By Kasia flood
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May 3, 2026
About ten years ago, I sat on a call that changed how I saw myself and my work.
A business rep offered a user experience consultation to improve platform performance only for the customer to scrunch their nose and decline. They were too busy for “creative” sessions.
“They’re very business oriented,” my colleague assured and yet, the session was never booked.
In that exchange, “creative” wasn’t just misunderstood, it was dismissed, framed as optional and a distraction from more important tasks.
Today, design thinking, UX, and customer-centricity are now part of the standard business vocabulary, but that underlying bias hasn’t fully disappeared. Creativity is still, in many rooms, treated as a contradiction to analytical thinking rather than its complement.
The creative label I’d always worn with pride suddenly came with an implicit ceiling. I spent the following decade absorbed in business books, courses on data analytics and pursuing my MBA in the evenings, and yet, changing perception takes time. I heard that early discussion echoed over the next decade in every request for “final polish” or “marketing spin”.
I’m a painter, printmaker, and aspiring novelist. I make art alongside my career and as I’ve grown into more senior roles professionally, it’s become clear how often those instincts show up at work. Not as inspiration, but as a method.
When creativity is treated as secondary, those methods get filtered out. It’s not just a limitation to individuals; it’s a liability for businesses.
AI has absorbed the predictable and amplified it. The world got noisier. LinkedIn, corporate blogs and ads have suddenly become longer, more polished, better optimized and just generally boring.
How can one be heard amongst a cacophony of endless echoes? They say something different. They diverge.
Because that’s inherently human. And in a world where we sell to and support other humans, that will always be the core advantage. That’s exactly why Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey found that organizations prioritizing “deeply human” skills alongside AI capabilities were nearly twice as likely to achieve better financial results.
And chief amongst those is creativity. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report surveyed over 1,000 employers and found “creative thinking” to be amongst the top four skills both rising in demand and considered most important by 2030. Nestled right alongside cybersecurity, big data and general technical literacy. Its rise in demand topped agility, leadership and talent management.
Across both lists, analytical and creative thinking shared the same average score. That’s not a coincidence. Creativity is what shapes the outcome from analysis. It’s what gives it purpose. They belong together.
I unfocus my eyes.
When I’m painting and need to see past the details, I’ll let my sight blur. It brings out the larger, general picture without needing to move, helping me make sure the composition is proportionate, properly mapped and gives the right feel. If I don’t do it often enough, I’ll get sucked into the delicious details of whatever I’m working on and find when I back up that that beautiful fragment is entirely lopsided or out of scale with the rest of the piece.
It happens in professional contexts all the time. Someone or a team gets their head down in execution and the outcome drifts from the objective. There’s many reasons why, but whatever the reason, we’ve all seen the outcome. Solid work, wrong direction.
The ability to toggle back and forth between the two levels of vision and execution, constantly translating between them keeps projects on track and ensures high-level needs are met.
It’s a skill artists have ingrained through sheer tactical need.
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” Michael E. Porter
When I first started painting digitally, the ability to zoom felt like a super power. I could magnify my page to focus on any speck I wanted and edit each minute detail to my heart's content… but I ended up hating the final pieces. It seemed the more brush strokes I added the less intent each seemed to have. I lost hours to details that were imperceptible when you looked at the piece at standard scale.
It took a return to traditional media and reapplying those constraints to achieve the results I wanted. No zoom, no endless erasures or over the top mixing of medias. Once this was mastered my work felt more intentional. It moved.
Operating with constraints forces you to pick a goal and make the necessary trade-offs to achieve it. It brings clarity.
Designing a product or a website, you could put a button linking to every small feature or content set, but the more you add, the more they’d compete. To truly make something succeed, you need to prioritize it.
Business strategy works similarly. Geoffrey Moore observed that many companies fail from chasing every opportunity before successfully dominating a niche. This lack of focus spreads companies too thin, sacrificing the momentum needed to reach the mainstream market.
By removing so many constraints, AI has made it easier than ever to lose focus. The FOMO is strong. Now, any business or individual can ideate, critique and do just about anything to varying levels of success… regardless of role, expertise or purpose. But just because they can doesn’t mean they should.
These days working on projects, I’m just as passionate about listing the “non-goals” as the actual objectives. It helps consciously park various ideas or feedback that aren’t directly relevant while diverting energy back to the task at hand.
Just like those early digital pieces, the more you add the less each stroke means. The best work — in art, in product, in strategy — isn’t just defined by what’s there. It’s equally defined by what isn’t.
Seeing the world for what it truly is and breaking it down into a simplified skeleton is a critical skill trained into any artist. Any face, body or landscape can be deconstructed to a series of circles, sausages and lines, kept in balance with impromptu units of measurement like a thumbnail.
I realized how this scaffolding lens served me in a professional context when building my first CMS schema. The product manager in charge had shared a draft with me as a courtesy since I’d be a core user of the final product. He was openly surprised when I returned a redlined copy.
The initial draft was a monolith. It represented content at the surface only, bloating the model. Each collection had its own separate (but often repeated) dropdowns, tags and descriptions. None of the content spoke to each other. Data was siloed, its overlaps denied.
But a tag is a tag. Text is text. The final copy established standard reference collections and slimmed the schema by nearly 50%. The result was less work inputting, editing and maintaining content moving forward. This meant less work and less errors.
As big data becomes central to our professional lives, abstraction is no longer a nice-to-have skillset in one or two dedicated departments. At its core, abstraction is stripping away the surface and seeing the skeleton beneath. That doesn’t just come from technical training. As an artist, I didn’t learn this in university. I started at my kitchen table at 8. The decades of daily practice both personal and professionally since have only honed it.
There’s a saying that painting is a constant series of brush strokes to fix the one before it.
In virtually every piece, I hit a point where I wonder what the hell I’m doing. When the value map is down and I’m starting to block out details… It looks awful.
Early on, I stopped there. Ripped it from my sketchbook and pretended it didn’t happen, but the limitation in that approach became clear pretty quickly.
Over time, you learn to keep pushing on. To trust the process. That good things are built in layers, and often, I’m happy with the final result, even if the outcome wasn’t the original planned. Nowadays I have the confidence — and sometimes a bit of a thrill — when I hit this point. It’s like the starting point of a before and after shot that leaves you feeling proud.
I’ve yet to manage a project at work that didn’t reach this point. When the initial brief has been expanded upon and all the little complexities it skipped over unearthed. The environment changed. New feedback came in. And things start to feel sticky.
It isn’t poor project management. It’s the reality that is learning through execution, and it’s important now, as the ground beneath us shifts faster than any brief can account for.
Art trains you to seek a bias for action. To understand that every brief is a hypothesis. The story you set out to write isn’t the one you finish. The product you scoped isn’t always the one the market needs. The build is where you learn what’s truly needed and how to deliver it.
For many, this tolerance is a methodology absorbed from books like The Lean Startup. For artists, it’s a lived experience rooted before most even started working… One that builds openness to change, high frustration tolerance, and the drive to keep going when the result isn’t visible yet.
AI is here, and it’s handling the busywork. The efficiency and logic that used to define and propel careers is suddenly commoditized. Where does that leave businesses?
If AI is a force multiplier, leaders today need to truly ask themselves what it is they’re multiplying. Is it more of the same? Or something genuinely new?
Because that’s the true differentiator today. To see a problem in a new light and offer a true, innovative alternative to the pain.
I spent a decade trying to earn credibility by speaking a different language. I didn’t need to. Neither do the creatives in your organization and if they’re jumping through those hoops, you’re missing a valuable perspective.
The best leaders have always known this. But what was once a competitive advantage is now integral to survival.