Creativity in Business Isn’t Brainstorming. It’s a Growth Discipline.
- Laura Derbyshire
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
Are you a Nigel?
If you hear the word brainstorm and immediately picture post-it notes, forced enthusiasm and ideas that go nowhere, well, you’re not alone.
Many scaleup leaders quietly distrust “creative sessions” because they’ve sat through too many that felt disconnected from reality, strategy or results.
But, here’s a sobering thought:
If creativity has been designed out of your organisation, you are almost certainly limiting growth.
Not because people lack ideas, but because you’ve confused creative thinking with unstructured brainstorming -> they are not the same thing.
In fast-growing organisations, creativity within the business is often misunderstood and treated as brainstorming rather than a disciplined input into strategy, decision-making and growth.
Why Creativity in Business Breaks Down as Companies Scale
In many organisations, creativity shows up in one of two ways:
As an unstructured brainstorm with no strategic filter
Or not at all, because it feels risky, inefficient or “off-strategy”
So ideas get shut down quickly and often by well-meaning or hyper-stressed leaders trying to protect focus:
“That’s not realistic.”
“That’s not aligned.”
“That’s not how we do things here.”
This doesn’t create clarity; it creates an invisible constraint.
Because some of the most commercially valuable insights in a business don’t come from the boardroom. They come from the frontline.
From people who:
Speak to customers every day
Hear objections first
See where processes break
Know what confuses buyers
Experience friction before it shows up in a report
In my experience, they may lack seniority, but they rarely lack insight.
What the Evidence Says About Creativity and Growth
McKinsey research shows that companies which actively encourage creativity outperform peers on revenue growth and market share by up to 2.5x.
Harvard Business Review has found that over 70% of high-impact improvement ideas come from frontline employees, not leadership - because they’re closest to customers, problems and real-world behaviour.
The issue isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s a lack of systems to surface, filter and act on them.
Creativity vs Brainstorming: The Distinction That Matters
Here’s the shift scaleups need to make:
Brainstorming is:
Unstructured
Idea-led
Often disconnected from strategy
Hard to action
Creativity as a growth discipline is:
Designed
Strategically framed
Commercially filtered
Directly connected to decisions
The best scaleups don’t ask: “Do we have any ideas?”
They ask: “Do we have a way of turning insight into direction?”
The OSER Creativity-to-Growth Framework
At OSER, we treat creativity as a strategic input, not a free-for-all.
1. Divergence: Open Input
Ideas are allowed to surface from anywhere:
Frontline teams
Sales
Customer support
Operations
Junior team members
Gill the receptionist
No judgement. No premature filtering. Just an idea collection exercise. This is where real insight lives.
2. Direction: Strategic Filtering
Leadership applies:
Commercial context
Growth priorities
Brand positioning
Market realities
Experience shapes ideas, not shuts them down.
3. Decision: Focused Execution
Only ideas that:
Solve real customer problems
Align with strategic direction
Can be executed at scale
Creativity without strategy is noise, but strategy without creativity is incremental.
Growth happens when the two are deliberately connected.
Why Scaleups Struggle With This
As companies grow, complexity increases:
More people
More channels
More stakeholders
More pressure from investors
In response, leaders often over-rotate on control. Creativity gets squeezed out in the name of focus, and the organisation becomes efficient, but less adaptive.
That’s when growth plateaus.
Not because teams aren’t working hard, but because the business isn't learning fast enough.
What the Best Leaders Do Differently
The strongest founders and CEOs we work with don’t try to be the smartest person in the room.
They design environments where:
Ideas can surface safely
Signals are captured early
Leadership joins the dots
Strategy evolves with evidence
They understand that their role isn’t to generate ideas - it’s to turn insight into direction.
That’s how they:
Innovate with confidence
Outlearn competitors
Create momentum without chaos
At OSER, we work with scaleups (£10m–£50m+ revenue) to turn creativity into a strategic growth lever.
We run structured creativity and growth sessions that:
Surface insight from across the organisation
Connect ideas to strategy and growth goals
Clarify where to focus and what to stop
Translate creativity into actio that leaders can back
If growth feels constrained by “how things are done", this is usually where the issue sits. If your organisation shuts down ideas too quickly, it’s not protecting focus. It’s quietly limiting growth.
Creativity isn’t a distraction from strategy. It’s one of the most underused inputs into it. If you want creativity to become a strategic asset - not a liability - let’s talk.
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