PART TWO: Creativity Is HARD
Especially in Miscalibrated Systems
Author Note: This is Part Two of a five-part series on Rewilding America’s Creative Economy to Meet the Demands of a Cognitive Industrial Revolution. Each part builds on the last, so I recommend starting with Part One for additional context.
Say the Hard Thing
For the last few decades, the arts and creative industries have pitched ourselves as the linchpin of culture and creativity. National groups, such as Americans for the Arts (AFTA), where I serve on the board, have worked tirelessly to articulate why the arts matter. I recently co-chaired our CEO search and am excited to support our brand new leader, Erin Harkey. She is the right leader for the challenges ahead.
AFTA’s advocacy campaigns often highlight ten reasons the arts matter, including strengthening economies, driving tourism, improving healthcare, sparking innovation, supporting mental health, and more. I believe all of that. The research backs it up.
But belief and research alone aren’t enough. And of course, AFTA isn’t alone in its talking points. Look at most arts advocacy organizations across the country, and you’ll find some version of the same. If we’re going to stake our relevance on these claims, we also have to ask: what proof do we have that we’re succeeding at the sector level?
As I laid out in Part One, the data trends don’t look good. Where are the systems that convert our beliefs and research into demonstrated outcomes that show we’re delivering on our promises at scale, not just in isolated examples? What does success look like beyond GDP contributions and anecdotal wins?
If we want the work to matter more, we have to be willing to examine the systems we’ve built to shape it.
On this point, I’ve noticed something even more troubling: in the arts and creative industries, those who raise difficult questions are too often labeled as disloyal, or worse, naive. When did asking honest, hard questions become off-limits in a field that champions authenticity, complexity, and courageous imagination? That may be the core of our most urgent challenge.
Recognizing that the systems and strategies we’ve built often lack lasting creative consequence is just the start. And we’re not alone in that. Four out of ten business entrepreneurs fail because there’s no real market for what they’ve built. The harder question is why. With so much unique talent, so many skills, and so many tools, why do the arts and creative industries still struggle to stick? Why does the work so often fall short of mattering in a way that endures?
There are relationships you outgrow, not because they were broken, but because you’ve changed. You can love something deeply and still know it no longer fits. The hardest part isn’t feeling that shift. It’s saying it out loud.
That’s what this moment feels like to me.
Over my personal and professional life, I’ve worked in almost every corner of the arts and creative industries. When you spend that many years inside a system, it’s hard not to make mistakes. I take responsibility for the parts I’ve helped build. Good and bad. Even then, what counts as “good” or “bad” is often a matter of perspective and time.
Despite all the rhetoric, the arts and creative industries are shaped by the same human challenges, egos, and ambitions found in every other system.
Creativity is neither benevolent nor malevolent. It depends on who is using it and why.
Here’s a hard thing to say: our most difficult challenge today isn’t driven primarily by external market forces. It’s internal. It lives in the systems we’ve built. Systems often marked by limited imagination and heavy structure, by myopic mindset and fractured feedback. Together, they shape how creative work and the creative industry itself are produced, packaged, and perceived.
These systems weren’t designed to fail. In my experience, they were built by smart, caring people trying to do good work with the information and conditions they had. But over time, structures meant to support and scale began to harden. What once enabled artists and cultural producers to grow has started to confine them.
This isn’t a critique of the people inside the system. It is a challenge to the architecture we’ve inherited over several generations. If we want the work to matter more, we owe it to ourselves to examine whether the architecture we've inherited still fits. The first step of innovation isn’t coming up with new ideas. It’s letting go of what’s holding us back.
And that’s where it gets hard. Because what needs to be released is often the very thing that once helped us survive.
Letting go isn’t a creative exercise. It’s an emotional one.
Creative Resistance Signals
Once you say the hard thing, you’re left with the even harder work: figuring out what to do next. Most people don’t resist change because they’re lazy or indifferent. They resist it because they’ve been burned, boxed in, or left out. What we call resistance is often something else entirely. It’s confusion. It’s grief. It’s exhausted hope wearing the mask of consensual indifference— an unspoken mutual agreement to remain unconcerned or uninvolved, which can be seen as a form of passive consent to whatever is happening.
In my experience, the deeper barriers to innovation aren’t about creativity itself. They’re about the systems and signals we’ve learned to navigate to survive. And those patterns run deep, not just in institutions, but in our minds and bodies.
Resistance isn’t dysfunction. It’s data.
We’ve all heard the phrase “think outside the box.” It comes from a simple nine-dot puzzle that requires drawing lines beyond an imagined boundary. Over time, it became shorthand for creativity in business.
But the irony is that most organizations are built like boxes.
America’s arts and creative industries infrastructure today didn’t grow outside of that mindset. It came from it. We emerged alongside industrial systems designed for stability, predictability, and control. Roles were clearly defined. Processes became standardized. These traits made sense in an era focused on repetition and scale.
I’ll note here that some creative economies, especially those rooted in Indigenous, grassroots, or place-based contexts, have long operated outside that model. These systems were often built on principles of reciprocity, emotional meaning, and collective resilience. There’s a lot we can learn from and with them now.
For those of us working inside the creative industries infrastructure, it’s worth remembering that we didn’t come from machines. We came from nature.
And nature, the greatest innovator, doesn’t work in boxes. It evolves through curves, spirals, branches, and irregular patterns. These forms aren’t chaotic. They are adaptive, efficient, and resilient. Biological systems don’t resist change. They metabolize it.
That’s the tension. We’ve built our organizations to function like well-oiled machines, focused on precision, control, and repeatability. But the world around us, and the cultural appetites we aim to serve, behave more like an ecosystem: volatile, complex, and constantly evolving.
Systems built for performance aren’t the problem. The problem is what kind of performance we’re measuring.
When performance gets defined only by efficiency, predictability, and scale, it leaves little room for imagination, adaptation, or long-term value.
Today’s creative industries have built workforce systems that prioritize yesterday’s proven successes instead of nurturing tomorrow’s untested possibilities. Structure has become rigidity. Alignment has turned into conformity. Strategy has been reduced to a checklist. And the more we optimize for what worked last time, the less capacity we have to create what’s needed next.
That’s what makes creative capacity so hard to activate, even in the “creative” industries. Creativity, as the science increasingly shows, is less about generating ideas and more about navigating the emotional and structural friction that comes with trying to move through systems designed for certainty.
Metabolizing creative capacity is hard because it’s change management in disguise.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to move people through uncertainty in commerce and culture. Sacred traditions like Buddhism’s five poisons, management frameworks such as The Human Element and William Bridges’ work on transitions, and even Thomas Merton and bell hooks perspectives on love have all shaped how I understand the human side of metabolizing creativity at scale.
Here’s what I’ve found to be the common denominator across most creative systems: resistance doesn’t usually show up as loud objection. It shows up as something quieter, but just as disruptive. Creative Resistance Signals are recurring psychological patterns that act like brakes on innovation. They aren’t personal flaws. They’re signals.
What we often label as resistance might be something deeper—a misalignment of values that never got articulated. Until those values are surfaced and shared, no structural fix will stick. But if we learn to read these signals, they can show us exactly where creative momentum is stuck.
Stillthinking
This is the deceptive calm of consensus. It looks like alignment, but often signals fatigue, fear, or a lack of participatory safety. People may feel safe enough to speak, but not convinced their input will shape anything that matters. The brain’s Default Mode Network, which supports imagination and internal narrative, needs time and space to roam. Without it, and without a reason to engage, the work flattens into what’s already known. In these conditions, the most practiced or confident voices tend to take up the space, while the most reflective ones hold back.
Friction Fatigue
This is the slow wear-down that comes from too many small barriers. New ideas start to feel like uphill battles. When the Salience Network is overstimulated and poorly directed, attention fragments. Focus gets lost in the noise. Energy drains, even when motivation is high. Creative friction isn’t always the enemy. When properly supported, it can sharpen outcomes and provoke more meaningful innovation. The problem is not friction itself, but systems that lack the pathways to metabolize it productively.Fear Echo
This is the residue of past failures that were never processed. Teams remember what went wrong, even if no one says it out loud. That memory often lives in the limbic system, the brain’s emotional center, and shows up as avoidance, not resistance. That unspoken grief can suppress risk-taking long after the original wound has faded. It’s Innovation Grief in disguise, a kind of protective hesitancy that makes the next big leap feel too dangerous, even when the risk is worth it.Rebel Reflex
We all know this one well. It’s the side-eye. That ‘who do they think they are?’ mentality. This is the snap reaction to someone else’s idea of change. It often shows up when people feel excluded or when a new direction threatens their sense of control. Our brain’s Executive Control Network interprets this as a threat to agency. Without shared meaning or authorship, even smart proposals can trigger quiet refusal.
It might surprise you to know that none of this is dysfunction. It’s data. These reactions tell us where the creative metabolism of an organization has stalled. If we ignore the data signals, nothing moves. If we decode them, we can begin the deeper work of realignment.
Miscalibrated Feedback Loops
These internal barriers don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re reinforced by the feedback loops we’ve built into our systems. These loops were meant to guide decision-making. But too often, they reward what’s familiar and fast instead of what’s meaningful and durable.
A majority of our creative industries systems are brilliant at identifying sameness and funding it. With the rise of artificial intelligence, those impulses are likely to intensify, stripping tension from stories before they ever reach an audience.
The result is a loop optimized for loudness. Business decisions that favor quantity over coherence. Systems that accelerate iteration but leaves no space for accumulation. When trend mimicry becomes the most rewarded behavior, it diminishes the appetite for emotional ambition. In the arts and creative industries, allowing that to happen guts the very thing that builds our most enduring commercial and cultural value.
We’ve seen this in real time. The recent Warner Bros. journey with the "Max" brand, and its subsequent re-embracing of HBO's distinct identity, isn’t just a corporate confession and course correction. To me, it’s a powerful real-world example of this dynamic. It highlights how a cultural system, and a brand, can struggle to metabolize meaning when its feedback loops are calibrated more for broad metrics than for cultivating deep memory and identity.
When Warner Bros. dropped “HBO” from its flagship brand, it followed a familiar industry logic: scale breadth, chase volume, and soften specificity in the name of mass appeal. But in doing so, it deprioritized decades of carefully built emotional infrastructure along with an identity that carried meaning, memory, and trust. The result was brand confusion and a dilution of cultural weight. When the company reversed course, it wasn’t just a marketing correction. It was a quiet acknowledgment of a deeper truth: systems that treat virality as value tend to erase the very things that make culture stick.
Culture doesn’t scale like code. It accumulates. It needs duration, managed risk, and narrative consequence to land and take root.
This is about more than brand strategy. It reveals a deeper structural truth. The entertainment industry hasn’t stopped producing; it’s stopped processing. As I discussed in Part One, the problem isn’t a shortage of ideas. The James Webb Space Telescope proves that wonder is alive and well. When those images drop, they don’t trend—they land. People don’t scroll. They stare.
The arts and creative industries need to relearn how to hold that kind of resonance. Our audiences are ready to feel something bigger. But too often, there’s nowhere for that feeling to go. No narrative net. No shared story to turn our deep well of creative wealth into meaning that matters.
Structural Fault Lines
This is what cultural stagnation looks like. Audiences aren’t disengaged. They’re metabolically stranded. We’re still moving vast amounts of content and messaging, but we’ve stopped converting novelty into resonance. Rewilding the system means rebalancing it. And without confronting how power, voice, and capital are distributed, we risk re-staging the same imbalance under a more poetic name.
From my perspective, we have four major structural fault lines where the creative industry's operating model is out of sync with culture’s deeper needs:
Time Asymmetry
If our catalogs and content strategies can’t carry memory, they can’t carry meaning. Many of our systems are built for immediacy, but culture moves in long arcs. The Webb images hit hard because they tap into something older than the moment. Time bent. Wonder worked. Can we name the last streaming title or fundraising campaign that achieved a similar feat of enduring cultural memory? It's challenging because we often don’t give our stories the time or the conditions to mean something lasting.
Risk Asymmetry
Creative risk isn’t a liability to be minimized; it’s one of the few things culture still responds to with depth. There’s a perception that audiences are fragile and need protection from discomfort. Perhaps it’s our P&L statements that are more fragile. Whenever a writer or creator brings ambiguity, contradiction, or narrative tension, the system asks, “Will it test well?” In some ways, we’ve industrialized a fear of discomfort. Yet, that discomfort is often where meaning, catharsis, and transformation live. Audiences don’t necessarily need us to protect them; they need us to stop reflexively protecting ourselves from the power of challenging stories.
Not everyone carries the same level of risk. Creators with unconventional cognitive styles or limited economic safety nets are often expected to deliver clarity, safety, and palatability, while absorbing more of the fallout when risks don’t land. Until the system finds ways to share creative and economic burdens and benefits more intentionally, it will continue to reinforce the fragility it claims to avoid.
Memory Asymmetry
Spotify doesn’t know the song I sang at my mother’s funeral, but I do. We risk replacing deep human ritual and personal meaning with algorithmic memory. Our platforms know what we clicked, but they don’t know what broke us open, what healed us, or what stayed with us for a lifetime. We remember behavior, not always meaning. Recommender engines can mimic taste with incredible accuracy, but can’t mirror longing or the complexity of lived experience. We've built systems that excel at remembering interactions but can easily forget the deeper human significance.
System Asymmetry
Our systems can often spot a potential hit based on past patterns, but can they detect a hinge in the culture, a moment, or an idea that could shift perspective? We’ve built incredible infrastructure for monetization, but much less for sustained meaning-making. We’ve outsourced the design of attention to platform logic, making critical format decisions based on A/B tests instead of deep insight into what moves, changes, and connects an audience.
Many of those decisions are shaped by algorithms that reward speed, polarization, and surface-level engagement. What rises to the top often reflects machine optimization more than cultural relevance or emotional depth. The problem isn’t a lack of creativity. It’s the absence of a feedback infrastructure, the connective tissue that allows artists, technologists, and audiences to evolve together.
We don’t need to burn the existing system down. We need to rewild it.
In an elemental way, arts and creative industries are in the attention business, yet we've sometimes outsourced the deep design of that attention. We've built machines that know what works according to current metrics, but we must also ensure they help us understand why something matters in the long run.
The challenge isn't a lack of creative talent or technological tools. Our creative ecosystems' underlying "metabolism" is miscalibrated. We are expert movers of material, but our systems sometimes struggle to convert novelty into lasting resonance. What’s missing isn’t creative potential. It’s the internal infrastructure required to perform in a cognitive industrial revolution: the pathways, the protocols, and the commercial structures that can unlock and amplify the immense creative wealth already embedded within our organizations and artistic communities.
UP NEXT: PART THREE
Creativity America: A New Metabolism for Creative Wealth
We’ve named the barriers. Now comes the harder part: building a system that doesn’t just produce content, but metabolizes creative wealth into long-term economic value and cultural consequence. In Part Three, I’ll share my thinking behind founding Creativity America, not as a campaign, but as a strategic system rooted in the arts and science of creativity.
©2013-2025 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved.
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Co-Edit Statement
As a neurodiverse writer, I use AI to support editorial clarity and structure. The conceptual frameworks, metaphors, and systems logic reflect my own thinking, grounded in lived experience and interdisciplinary research. AI contributed to refining language, not generating ideas. Original analysis, arguments, and insights are my own.
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