The Creative Process Is Broken. Here’s How I Fixed It

The next few posts are going to be me talking about my book, not because I’m obsessed with myself (well, maybe a little), but because I think you’ll actually get something out of it. You knew I wrote a book, right?

Let’s be honest: the word creative doesn’t mean much anymore.

Every company says they’re creative. Every marketing deck has a section called “Big Ideas.” Every brainstorm starts with someone saying, “No idea is a bad idea!” before immediately shooting down the first one.

Meanwhile, everything looks the same. The same fonts. The same slogans. The same video that opens with “It starts with a spark…”

Creativity has been sanitized, optimized, and turned into a corporate KPI. It’s been beaten into submission by committees, compliance, and caution.

And I can say that with confidence because I’ve spent the last twenty years in those rooms, at agencies, startups, and billion-dollar companies — and I’ve seen creativity die in every one of them.

So what’s the problem?

It’s not that people aren’t smart or talented. Most of them are brilliant. It’s that we’ve romanticized creativity into something mystical.

We talk about “aha moments” like they’re divine intervention instead of what they really are: the end result of a process.

Most teams treat creativity like lightning, a lucky strike. But if you’re serious about making great things, you don’t wait for lightning. You wire the damn building to conduct it.

Why I Mastered WoMBAT

I got tired of waiting for inspiration to show up.

So I built a framework that forces it to show up whether it wants to or not. It’s called WoMBAT, short for What Might Be All The…

It’s simple, but it changes everything...and in truth I didn't really create it, i just perfected it (The CIA has been using it for years).

Instead of asking “What if we…” or "How do we...", which leads to narrow, one-lane thinking, you ask, “What might be all the ways…”

That one extra word, all, forces your brain to keep digging. It throws out the old playbooks and safety nets and makes you think differently.

• What might be all the ways to launch this?

• What might be all the ways to make people care?

• What might be all the ways to make this unforgettable?

You don’t stop at one. You don’t stop at ten. You go until your brain starts offering up nonsense. Because hidden inside the nonsense is usually the magic.

Most teams kill ideas too early. They stop at “good enough.” They start filtering before they finish exploring.

WoMBAT doesn’t let you do that. It demands curiosity. It demands volume. It demands a willingness to look stupid for a minute so you can look brilliant later.

The Day We Put a Cloud in the Sky

When I worked on Xero, everyone and their grandmother was calling themselves a “cloud company.”

So, we decided to take that literally. We put our logo in an actual cloud, a real one.

It was expensive. It was risky. It made zero logical sense.

And it worked. People lost their minds. We were in the news, on blogs, and in conversations that had nothing to do with accounting software.

That idea came straight out of a WoMBAT session. We’d written “What might be all the ways to show people we’re the real cloud?” on a board, and one of the dumbest, most offhand answers became the smartest thing we ever did.

That’s what this process does: it takes you beyond the obvious. You don’t stop at “make a video.” You go until you hit something impossible, and then you figure out how to make it possible.

Creativity Isn’t Lightning, It’s Plumbing

People love to say “You can’t teach creativity.” Bullshit.

Creativity is teachable. It’s repeatable. It’s mechanical. It’s plumbing.

You build the system. You maintain it. You keep the pipes clear.

And if the water stops flowing, you don’t sit around praying for rain, you fix the pipes.

The myth of the “creative spark” is dangerous because it gives people an excuse not to do the work. It’s what keeps average ideas alive. It’s what lets lazy thinkers off the hook.

But the people who make magic happen, the ones who consistently deliver ideas that get remembered, they don’t rely on inspiration. They rely on structure.

They know how to manufacture moments of brilliance instead of waiting for them.

Stop Worshipping Chaos, Start Organizing It

I’ve seen every version of a brainstorm. The quiet ones where everyone’s afraid to speak. The loud ones where one person dominates. The ones where the “wild idea” ends up being a slightly different version of last year’s campaign.

The dirty secret is: most creative teams confuse chaos with creativity.

They think that being messy means being inspired. But real creativity isn’t chaos. It’s organized chaos. It’s controlled combustion.

That’s why frameworks like WoMBAT matter, they give shape to the storm. They make it productive. They make it sustainable.

Without process, your team burns out. With too much process, your team dies inside.

WoMBAT is the middle ground. It’s the system that keeps creativity alive without suffocating it.

Why This Matters

If you’ve ever walked out of a brainstorm feeling like you just wasted an hour of your life, you already know something’s broken.

You don’t need another meeting. You need a new operating system for ideas.

Because creativity isn’t a talent. It’s a skill. And skills can be built, refined, and scaled.

I’ve built mine around WoMBAT. It’s how we created award-winning campaigns, sold out products, and launched ideas people still talk about a decade later.

And it’s the backbone of my book: “The Only Creative Process That Matters.”

If you want to stop guessing, stop waiting, and start creating work that people actually notice, this book shows you exactly how.

Because creativity doesn’t just happen. You build it.