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Rethinking Creativity: Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal
Rethinking creativity at work in the digital age
Jess Price
April 06, 2026
Welcome to the 18th edition of Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal.
Table of Contents
Jess’ Monthly Reflection
It is April, which in my life means one thing: Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF)!
MICF is my favourite time of the year. I block out my calendar and spend my evenings running around the city laughing in tiny hotel boardrooms, Town Hall closets, and random underground venues I would never discover otherwise. There are many reasons I love the festival, but the main one is our topic this month: creativity.
Comedy is the clearest way I have found to watch someone in their creative process. As a creative person, I can tell you it is a life filled with solititude and a messy middle that nobody else understands until the work is finished (is it ever really finished…?). Watching a comedian build a show from the first time they tell a joke, through to the polished festival show, lets me witness the parts of a creative career that make it different to corporate.
Creativity requires space to experiment and play. You need room to move, think and an ability to switch off from ‘work’. When I am in my creative process, I rarely look productive. I am usually walking around outside, reading a book, or creating a mess on my analogue desk. This is work I could never do in an office.
If you have followed me for a while, you have seen this process. Moonlit Minds began in September 2024 as a loose collection of ideas written from a rooftop pool overlooking New York City’s financial district. Month after month, it evolved into what it is now. The same is true of what I share on LinkedIn. To some, it looks like I keep changing my mind. I am not. I am sharing the messy middle because that is where ideas are best tested, challenged and reshaped.
I did not choose the topic of creativity to celebrate the achievements of my favourite creative industry, or to share my own creative process. I did so for one important reason. Corporate work increasingly needs creative thinking. Since 2015, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Reports have consistently listed creative thinking in the top 5 skills we need to succeed in the future.
Despite this, the Programme for International Student Assessment 2022 creative thinking assessment of 66 countries found that only half of the students in OECD countries could generate original ideas in familiar contexts, and in over 20 countries, students did not reach a baseline level of creative proficiency. Our workplaces are also not designed to support the environment and workflow necessary for creative thinking.
So in honour of 40 years of MICF, let’s talk about creativity at work.
Enjoy April’s Pink Moon,
Jess Price
Founder & Chief Vision Officer
P.S. If you want to see a show but are not sure what, I have an Insta Highlight with all my recommendations - as I see more shows, I will keep updating it.
P.S.S. If you prefer to watch or listen, I recorded a version! It’s not the best, but in the spirit of creativity, I thought it was worth giving it a go.
EXPLORING THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Research Approach: AI-assisted synthesis to access and distil credible historical and contemporary sources; insights cross-checked; citations included. This is not meant to be a complete summary. Case studies were chosen for their enduring legacy.
A Brief History of Creativity at Work
When we think about creativity at work, what we are actually referring to is the skill of creative thinking. Creative thinking refers to the “capacity to bring a new idea or concept into existence through imagination and to imagine something that does not exist.” Throughout history, there have been countless examples of how we have thought about creative thinking at work.
Pre-Industrial (before 1760): The Renaissance
The Renaissance was a broad cultural transformation in Europe that accelerated throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. It marked a shift away from medieval traditions toward renewed interest in human creativity, classical knowledge and individual expression. This became known as humanism. The reason we remember the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Donatello di Niccolo and Raphael Sanzio is that society valued creativity as a branch of human knowledge.
First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840): The Luddites
During the early Industrial Revolution, textile production shifted from highly skilled artisans working with handlooms to mechanised factory systems using machines. Skilled weavers and framework knitters had traditionally exercised significant creative control over their craft by adjusting patterns, techniques and materials. As factories standardised production, this discretion disappeared. Between 1811 and 1816, groups organised machine-breaking protests across England, targeting new textile machinery they believed threatened their livelihoods, working conditions and control over their craft. These groups became known as Luddites, a phrase we continue to use for anyone resistant to new technology.
Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914): Menlo Park
In 1876, Thomas Edison established the Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey. Often described as the first industrial research and development lab, Edison organised teams of machinists, chemists and engineers to systematically experiment and prototype new technologies. This collaborative model produced major innovations, including the practical incandescent light bulb and improvements to electrical power systems. Creative thinking became associated with coordinated research teams embedded inside industrial enterprises.
Third Industrial Revolution (1970-2006): Pixar’s Braintrust
This perception of creativity as the role of one team persisted. But one core incident at Pixar led to a different approach. Before Toy Story became the version we know today, it was so bad that production was nearly shut down. Instead, the team rewrote the story together using a structured feedback process. This led to the creation of the ‘Braintrust’, a recurring creative forum built on four principles:
No one can override the director
Feedback is peer-to-peer
Success is shared
Notes must be honest, specific and actionable.
In addition to better films, the Braintrust created a system that made creative thinking more reliable. As Pixar’s founder Ed Catmull notes, the Braintrust became a core part of Pixar’s ability to produce high-quality work consistently.
Fourth Industrial Revolution (2011-now): Google’s 20% Time
Google’s 20% Time is often cited as a model for workplace creativity. But its evolution tells a different story. In the early 2000s, creativity was framed as a cultural pillar. Individuals and teams were encouraged to explore through initiatives like 20% time. The initiative allowed you to spend 20% of your work week on something unrelated to your core work. As Google scaled, that framing shifted. By the early 2010s, creativity was increasingly positioned as a response to complexity and reframed as ingenuity or moonshot thinking. After Alphabet’s formation in 2015, the emphasis moved again. Creativity became less about human exploration and more about what AI systems could achieve at scale. By 2024, AI had become central to Google’s strategy and growth narrative.
What this reveals
Creativity moved from being recognised as a valuable form of knowledge, removed from humans, organised into teams, structured through feedback and now increasingly mediated by AI. It followed authority, tools and decision-making power. This reveals a clear contradiction: work now demands creative thinking from everybody, but the systems we rely on were never designed to support it.
THE LOGIC WE HAVE INHERITED
The Creativity Defaults We No Longer Notice
If creativity follows authority, tools and decision-making power, the question is no longer whether we are creative. It is what our systems allow creativity to look like. The systems we inherited were not designed to bring something new into existence or imagine something that does not exist. The logic we inherited was that specialised teams were responsible for creative thinking, while machines can standardise the rest. It made sense when work was predictable, but less sense now. The problem is not that the systems are broken. It is that the systems were never designed to allow humans to leverage creative thinking.
We treat creativity like productivity
Modern work systems were designed using principles of division of labour and scientific management, which prioritised measurable output, standardisation and efficiency. Frederick Taylor believed productivity could be increased by reducing variability to enable control and coordination at scale. That logic still defines how we understand work today. It assumes value comes from consistency, predictability and output, yet these concepts create tension with how creative thinking actually works. When we treat creativity like productivity, it gets measured, compressed and optimised, rather than explored. The nature of work has changed, and creative thinking demands more from us:
70% of creative leaders say many of their most talented designers are working on tasks below their skill level (Superside, 2025)
58% of respondents say their organisational culture does not reward creative pursuits (Canva, 2024)
We demand creative thinking from systems designed to suppress it
Work has shifted from repeatable tasks to adaptive, knowledge-based work that requires creative thinking. At the same time, digital coordination and AI-augmented production have increased expectations for speed and output. But creative thinking depends on exploration, iteration and human judgement - activities that are difficult to measure and often appear inefficient. This creates a structural contradiction: we now require non-linear thinking inside systems designed to reward linear output:
96% agree that creative ideas are essential to an organisation’s long-term success and performance (Canva, 2024)
78% of creative leaders agree that creative demand is higher than their capacity to deliver (Superside, 2025)
And now, a new force is accelerating this tension.
AI amplifies the linear system we designed
Creative thinking remains constrained unless systems stop optimising primarily for measurable output. Goodhart’s Law tells us that ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’ In the context of creative thinking, this means that as long as work is designed to optimise efficiency and productivity, it becomes structurally inevitable for creativity to be suppressed. AI did not create this problem, but it is amplifying it. Systems that reward speed, predictability and measurable output are well-suited to machines. Tasks that rely on judgement, context, empathy and creativity remain more difficult to automate effectively:
87% of Chief Marketing Officers believe modern strategies require more creativity, empathy and humanity (Dentsu, 2025)
79% of creative professionals say they want to create bolder work, but they are always racing against the clock (Superside, 2025)
Redesign at the Level of Meaning
Right now, creativity is implicitly defined as output - how quickly ideas can be produced and how useful they are to the business. This definition worked when our work was tied to machines. It does not work for the conditions required for true creative thinking - exploration, uncertainty and time. It treats creativity as something to extract, but creativity cannot be extracted. In the words of Rick Rubin, “When it comes to the creative process, patience is accepting that the majority of the work we do is out of our control. We cannot force greatness to happen. All we can do is invite it in and await it actively.” (pg 115) To redesign creativity at work, we need to reframe the work humans do from something we produce to something the system makes possible. This shifts the question from “How do we get people to be more creative?” to “How do we design systems that make creative thinking inevitable?”
CREATING A NEW PARADIGM FOR TOMORROW
Principle Generation Approach: AI-assisted possible futures, based on a NotebookLM containing sources related to the Brain Economy and Paradigm Makers 5 Essential Elements.
Designing Creative Work for Humans
We do not remember the Renaissance artists because everyone was creative in their time. We remember them because the system concentrated resources, time and patronage in a way that allowed creative work to endure. If we want a modern creative Renaissance, we must redesign work so that creative thinking becomes structurally inevitable. That means shifting from systems optimised for efficiency, control and output towards systems that sustain human cognitive capacity to enable creative thinking.
This shift reflects a bigger change in how value is created, which is described as the brain economy. At its simplest, the brain economy recognises that the most valuable resource in modern work is not labour or time, but human cognitive capacity. Rather than treating our ability to think, imagine, decide and create as individual traits, the brain economy treats these abilities as infrastructure that must be sustained and expanded.
If creative thinking becomes a system requirement, then the structure of work must change across Paradigm Makers Essential Elements.
Old Paradigm: People execute predefined work
New Paradigm: People shape, challenge and redefine the work
As machines take over routine tasks, human value shifts to uniquely human skills like creative and analytical thinking, resilience and curiosity. This requires moving beyond passive roles to active authorship. Roles are designed to give people agency over shaping work, rather than just delivering it. For teams, it means defining problems and approaches rather than simply executing predefined tasks.
Question: When employee disengagement and burnout already cost the global economy $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024, can we afford to keep treating people as cogs in a machine?
Innovation: From Optimisation to Exploration
Old Paradigm: Improve what already exists
New Paradigm: Explore what does not exist
Optimisation reduces variation, and without variation, there is nothing new to discover. Meanwhile, creative thinking depends on it. In a brain economy, exploration and divergence are integrated as system requirements. Time, budget, and space are allocated for exploration.
Question: If the 21st-century economy relies on brain capital, how can our innovation budgets prioritise improving the machine over expanding human potential?
Technology: From Acceleration to Augmentation
Old Paradigm: Tools increase speed
New Paradigm: Tools expand thinking
Technology reflects the system it operates within. If designed for efficiency, it replaces humans. If designed for capability, it extends human thinking. This shift from automation to augmentation means our AI tools support decision-making rather than fully automating it.
Question: If parallel investment in brain skills is what ensures technology augments rather than erodes performance, why are we racing to adopt the latest software while leaving our human skills to stagnate?
Economics: From Output to Cognitive Capacity
Old Paradigm: Value is measured by output
New Paradigm: Value is sustained through thinking capacity
In an “AI-driven” world, thinking becomes our source of differentiation. Yet AI exhausts our attention, fragments focus and drives burnout, which reduces our long-term capacity to create value. The brain economy reframes attention, energy and mental capacity as economic assets to be measured and protected. Our performance systems shift to prioritise thinking over volume of output.
Question: If we are projected to spend [insert your projected AI spend here] by 2028 on the ‘AI software’ of the future, can we afford the economic fallout of failing to upgrade the human ‘operating system’ required to run it?
Norms: From Busyness to Thinking
Old Paradigm: Always on, always responsive
New Paradigm: Deliberative, reflective, exploratory
Our cultural norms reinforce system behaviours. That means we need to redesign norms to prioritise thinking over visible activity. Thinking is the dominant theme of each new paradigm because the way we communicate, meet, and countless other societal norms do not give us the space to do so. The brain economy prioritises thinking through deep work, reflection and recovery.
Question: When 1 in 5 employees globally suffer from symptoms of burnout, is our ‘always on’ culture a sign of systemic failure to maintain our most valuable national asset?
How these principles fit together
Taken together, these shifts describe a different logic of work:
Economics and Norms define what is valued
Technology and People determine how work happens
Innovation reflects what becomes possible
When aligned, they move work away from extracting output, toward sustaining the conditions that make creative thinking inevitable. This is the difference between managing people as inputs and designing systems that expand what humans are capable of.
DESIGNING 2075: WHAT HAPPENS IF WE START NOW
Scenario Generation Approach: AI-assisted scenario, based on the 5 design principles proposed above and Paradigm Makers’ 2075 vision of a world where our systems are intentionally designed to allow flexibility for humans and structure where it's needed.
The Design of Deliberate Creativity at Work
If we take these ideas seriously today, creative thinking becomes something we actively design for. By 2075, our systems could be intentionally structured to sustain human thinking, rather than just extract from it. The brain economy gives us a useful model. If human cognitive capacity becomes the most valuable resource in modern work, then every system we build either expands or depletes it.
The question is no longer: How do we get more output from people?
Instead, we ask: What conditions allow people to think, create and decide well over time?
This shift can begin today. When making decisions, consider the following questions:
Where are people executing work they could be shaping?
Where is exploration being compressed in favour of optimisation?
Does this tool replace thinking or expand it?
Are we measuring output, or sustaining the capacity to create?
Does this system reward speed or quality of thought?
If we redesign systems around these questions:
Work shifts from managing time to protecting attention
Performance shifts from visible activity to quality of thinking
Technology shifts from replacing humans to expanding them
Value shifts from output to sustained cognitive capacity
Creative thinking stops being something we try to force and becomes something the system makes possible
The systems we rely on today were designed for a different world. They are not broken, but rather working exactly as they were designed to.
The decision for us is whether we continue to optimise for efficiency or redesign systems for the kind of thinking the future requires.
Until next time,
Jess
P.S. I really liked framing the new paradigm through the Brain Economy. Do you think I should make it a regular feature?
P.P.S The concept of creativity didn’t evolve in isolation. If you enjoyed this edition, you might also like:
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