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If I asked you to nominate the ‘creative’ person in your workplace, who would it be?

You might be lucky and have a team of advertising/design staff who ooze a cool weirdness all around the company. If you’re sitting in an open plan environment with 50 identical cubical and white-collar shirts and software limited to the Microsoft business package – chances are you’d need to look a little harder to find a hot spot of creativity.

But, I assure you it’s there.

People in Creative Industries have worked for generations to fool the world into thinking they have complete domination over the ‘creative’ label. Chances are, once this article is published – a man in a turtleneck and bespoke hat will knock on my office door with a cease and desist letter, warning me to stop sharing our secrets. I admit to feeding into and profiting from the illusion of ‘creativity being a rare gift, bestowed upon a few’ for most of my career. But the state of the world demands that we all make changes. The world needs some creative problem solving, some innovative solutions and new ways of seeing the world.

Take another look around your open plan office environment (or equivalent). See the person who lives and breathes Excel spreadsheets. This person is a designer of information. This person is a designer of perception. This person is a designer of knowledge. It takes creativity to design ways that best suit the data that needs to be communicated, and creativity to engage with the audience (or target market) for that Excel spreadsheet. It takes creative problem solving to find solutions to errors within the calculations and a self-directed learning mindset to search online for resources to stay up to date with the perpetually evolving software. The reality is, this Excel spreadsheet is a designed outcome, some might even say a work of art.

Take another look around your open plan office environment (or equivalent). See the person who creates staff schedules. This person is a designer of people. This person is a designer of families and communities. This person is a designer of mental health and wellness. This person uses time as their creative medium. The brief for this role requires this person to ensure that every minute of the day and every key task is allocated to a suitable individual. Just like paint or clay changes consistency with atmospheric changes, the availability and suitability of staff can change at any given moment. The person designing staff schedules uses iterative design processes to identify solutions, and alternatives if someone is unavailable. Those of us who design people's lives have a significant impact on our companies and our societies. Happy staff perform best. Happy home-life contributes to positive mental well-being. The person in your company who designs schedules is one of your most important creative practitioners.

Have one last mental scan of the people in your office. See the person who is ‘front of house’. Perhaps they are a receptionist, an assistant or someone at a sales terminal. This person is a designer of first impressions. They are designers of experience. They design everything that exists between the customers/clients and the rest of your organisation. They are creative problem solvers that use their design skills in response to immediate situations with the resources they have available in the moment. These types of designers know all of the company policies and use creativity to bend these policies to suit the needs of their target audience. These designers rely on creativity to walk the line between ‘the customer is always right’ and ‘we are here to make money’. One of the biggest design challenges is often telling a person something that they don’t want to hear, and still managing to have them leave the conversation happy. These people design information, they design inter-personal relationships and they use creative thinking to work within organisational policies that don’t always translate well to the front-of-house operations.

These three examples highlight the diverse ways in which most people use creative thinking and design in business environments. Regardless of whether it is acknowledged or labelled as creative practice – creativity is everywhere. Businesses do not function without creative people. The more creativity is valued and nurtured, the stronger a business will become.

Valuing the diversity of creative practice also supports the ‘obvious creative folk’ in your workplace. Designers, the advertising team, social media managers all thrive on having their creativity acknowledged and appreciated. We often feel like we are born with a very special gift, that seems to only ever put us in the low end of the median income bracket. It’s important to not ever limit your creative people to a narrow career progression pathway. They are likely able to transfer their creativity to support other roles. Creative leaders often have unique and intuitive abilities when it comes to managing others, designing logistic solutions, interpreting data and trends in the market. We often see these ‘noncreative roles’ as just new fields of design, or new materials to design with.

This holistic view of design and creativity not only supports strong organisations, it also provides a lens through which we can see our colleagues differently. When things aren’t working, or problems arise, designers are able to take this information and present multiple solutions, test those solutions and further refine them. The world needs more creative thinkers. But more than that – it needs people to value and nurture creative people.