Why Creativity Often Feels at Odds With the Cultures That Need It

Designers are hired to bring new thinking into organizations, and then punished, or resisted, when they actually do it.

It’s a tension built into the role.

Companies say they want innovation, transformation, and new possibilities, yet often reject the very ambiguity and exploration required to create them.

After seeing this pattern repeat across teams, industries, and leadership styles, I’ve realized it’s not an anomaly.

It’s a long-standing dualism baked into the work itself.

This clicked for me recently while watching On The Hunt, where Julia Roberts references a concept from St. Augustine: we’re constrained by the conditions of the society we live in. Those who see beyond those conditions or challenge them risk being pushed to the margins or even exiled.

There’s a parallel to corporate life.

Most companies function as their own micro-societies with norms and expectations that hold everything together.

When you challenge those, even when your role requires it, the response is often resistance.

Corporate culture as a micro-society

Every organization I’ve worked in has had its own culture with shared language, values, and unwritten rules. These cultures are built for predictability, efficiency, and repeatability, qualities that help operations run smoothly.

But design work is the opposite: ambiguous, exploratory, iterative, and often uncomfortable. It slows what others want to speed up. It surfaces cracks in assumptions. It introduces tension. And tension is rarely comfortable for people whose roles depend on optimization, not exploration.

Designers can go from being seen as strategic partners to being labeled “too idealistic” or “not aligned” simply for doing the work their role requires. You’re doing the work you were hired to do, yet if you push beyond the comfort zone of the culture, you risk being misunderstood or sidelined.

Where creativity collides with business rhythm

Businesses rely on roadmaps, forecasts, and processes that favor clarity and predictability.

Creativity rarely follows that timeline. Innovation doesn’t move in straight lines.

Creative exploration often starts by breaking something open before it can be rebuilt.

Just look at the process of creating a bronze sculpture.

You have to destroy the original idea to create the outcome.

This is where the tension shows up.

Organizations want innovation, but they want it to fit neatly within environments designed for operational stability. They want transformation, but they want it to happen without disrupting the established culture. They want creativity to behave like an efficient workflow.

And that’s simply not how creativity works.

Designers end up working in the space between what the organization hopes for and what its culture is able to support.

Most of the frustration and misunderstandings I’ve experienced live right there in that gap.

As a design leader, it’s important to understand the boundary, live close to it, while avoiding going beyond it within the specific micro-society you are in.

The historical and human pattern

Recently, I’ve found myself returning to the humanities - history, philosophy, art - to understand this tension more deeply.

And it turns out that this tension, this struggle between the creative individual and the collective around them, is as old as humanity itself.

If you go back to the world’s historical philosophers, they were all wrestling with the same fundamental question: what happens when someone sees or imagines something beyond the limits of the culture they’re living in?

Plato’s allegory of the cave is essentially a story about what happens when someone sees the world differently from everyone else. They step outside the familiar shadows and gain a clearer view of what could be. But when they return to share those insights, they’re often met with resistance because the group is more comfortable with what it already understands. Any designer who has presented a forward-looking concept before the organization was ready for it knows that feeling well.

Nietzsche explored the tension between the individual who pushes boundaries and the collective that prefers stability. The collective isn’t intentionally resisting. It’s simply protecting what feels safe. But when you’re the one asking difficult questions or surfacing ideas that require real change, you can become the source of discomfort. Not because the idea is wrong, but because it challenges the current culture.

The philosophers weren’t alone in wrestling with the discomfort that comes from seeing the world differently from the culture around you. Artists have felt this pressure for centuries, especially those who were ahead of their time.

Vincent van Gogh is one of the strongest examples of an artist who lived inside this tension. During his lifetime, his work wasn’t just misunderstood. It was actively dismissed. His style was too bold, too emotional, too intense for the artistic culture of the time, which valued technical realism and restrained expression. He wasn’t creating chaos for its own sake.

He was simply painting the world as he saw it, with a level of honesty and emotional clarity that made others uncomfortable.

What’s interesting is that these dynamics aren’t new. They’re human. They’ve been happening for thousands of years. So when they surface in corporate settings, it’s not a sign that something is fundamentally broken.

It’s a sign that creativity naturally pushes against the boundaries of whatever culture it enters. And cultures push back.

Design and the space in-between

Over time, I’ve learned that this tension isn’t a sign of failure. It’s the terrain of the work. Designers operate in the space between how things are and how they could be. That space is inherently uncomfortable. It requires resilience, patience, and a willingness to move through misunderstanding.

Businesses need design.

They need creative thinkers who challenge assumptions and push toward future possibilities. Yet organizations are also built to protect themselves from disruption.

Designers end up holding both sides of that contradiction. We support the existing culture while pushing it toward a different horizon.

This dualism isn’t going away. Naming it makes it easier to navigate. It reframes tension not as a sign that you’re out of place.

More often, it’s proof that we’re doing exactly what the work requires.