The End Of Creativity In The Tech Industry

This expert opinion by Joe Procopio, Founder of JoeProcopio.com, was originally published on Inc.com.

Raise your hand if you’re still working in the tech industry … and you’re still enjoying it. 

Oh, hey! A lot more hands than I thought. Wait, Steve, put your damn hand down! I know you hate your life right now. Whom are you trying to fool?

So, yeah, there are still quite a few hands up, but far fewer hands than there were just a few months ago. That’s the general consensus from my peers, anyway.

Over my own three decades of time served in the tech industry, hopping from one new technological advancement to the next, I’ve never seen tech work become as much of a slog as it is today. There are a lot of reasons for this—macro industry economics, the specter of AI replacement, the general public’s distaste for an alleged nerd oligarchy—and I get it! 

But those are just symptoms of a greater disease, and the disease is what I’ve been talking about with my tech industry peers.

Creativity is dying. That’s probably not news to you. But what is news is that I have uncovered how it’s taking the entire tech industry down with it.

There is no such thing as a flywheel for creativity

As the tech industry continues to spin the giant flywheel of bloated features and AI-driven innovations, let me drop a pearl of wisdom I learned in the long-long-ago. Because this problem didn’t start yesterday and it didn’t start with AI.

Some of the best coders I’ve ever worked with—and I’ve worked with some of the best—I hesitate to work with again, because they couldn’t muster a single spark of creativity. 

I don’t know why that is. Maybe there’s something about the profession of tech—maybe because of the emphasis on left-brain skills necessary to muster the desire to get into it—that discourages the right-brain skills necessary to succeed with it.

That said, if I can find a person who can make me laugh and do math in their head, I’ll pay that person whatever they want. Because they’re going to drag us through the worst of times while pushing us into the best of times. 

Here’s the problem. The business of tech has turned into a morass of pushing inelegant and unnecessary features through a machine of sprints and retros to produce an infinite number of pieces of software and hardware that nobody really needs or even wants anymore. 

Well, if I’m going to be more precise and less hyperbolic, the actual problem is that the exact strategy I just described is super profitable, at least at first. A company gets an idea, creates the flywheel, spins it, and then just keeps throwing features at the flywheel at the proper angle to keep it spinning. 

OK. No. Hold on. The real real problem is that creativity doesn’t have a flywheel. You can’t schedule creativity. You can’t rely on creativity to show up and push the flywheel at the appointed time. 

However, if creativity doesn’t make a regular appearance, you’re screwed. Here’s why.

There Is No Sustainability Without Creativity

I hear you, you beautiful dissenter. “This is fine,” you say. “We can succeed without creativity. The most successful businesses in history were also the most boring.”

This came up a lot in my conversations and I realized … it’s just not true.

Well, sure, the mythical step-by-step, B-school-birthed, numbers-driven business is the holy grail that those B-school folks have been analyzing and studying since the invention of the balance sheet. Like Phillip looking down his nose at Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School. Classic.

And boring works. For a while.

But I’m not even talking about the need for that kind of creativity—the bells-and-whistles-and-jazz-hands kind.

I’m talking about the kind of creativity that is the fuel that solves big, hairy problems—problems that are either threats or opportunities for any tech business.

There’s no magical crisis-solving fire hose conveniently placed behind glass. There’s no acronym-ready formula for systematically turning a great idea into a lucrative reality.

Well, yeah, there are both of those things, but they’re almost always scams.

And if a business doesn’t get the occasional whiff of massive opportunity or has the sense to recognize the stench of impending failure every so often, it’s not doing real business. Not for long. And if there were a dot-connectable plan for swiftly capitalizing on those opportunities or neatly sidestepping those failures, well, then, we’d all be rich.

Are we all rich?

“Hey, ChatGPT, make me rich.”

There Is No Such Thing As A Chief Creative Officer

Creativity without direction is improv. It’s costly and most people hate it, unless you get really good at it. Direction without creativity is the Titanic. And icebergs don’t look like icebergs from a distance.

You need balance. But when you replace all the direction and acceleration with a perpetually spinning flywheel, you can’t just balance that out with a separate but equal force of creativity. 

There is no such thing as a chief creative officer. Except in, like, Mad Men-style marketing. But even that CCO will tell you that creativity doesn’t flow from a single source. That CCO isn’t the fountain of creativity, they’re just the wrangler.

And so, yeah, even though the tech industry tries to bake the necessary creative balance into teams of product, strategy, innovation, or even the office of the CTO or the CEO themself, expecting creativity out of a single source is like buying one Ping-Pong table for 1,000 employees. It’s not to address employee stress, it’s just for photos on the careers page.

Lately, the tech industry has been trying to lean into AI to optimize the output of customer support, HR, and now coders and overall software development. They’re just waiting for that directional flywheel to spin on its own accord. 

And maybe it will, but it’ll lack balance.

I’d love to say that all it takes is one person steering the Titanic of technical creativity, because that person would be me and I’d make a fortune. But it takes more than that. It takes creativity from the entire team, or from most of the team anyway. 

Creativity can’t be optimized, but the balance between creativity and direction can. 

We’ve forgotten that.

I’ll keep reminding you to remind others to bring balance to the tech industry. Please join my email list so you can get a heads-up when I’m published.