Creativity Belongs to Everyone

If creativity is natural to us, why do so few people feel creative?

Creativity is everywhere. We see it in the way a child builds a den from cushions, in the unexpected direction a good conversation takes and in the moment a familiar problem is seen from a different angle. Yet most adults, if asked whether they are creative, will hesitate. Many will simply say no.

Something happened between childhood and now.

You were born this way

Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.

Picasso’s observation is so widely quoted that it risks losing its force. He is not saying that every child is talented or that every child will become an artist. He is pointing to something more fundamental: creativity is part of our natural state before we begin to judge, restrict and define it.

Creativity is not a gift distributed unevenly at birth, a particular personality type or a stroke of genetic luck. It grows from abilities built into the human brain: connecting distant ideas, imagining what does not yet exist and responding to the unknown in an original way.

The question is not whether you have creativity, but what happened to your relationship with it.

What happened?

For many of us, the answer begins in school. We entered a system designed, with the best of intentions, to develop a particular kind of thinker: one who could find the right answer, follow the correct process and perform reliably under assessment. We learned to narrow the lens in search of precision.

This way of thinking is valuable, but creativity asks us to widen the lens. Divergent thinking generates multiple possibilities, plays with ideas and tolerates not knowing. Yet it was rarely given the same attention. Mistakes were not treated as part of discovery, but as something to avoid.

Sir Ken Robinson spent decades making this case. Our education systems were created for a world with different priorities, and many of us learned to value conformity over curiosity, the correct answer over the interesting question and certainty over exploration.

We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.

By the time we reach adult life, these habits are deeply rooted. We have spent years being rewarded for knowing and penalised for getting things wrong. The willingness to explore without knowing where we are going, try something that might not work or remain with a question before reaching for an answer begins to feel risky. In professional life, it can even feel irresponsible.

So we stay with what we know, often without recognising what has been lost.

The cost is not only personal. Organisations and teams lose access to imaginative thinking at precisely the moments when they need it most, when familiar answers are failing and a different response is required.

Reclaiming what was always yours

The encouraging truth is that creativity has not disappeared. The brain continues to change in response to what we repeatedly do, and creative thinking can be strengthened through practice, permission and environments where it feels safe to explore.

This is not about becoming an artist, learning an impressive new skill or adding another demand to an already full life. It is about recovering a way of meeting the world that was once natural to you. You might begin by holding a question open a little longer, approaching a familiar problem from an unfamiliar angle or noticing something you would normally walk past.

What was gradually pushed into the background can gradually be brought forward again. It begins with small acts, repeated often enough for creativity to feel less like a risk and more like a natural part of how you think, work and navigate.

Creativity belongs to everyone, but knowing that is not enough. To regain trust in it, we have to use it.

That is where we go next.

This article is part of the series Creativity and The Art of Navigating, an ongoing exploration of how to find our way through uncertain times. If you'd like to read more articles or have future pieces sent straight to you, please follow the link below.