Rational versus Creative - come out fighting

I've been watching the livestream from this year's Nudgestock Festival of Behavioural Science - an event I'm a huge fan of (and I've spoken there several times). 

Behavioural guru Rory Sutherland made an interesting point just now: 

'Creative people always have to present their ideas to rational people ... it almost never happens the other way round.' 

He's right (and so is that Woodrow Wilson quote on the slide). 

But that wasn't always the truth. 

Once upon a time creative people could present their ideas to creative management - that's how we ended up with Monty Python and Blackadder, Kate Bush and Harry Potter. They got made/ recorded/ published because someone creative once said, 'I have no data to support this as a good idea but I feel that it might be a good idea so let's run with it.' 

This is an issue right across the whole spectrum of work. Businesses need creativity. They need fresh new ideas. But they're not going to get them if the creatives have to use logic and data to sell an idea to management. Sometimes there is no data because their idea has never been done before. I have some bitter experience of this. 

Around eight years ago I once wrote a trilogy of comedy murder mysteries. My agent couldn't sell them to traditional publishers. What he got back from them was, 'This is well-written, very funny. I liked it a lot but there's no market for comedy murder mystery.' No data you see. 

But then along came Richard Osman. 

Now there's data. And a market. What the publishers didn't do is go with their gut. Or ask the public if they liked the idea. 

There are almost no new British comedy novels because the data says, 'There's no market'. That's because the big hitters like Douglas Adams, Sue Townsend, Tom Sharpe, etc. have all died. With no new comedy bestsellers, the data now says that comedy novels don't sell. And so, an entire wonderful historical legacy of British comedic writing from Jerome K Jerome to Terry Pratchett has been wiped out. If a bookshop has a comedy section (and many don't these days) it's invariably TV tie-ins of memoirs by comedians.

And you wonder why I rail against the defunding of creativity in schools? 

And why I spend half my life pointing out that creativity is more important to businesses than degrees?

Things need to change.