There was a time when a career in the creative industry was considered a starving one. Parents dramatically tried to keep their prodigies from falling into the artistic abyss and instead pursue careers in finance, law or medicine. In the past decade however, there has been a societal shift in the attitude towards creative careers.

Younger generations value creative expression higher than any other generation. As they came of age, so did their demands, and businesses responded accordingly. Seeking to inject more creativity into their DNA, they looked to the creative industry for help. But how to get efficiency obsessed companies to implement creativity? Boil it down to an easy-to-understand, low-investment process.

Where before creative agencies transformed briefs into creative solutions as a black magical box. Now clients were involved in that magic through creative sprints. Great tools to get access to otherwise unreachable stakeholders and have buy-in built into the solutions. As much good as they’ve done and still do, there is a side effect: commoditisation.

Design Thinking has helped corporations understand the creative process, but in doing so also reduced it to a process. Trying to make science out of art. When you see a team solve a problem in a two-hour workshop, however rudimentary the solution might be, it sets a precedent. It’s why briefs demand exponential change, yet only give four days to do it. I believe this is one of the key factors driving the timeline and budget declines over the past years.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a firm believer in a good creative process. But good creativity is more than following a flowchart and putting stickies on a wall. Great creativity takes time.

But speed is inherent to creative sprints, leaving little time to dig into unexpected, outlier perspectives. Yet true creative genius requires perpetual, kaleidoscopic, iterative exploration throughout the process. Which is why we built as much space for this in our Creative R&D model when building Dentsu Lab, enabling us to find those outlier perspectives.

Do we use Design Sprints and Workshops? Yes. But only as a start, never a finish.

The transformative power of creativity can’t be understated. If we make time and space to fuel creativity in our teams and businesses, that exponential change we all seek could be just around the corner.

Not in two to four business days, though.