly caps the organisation’s creative output at whatever the two or three self-identified \u201ccreative ones\u201d can produce.\u00a0And if demand for creative thinking continues to rise, that’s not a particularly scalable strategy.<\/p>\n

Creativity has a process. Most people have never been taught it.<\/h2>\n

The idea that some people are simply born creative and others aren’t doesn’t hold up particularly well against how creative work actually gets produced.<\/p>\n

Professional creative work, in advertising, design, product development, strategy and innovation – rarely comes from waiting for inspiration.\u00a0It comes from behaviours that can be deliberately practised: generating a high volume of raw ideas without judging them too early, looking at a problem from an unfamiliar angle, challenging assumptions, making connections between things that don’t initially appear connected, and pushing past the first, most obvious answer before committing to one.<\/p>\n

Those behaviours can be developed.<\/p>\n

Creative thinking skills training isn’t about turning analytical people into eccentric idea machines. It’s about giving people specific techniques that make different ways of thinking easier to reproduce.<\/p>\n

The gap between the \u201ccreative\u201d two or three people and everyone else is therefore not necessarily a gap in talent. It may simply be a gap in technique.<\/p>\n

What effective creative thinking skills training looks like<\/h2>\n

If creativity is a skill, then training it should look like training any other business capability.\u00a0That means more than explaining why creativity matters. People need to learn specific techniques, practise them and apply them to problems that actually matter to their work.<\/p>\n

Effective creative thinking skills training should give people:<\/p>\n