The Daily Mail reports the word ‘creative’ is #1 in the top ten most over-used business buzzwords, according to Facebook’s analysis of users’ profiles. It seems the word is now officially declared meaningless and we are advised against using it…

Being a company that produces creativity, we should be concerned if there is life left in this word. A quick check with the dictionary seems to reinforce its importance in our language, defining it as ‘the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.’

Creativity has been applied traditionally to the visual arts, design, the media, publishing, entertainment etc. However, it also explains the illuminating insights of our more rational professions such as architecture, engineering, science or even mathematics. We use the word the word to describe skills in the home, including DIY, cooking and other homemaking crafts. We use the word to describe inspirational teaching, education and training. We use the word in industry to describe our ability to innovate, produce, manufacture, transform, improve, sell, and develop. In fact as a word it can be applied to a huge range of special abilities to solve any type of problem.

But, perhaps the issue is not – what is creativity – but how much creativity? Advertisers try to pin down creativity through a system of objective quantification – resulting in at least a couple examples of ten point ranking scales. For instance we could talk of a ‘world class’ idea at the top of the scale and something like ‘stinker’ at the bottom. The system builds on the idea of grading degrees of creativity, rather like the theoretical scales that academics have developed that include for example – eminent creativity (“Big-C”) and everyday creativity (“little-c”).

However, it feels that such systems are in danger of adding further ambiguities and clichés to the equation, and simply serve to highlight the difficulties of being too precise about creativity. So until we can find – in an Eskimo-for-snow kind of way – sufficient words to convey the myriad facets of this activity – sorry Facebook – creative will have to do.