Drinking from the same Creative Well
I’ve been thinking about how ideas form now, and how often they feel familiar before they’ve even landed. Not because creativity is weaker, but because the conditions around it have changed in ways we’re only beginning to understand. We live in a moment where inspiration is everywhere and yet strangely narrow, where the algorithm of life and social media operate as essentially the same mechanism at different scales, both funnelling most people towards the same cultural signals, processed through the same platforms, reinforced by the same feedback loops that quietly shape not just what we discover but what we believe is worth discovering.
Why Inputs Matter More Than Ideas
That’s why I’ve always believed the most important part of any creative process sits upstream of the idea itself, in territory most briefs never acknowledge and most timelines don’t allow space for. How many inputs you allow in. How varied they are. How much friction you’re willing to tolerate before everything gets smoothed into something presentable. The things that don’t resolve neatly are often the things that produce the most interesting outcomes, because they resist the pressure to fit into existing frameworks.For me, this has meant gravitating towards people who think in irregular ways, whose brains don’t move in straight lines. Dyslexia, ADHD, pattern recognition shaped by lived experience rather than formal frameworks: these aren’t alternative perspectives to acknowledge politely in a deck, they’re essential counterweights in a culture that pushes everything towards sameness. They notice what linear thinking misses, the connection between disparate references, the value in the abandoned tangent, the solution that doesn’t follow the expected logic tree but arrives somewhere stranger and more specific because it was allowed to wander.
Social Computation and the Architecture of Consensus
What complicates this further is that we’re not just dealing with algorithms that curate what we see. We’re dealing with what researchers call social computation, where collective behaviour becomes a kind of distributed processing system that shapes cultural output. Every like, share, save and screenshot feeds back into what gets surfaced next, creating loops that amplify certain ideas whilst burying others before they’ve had time to breathe. The crowd isn’t just consuming creativity anymore, it’s actively determining what counts as creative, and that changes the fundamental dynamics of which ideas survive long enough to be called original.This isn’t inherently bad. But it does mean that popularity and quality become harder to disentangle, and that ideas which resonate quickly tend to be ideas that already feel somewhat familiar, slotting neatly into existing mental models rather than challenging them. Trends emerge, peak and exhaust themselves in compressed timeframes, leaving less room for the slow, strange ideas that take longer to understand but carry more staying power.
References, Accumulation, and the Long View
Years ago, I had an ongoing conversation with John Tree about where ideas come from and why some work feels alive whilst other work is simply iterative. At the time he designed the Yale padlock, drawing inspiration from the feeling of a smooth heavy stone in your hand. Those conversations shaped how I worked. Off the back of them, I started building a broad and eclectic collection of books, not as a formal library or a badge of taste, but as a personal archive of curiosity, things I didn’t fully understand yet, things that sat outside whatever the dominant conversation was at the time.The logic was simple: if you ask the internet for inspiration without deliberately digging into obscure archives or forgotten blogs, the references you find are the same ones circulating everywhere else. A curated personal archive works differently because it reflects accumulation over time rather than immediacy. No one else has lived with that exact mix of material, so the connections it produces tend to be stranger, slower, and more personal.
A Pitch, A Reflection
It was probably all of this that came back to me when, a few years ago, we pitched an idea we didn’t win, moved on as you do, and then months later saw the work appear in the world. It wasn’t copied. But it was close enough to feel uncanny, close enough to recognise the same thinking arriving from somewhere else entirely.What initially felt like a sort of theft revealed itself as something structural. A lived example of convergence. The brief was similar, the cultural moment was similar, and the inputs most people had access to were similar. But here’s what that experience crystallised: it didn’t feel validating that we’d been right. It felt like confirmation that we’d been ordinary. That we’d drawn from the same well as everyone else, just slightly earlier, and what we’d mistaken for originality was simply timing. That realisation was a better lesson than winning the pitch.
Managers of Consensus
Most leaders, including politicians, aren’t curators of originality anymore. They’re managers of consensus. And the sooner the industry admits that curation has replaced creation, the sooner we can stop pretending good taste is the same thing as good thinking. Taste can be taught, shared, democratised through mood boards and reference decks and carefully curated feeds. But thinking, actual thinking, requires something messier and harder to systemise. It requires perspective, and perspective is shaped slowly, through what you choose to pay attention to over time, who you talk to, what you collect, and how willing you are to step outside the main current.The audience itself increasingly operates this way too, holding contradictions without apology and resisting neat categorisation. Trading down in one area whilst splurging in another. Rejecting brands whilst trusting individuals. Craving convenience and meaning in equal measure. Creativity that isn’t grounded in experience struggles here, because it feels designed by people who understand the semiotics of authenticity but not the texture of it.
Innovation happens between disciplines, between people, between ways of thinking. Not within closed systems where everyone’s working from the same playbook.
The Last Differentiator
In that context, originality isn’t about novelty anymore. It’s about perspective. And building perspective means going back to the shelf instead of the feed, not out of nostalgia, but as a way of widening the well before you draw from it again.
Though even as I write that, I’m aware this argument itself draws from shared wells: essays about algorithmic culture, discourse on neurodiversity in business, analysis of Gen Z behaviour, all of it circulating through the same platforms I’m supposedly critiquing. Maybe there’s no way out of the loop, only degrees of self-awareness about which part of it you’re stuck in, and whether you’re willing to swim against the current occasionally, even when it’s exhausting and inefficient and produces work that doesn’t always land immediately.