Creativity Is Not a Talent. It's an Operation.

Creativity happens in the friction. AI is designed to remove it.

Nick Gray | IGU Global

The short version: Creativity isn't an inborn talent — it's a cognitive operation anyone can build through friction and repetition. AI removes that friction by collapsing the thinking stage, which is why AI-reliant brands converge on the same voice. The edge belongs to those who use AI to gather information but protect the thinking.

We've been sold a lie about creativity. And most of us have believed it for as long as we can remember.

That narrative that creativity is a gift, you either have it or you don't. It belongs to the painters, the musicians, the designers and the people who see what others can't. It lives in brainstorms and mood boards and late nights where inspiration just "strikes." The creative person is the one in the room who thinks differently. Naturally and without effort.

This is the story we grew up with. And it's wrong.

Not partly wrong either, but structurally wrong. It frames creativity as a trait when it's actually a behaviour and a very real cognitive operation. One that any person and any organisation or brand can actually build, if they understand what it actually requires.

What creativity actually is

There's a framework called Bloom's Taxonomy. It was originally built for education and used to develop and progress students in thinking but today it maps perfectly onto how thinking works in business, in brand, in strategy, in life whilst also giving us a pretty clear snapshot of society and where it's heading.

At the base of this pyramid is remember, understand and apply. This is where most work lives. Learn the model. Follow the playbook. Run the template. It feels productive enough because things get done. But nothing new gets made. This is where your social media can be found, it's the fast food of information. It's easy to digest but not really anything new or healthy for you because it requires very little processing or thinking.

In the middle of the pyramid sits analysis and evaluation. Now you're thinking, comparing, unpacking, making judgments and where most people believe strategy happens. It's not. This is where strategy gets assessed which is still super important. But it's not the top.

The top is create. This is the ability to synthesise and build something genuinely new. Not new as in 'no one has ever seen this before.' But new as in: you connected things that hadn't been connected and then built something from the raw material of everything below it.

This is where good leaders live and where competitive advantage now lives for anyone. The great news is that this is a level attainable to anyone willing to develop their brains the same way we develop muscle at the gym. It takes time and it takes some suffering, sometimes it hurts but through repetition we get stronger and better.

Here's the critical part though. You can't skip levels. You have to earn your way up no different to earning that six pack at the gym. The reason most brands produce work that looks and sounds the same as everyone else isn't a lack of talent. It's that they stop climbing at "apply" and call it done.

The myth we need to retire now

The biggest problem with the "creativity is a talent" narrative isn't that it's flattering to creative people. It's that it gives everyone else permission to opt out.

If creativity is innate, then it's not your fault you don't have it. If it belongs to the "creatives," then the rest of the organisation gets to focus on execution and optimisation and leave the original thinking to someone else. Entire corporate structures are built on this assumption unfortunately. The creative team creates and everyone else just implements. And the result is a company where original thinking is siloed into one department while every other decision defaults to what's safe, proven, and repeatable.

This is part of the reason why you end up with brands that look identical and retail experiences that feel interchangeable, marketing that says the same thing in the same voice on the same platforms.

Look nobody made a decision to be unoriginal, they just never built the conditions where originality could actually happen.

Creativity isn't even about having an idea. It's about doing the cognitive work that makes new ideas possible. And that work is uncomfortable, it requires sitting with information long enough to find a pattern nobody else has found or holding two conflicting ideas in your head without resolving them too quickly. It also means being wrong, out loud and before you get to be right.

That's not a gift. That's a discipline.

How we actually learn (and why it matters here)

Information comes in from everywhere today. Books. The internet. Conversations. AI. But information isn't knowledge. It's simply just raw material.

Knowledge is what happens when your brain does something with it. You connect it to what you already know. Compare it to what contradicts it or build a bigger picture from fragments that don't obviously fit together. That processing is where memory, expertise and judgement get built. And it requires friction (that sometimes feels painful). Effort. Time. The discomfort of not having the answer or structure yet.

This is not a design flaw in human cognition. This is the design. The friction is the mechanism. Take it away and you don't speed up learning. You just hollow it out.

What happens when we outsource the middle

This is the part most people aren't talking about.

AI is extraordinary at the bottom of the pyramid. It can retrieve information, summarise it, compare it, structure it, and deliver a recommendation faster than any human being ever could. And because speed feels like progress, we've started treating this as a pure gain. More output. Less effort. Better results.

But let's look at what AI actually optimises. It gives you the summary, the answer, the recommendation. It collapses the processing stage, the exact stage where creativity gets built, into something instant and effortless.

And that's the trade a lot of people today don't realise they're making.

When you let AI do the connecting, comparing, and sense-making for you, you get a faster output. But you skip the cognitive work that would have built the neural pathways to do it yourself. You lose the reps. And creativity, like any skill, it's built on reps. No different to your training at the gym.

And this isn't a hunch. In 2025, MIT's Media Lab wired people up to EEG while they wrote. The ones who leaned on AI showed the weakest brain connectivity of any group, and afterwards most couldn't even quote the work they'd just produced. The researchers had a name for it: cognitive debt.

Look, I need to be clear here, this doesn't mean AI is the enemy. It means AI is a tool that optimises for a specific thing, and that thing is speed. Speed can be very useful, however speed is not creativity. In fact, speed is often the opposite, because the most original thinking happens when you slow down long enough to see something everyone else scrolled past.

The real cost for brands

Here's where this gets commercial.

When every brand in a category uses the same AI tools trained on the same data sets optimising for the same patterns, you get convergence which simply means strategy starts to sound the same and positioning starts to look the same. The brand voice flattens into a consensus tone that's technically proficient and very emotionally vacant.

Again, not because the AI is bad, ok. AI is doing exactly what it was designed to do and that's finding the most efficient path to a reasonable output and the most efficient path is, by definition, the most common one. It's not thinking. It's predicting the most likely next word. And the most likely word is the one everyone else would have used too.

Differentiation has never come from efficiency, it comes from the willingness to do the thinking that can't be automated, to sit with a problem longer than is comfortable and to trust a strategic instinct before the data confirms it. We have to build an answer from first principles when the templated version is sitting right there.

This is the part that can't be outsourced and in my opinion is becoming rarer each day, which means in the same breath that it's becoming more valuable also.

The competitive advantage is in the friction

The brands and businesses who can separate themselves from here will be the ones who use AI to gather and organise information, but protect the processing stage. Those who simply refuse to let the tool do the thinking for them, even when it easily could and understand that your LLM is training you to need it, trust it and rely on it.

This doesn’t mean you need to be anti-technology, it just means you understand that the thinking is the product, the struggle is the skill and the friction is where the value gets created.

Give yourself permission to be wrong early also. I always say, set constraints, because creativity without a container is just noise and protect the time where you're not optimising, you're not solving, you're just asking "what if." That unoccupied time is a luxury but should be built into your day. It's the reason I have so many founders telling me their best ideas happen in the shower. It's not the water or cleaning that happens, it's that they are unoccupied and free from the distractions for a moment.

Play is not the absence of work, it's experimentation. What happens if I do this, what happens if we try that. The willingness to sit in the discomfort before the answer arrives is the thing that most people and most brands don’t do and that's exactly why it works.

Creativity isn't about being artistic. It's about being willing to operate where most people won't and realising that your brain is no different to a muscle. When we first lift that heavy weight at the gym it hurts but over time and through repetition that muscle gets stronger and fitter and more powerful the more we use it. Your brain is exactly the same.

Use it and sit in the friction.

Frequently asked questions

Is creativity a talent or a skill? It's not an inborn gift, it's a cognitive operation. Anyone can build it through friction and repetition, the same way you build muscle at the gym.

Does AI make you less creative? It can. AI collapses the thinking stage, the connecting, comparing and sense-making where creativity gets built. Use it to gather information and you're fine. Let it do the thinking and you lose the reps.

Why do so many brands look and sound the same now? Because they're all using the same AI tools, trained on the same data, optimising for the same patterns. The most efficient path is, by definition, the most common one. Convergence is the result.

How do you build creativity in a team? Protect the processing stage. Set constraints, give people permission to be wrong early, and build in unoccupied time where they're not optimising or solving, just asking "what if."

About the author: Nick Gray is the founder of IGU Global, a Sydney brand strategy and retail consultancy, and was named a Top Retail Expert 2026 by Rethink Retail. With 25+ years across Nike, Adidas, Diesel, Sneakerboy and Westfield, he works with startups, mid-size brands and enterprise clients on emotionally intelligent brand strategy, consumer psychology and AI's role in retail.

Work with Nick at iguglobal.com.