I’ve worked on projects that brought structured content models to dozens of content creators, and the most common pushback I’ve heard from them is that structured content kills creativity.
Usually this comes from people trained in traditional writing disciplines.
I see two problems with this:
- Creating content in a business isn’t about being creative for creativity’s sake. It’s about achieving business goals and meeting user needs.
- It misdiagnoses both creativity and structure. This applies outside of the content world too.
The misdiagnosis of creativity
If we rephrase the objection to apply beyond the world of content, we might say “structure kills creativity.”
But here’s the thing. That’s not true at all.
We’re confusing where creativity happens with whether it exists.
The symptoms when creativity is misdiagnosed
There’s a few subtle symptoms to help catch when you’re starting to assume creativity is only a late-stage activity (beside from that obvious statement “structure kills creativity”).
- Inconsistency gets mistaken for originality.
- Heroic last-minute changes are overvalued.
- Novelty gets confused with innovation.
- Creativity is recognized only in outputs, not inputs.
How we should shift our thinking about creativity
Once we step back and acknowledge that—of course—creativity exists even when there is structure, we can then realize that creativity happened earlier in the process. It took creativity, albeit a different kind of creativity, to create the structure we’re being asked to work within.
Thus, we realize that creativity shifts us upstream, from:
- Writing to modeling
- Modeling to systems design
- Page assembly to automation
- Creating all the things to deciding what can exist
- Expression to enablement
And it’s that last move that may be the key to this shift. An artist may focus on personal expression through music, media, or materials, and if that’s all they do, that’s fine. But what if they add teaching others to their capabilities, enabling more people to express themselves?
Back in the content world, maybe it’s teaching those writers how to shift from the words-on-page creativity to identifying and codifying content patterns into content models. (Ahem, I’d like to introduce you to Model Thinking.)
How to diagnose a true creativity problem
I don’t want to be overly idealistic. It’s quite possible to have problems with creativity. Here’s a couple of symptoms of constrained or missing creativity:
- Nothing is wrong but everything is bland. The system may have squeezed creativity out.
- People wait for direction instead of offering ideas. If you’re hearing “just tell me what you want” more than “here’s two ways we could do this,” risk avoidance has displaced creativity.
The misdiagnosis of structure
When we give assent to the idea that “structure kills creativity,” we’re not just doing creativity an injustice. We misunderstand the work that structure is doing for us, and it brings real costs that we feel deeply.
The symptoms when structure is misdiagnosed
It’s harder to catch when structure is being misdiagnosed, but senior-level contributors—strategists, architects, designers, and systems thinkers—should be able to notice these symptoms.
- People and teams experience overwhelm. This is the classic “blank page syndrome” where you don’t know where to start because there are so many possible directions you could go.
- Decision fatigue sets in. Humans make 35,000 decisions a day, and decision quality declines the more decisions we make. This dovetails closely with experiencing overwhelm.
- Difficult conversations are overdue. Face it: we don’t want to discuss hard things if we can avoid it. So we might tend to push the difficult conversation down the road, leaving it to surface late when subsequent decisions are much more costly.
How we should shift our thinking about structure
We already know that we need to start seeing structure as evidence of creativity, but we need to realize that structure is there to lighten our load and make us more efficient.
Purposeful structure will kill things that weigh us and our teams down, such as:
- The illusion that creativity removes uncertainty at the last minute
- Endless re-deciding (or as I might say with more charged language: endless relitigation)
- Unconfronted ambiguity
- Permission to avoid alignment
How to diagnose a real structural problem
If you’re like me, my inner information architect wants to perfectly organize everything, even when there’s no real need. If I’m not careful, I can create arbitrary structure, and that “too much structure” is not a good place to be. In addition to too much structure, you might have the wrong structure or not enough structure.
Signs of a structural problem include:
- Every project feels like it’s the first time. Everything is hard because you’re relying on ad hoc work. Structure isn’t there or isn’t doing enough.
- Rules exist without a clear “why.” People can’t tell you why the rule is there. Structure is inert.
- Edge cases trigger workarounds instead of solutions. There’s no feedback loop, and the system doesn’t adapt.
- Structure constrains ways of working. People spend more time fitting work into the system than thinking about how to improve the system. Structure doesn’t match reality.
The prescription
If your organization is producing outputs full of inconsistency—or if you’re seeing a lot of rework or experiencing fatigue, avoidance, or poor judgment—it may not be a creativity problem.
It may be that creativity is being asked to do too much, too late.
Try shifting creativity earlier. Apply it to inputs instead of outputs. Use creativity to decide what can exist, not just how things are expressed.
Structure and creativity aren’t opposites. Structure is the result of creativity upstream where it can make bigger, longer-lasting impact.