Creating Beyond the Rules: Power, Economy, and the New Mindset

With a new era comes new thinking

Every era claims to champion new thinking, yet most institutional structures reward what is comfortably known. Artists, founders, leaders, and directors engaged in creative solution-based thinking encounter friction not due to resistance to quality, but from structural designs that prioritize repetition over originality. The narrative of an economy built for innovation lacks honesty—a closer look reveals that so-called disruption thrives only when it protects existing concentrations of power. The usual playbook secures continuity for those who authored it. True paradigm shifts threaten these arrangements and so are read as risk, not value.

Benefits of innovation

Consider who benefits when innovation calls become parades of familiar patterns. Power does not seek progress—it seeks predictability, often camouflaged as open-mindedness. Institutions command innovation while prescribing format, tone, and even the politics of acceptability, reinforcing a cycle where only approved forms of creativity receive sanction. This is not random—it is design. Decision-makers expand their influence by shaping the criteria for what solutions should look like and who is allowed to deliver them. Creative solution-based thinking that troubles the boundaries of these frameworks becomes a liability rather than an asset. Leaders invested in change recognize that requesting permission upholds the illusion that existing structures simply need more or better input, not fundamental overhaul.

Economic systems and its rewards in the cultural sector.

When people say the economy is failing artists, they obscure a more precise truth: economic systems reward the maintenance of boundaries, not their crossing. Capital flows toward safety, not toward contribution or relevance. Founders and directors who question commodity logic, or who challenge the metrics used to assess value, encounter barriers dressed as advice and opportunity—explicitly and implicitly. Labor that aligns with dominant expectations earns support; labor that unsettles pattern or profit is isolated. The myth is malfunction; the reality is intent.

For those intent on paradigm shifts, a new mindset is not optional. Artists, founders, directors, and leaders must treat systemic rejection not as evidence of unworthiness, but as a function of what these systems are designed to defend. Permission has symbolic power only if it is believed in—most constraints placed on creative labor serve the interests of those already secure, rather than clarifying what is possible.

The practical prompt: In meetings or negotiations this week, isolate one unexamined assumption about who should be empowered to decide value or allocate resources in your environment. Study how this assumption shapes your options, and design one experiment that operates outside its logic—no matter how minor.

What patterns do you accept as inevitabilities—about economics, power, or success—that deserve to be treated instead as the starting point for your next act of creative solution-based thinking?