We train creativity out of kids, then pay to get it back. Here's how to keep it. #
Posted July 1, 2026 [ Reviewed by Davia Sills
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Key points
- The best creative breakthroughs come from play and a little pressure, not shortcutting straight to the answer.
- We abandon childlike imagination partly out of ego, and now can hide our unfinished thinking behind AI polish.
- Businesses now pay to reintroduce the childlike thinking we've trained ourselves out of.
- The way back isn't a new app; it's a pencil, paper, and permission to make a mess.
In my years in advertising, those of us in the so-called Creative Department of the agency often worried we’d had our last good idea. But eventually, we always proved ourselves wrong. Our imaginations and our conversations with each other would create a flurry of improbable connections and laugh-out-loud silly notions, yielding something magical out of nothing.
The magic came from the play, and yes, a little from the pressure too. Both forced us somewhere we couldn’t have gotten on our own.
Today we’ve short-circuited both, defaulting to the easy solution: off the thinking onto technology, fast-forwarding past the childlike part that produces the unexpected answer. We've forgotten how to think like a child—open to every possibility, endlessly inventive, not looking for shortcuts, but always seeking magic.
There’s another reason we’ve abandoned our playful nature, and it’s less flattering: ego. We want to look smart. We don’t want to look silly, unfinished, or like we might fail in front of other people. AI is the perfect accomplice because it hands us something polished and professional to hide behind.
But the rough, the imperfect, the visibly-still-thinking is exactly where the magic lives. A child doesn’t care if the drawing is good. That’s their superpower. We trade it away the moment we start caring what the room thinks.
I learned this early. One of my very first clients was Kentucky Fried Chicken, and they needed a newspaper campaign that would get people buying their chicken for more occasions. We had a lot of really lame and corny ideas.
Then, almost out of boredom, I picked up a black grease pencil and started drawing right on top of the photos of the packaging. I gave the box wheels, and suddenly we were taking KFC on a road trip. I scribbled a TV antenna on it (back in the day when people still remembered TVs with antennas!), and now it was dinner in front of the game. Within an hour, we had a dozen scenes—picnics, class reunions, study sessions, moving parties—each one sparked by a crude mark on a picture, each one letting the reader’s own imagination supply the rest.
And here’s the part I still love: those ugly grease-pencil scribbles didn’t just spark the campaign. They became it. The ads ran exactly like that: wheels, antenna, and all. No one cared that the drawings were rough. That was the whole point.
I recently discovered a company built entirely on injecting that childlike thinking back into real business situations. It’s called ConsultingKids, the brainchild of a Dutch entrepreneur named Bas Warmerdam. He organizes think tanks of fifth-graders to help companies solve real problems—translating the business case into games and language kids understand, letting them problem-solve in their own idea-flooded way, then translating their solutions back into business terms.
He also runs a workshop that reintroduces grown-ups to the imagination they still have but have forgotten how to reach. There’s a quiet irony in it: as Sir Ken Robinson famously argued, we spend our early years training the creativity out of children—and then, decades later, pay consultants to put it back.
If I had to name one path back to your childlike imagination, it wouldn’t be a new app. It would be the oldest tools we have: a pencil, a piece of paper, and permission to make a mess. Doodle your way toward the idea instead of prompting your way to it. You’ll see connections you’d never have found otherwise—not because the drawing is good, but because you stopped caring whether it was. That’s the part of you that once conjured a friend out of thin air. It’s still in there. Go let it play.
References
Brown, Sunni. 2014. The Doodle Revolution: Unlock the Power to Think Differently. New York: Portfolio