‘The Power of Understanding That Everyone and Everything is Creative”
An opinion piece by Abraham Abbi Asefaw
(originally published in Pitch Magazine April 2019)
I work with a lot of people considered the ‘top creatives’ in this World, yet the most creative person I know is my mother. I haven’t always realised that though. Not until I ventured into this industry and spent years working with the biggest companies and most well-paid and respected creatives did I understand that true creativity is something not belonging to the few but the many. I was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and by the time I was 4 years old had travelled from there all the way throughout Europe as a war refugee with my mom at the steering wheel making decisions and finding answers to problems quicker and smarter than any Creative Director ever would. Finally settling in Sweden, my brothers and I were raised, like most immigrant families, with three choices for a future: Doctor, Engineer or Lawyer. I chose the latter.
As a law student, it didn’t take me more than a few years to realise that the many opportunities coming my way outside of my studies seemed far more appealing and I founded my first agency. The beginning of a now almost two-decade journey in what we so confidently have defined as ‘the creative industry’ started and while I haven’t looked back since, oh boy has my opinion about how we define, discuss, claim and overall use the word creativity changed.
I am not sure when my quest of democratization of the word started but it must have been somewhere between developing more accelerated and more inclusive ideation methods and realising how demographically exclusive, naïve and elitist this industry truly can be.
While the wider belief amongst industry peers is that our creative processes and minds are evolving I ask myself ‘are we designing tools and methods that empower us or autopilot us?’. For so many years now, my company and I have been helping businesses get rid of systemised processes doing anything but empower. What we see, even with the biggest of the biggest is that the very same processes designed to create award-winning ideas are in fact crippling and seriously excluding. And that’s why the industry is scared of and challenged by emotional AI and product teams. They’re running faster and they’re part of democratization that in my opinion is creating a playing field much more interesting than anything there’s ever been. Their existence and rapid growth is a question rather than an answer. Its only demand is more collaboration and creativity.
At the end of the day, I believe the most interesting aspect of the future of creativity is about raising the collective creative potential rather than holding on to a fear of anything or anyone replacing it.
The fact that the creative economy is one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy right now globally helping to boost social development and employment makes me excited and makes up for the times I have felt defeated by ignorance in power.
I believe the rapid growth of challenging creative structures to the westernised categorization of ‘creative’ is forcing us to appreciate creativity for what it really is — an ever-evolving driving force of humanity.
