The Case for Getting Messy in 2025

Innovation thrives in messy, uncomfortable spaces where curiosity leads and failure teaches. Heading into 2025, it’s time to embrace good chaos and rewrite the rules.

Somewhere in the cavernous depths of corporate and public sector offices, there’s a PowerPoint deck. A beautiful presentation. It’s lengthy, precise, aligned with “strategic imperatives” and absolutely, unequivocally dull. It’s the kind of deck that’s designed to preserve the status quo because, deep down, everyone involved in creating it is utterly terrified of making a mistake, or being one to cop the blame.

And that, my friends, is why most organisations, especially if they’re relatively big, be they private or public sector, struggle to innovate.

Creativity Is a Dangerous Business

Everyone loves creativity. In theory. It’s why we fetishize startups, lionize the scrappy underdogs, nod sagely when someone drops a Steve Jobs quote or erupt into conversation when the audacity of Elon Musk is brought up. But in practice? Creativity scares the shit out of people.

Why? Because it’s messy. Creativity doesn’t sit neatly on a Gantt chart. It doesn’t have guaranteed ROI. It involves false starts, uncomfortable truths, and—now brace yourselves—the possibility, nay probability of failure.

Worse still, creativity asks you to try things without knowing the answer in advance. Very often you can only explain creativity in reverse. This doesn’t sit well in organisations built on the illusion of control, where every decision feels like it has to be planned to the millimetre.

Why We Love Big Consultants (Even When We Shouldn’t)

Enter the Big Consultant from stage left. Stomping around in a suit, sans tie, occasionally to be found jacketless, trying desperately to bridge the divide between what they assume is professional, but just interesting enough. They can be from McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte, Accenture … pick your poison, all effectively the same, just some more confident than others.

Armed with frameworks, data dashboards, a new ‘offering’, the aura of superiority that only comes from charging eye-watering fees and an agenda to land a big tech project. They sell the dream of risk-free innovation, a warm and fuzzy fiction where creativity is neatly packaged into spreadsheets and phased workflows.

The thing is, mind you, almost all of these types are better at maintaining the status quo than breaking it. Their playbooks do work alright for a bit of incremental change, so they’ll find you a few efficiencies, run a series of workshops where they’ve learned to use the ubiquitous Post-It note, but they never change the world. And yet, we keep hiring them, so they must be doing something right.

They make us feel safe, do just enough change without ever really upsetting the apple cart. And if they do make a booboo, then you’ve got the big bad firm to be blamed. Water off a duck’s back. You can’t be blamed when Deloitte messed up the project plan.

It’s not that big consultancies are bad. Let’s not be so mean. They’re just not wired for messy, disruptive creativity. The kind of thinking that rewrites the rules doesn’t come from a 100-slide deck. It comes from smaller, scrappier minds willing to say, “Let’s try… What if? Imagine if we… We tried this…” without needing a series of committees or endless stakeholders to approve it.

The Role of ‘Producers’ for Innovation

This is why we need more producers of innovation. This is perhaps explained really rather nicely in a conversation between Rick Rubin and Rory Sutherland. (weird but amazing combo right!?) Think of producers as curious, creative, generally knowledgable, people who can step into a creative process not to control it but to coach, guide and amplify what’s already there. As Rubin explained in his brilliant conversation with Rory Sutherland, the job isn’t to have all the answers but to point out the weak spots and let others figure out their best solutions. It’s about being, as Sutherland put it, “interestingly less wrong.”

This kind of approach values curiosity over perfection, experimentation over predictability. As Rubin said, “Sometimes doing the same thing and doing it well is the best form of reinvention,” but other times you need to make radical shifts to explore what’s possible. It’s a masterclass in why creativity needs space to grow and why innovation doesn’t emerge from a sterile, over-controlled environment.

The Real Risk Is Staying Comfortable

The late, great Sir Ken Robinson once said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” That’s the crux of the problem: fear.

Innovation isn’t supposed to feel safe. It’s about discomfort. It’s about starting before you’re ready, trying things that might fail and following ideas that spark curiosity, not because they’re perfect, but because they’re interesting enough to pursue, were they perfect then someone would have already done them.

When an industry operates in a bubble, innovation grinds to a halt, and all the things end up looking the same. Organisations love to benchmark against their competitors, but all that does is reinforce groupthink to a formulaic sameness. Everyone starts copying everyone else, and before you know it, an entire sector is trapped in a feedback loop of mediocrity. Would it not be nice if airlines were distinct in their customer experience, or grocery store competitors had different store formats, or rather than a telco talking about having the best network they tried to find amazing use cases unlocked by 5G?

This is why bringing in perspectives from other fields is so powerful. The most exciting breakthroughs often come from cross-pollination—applying ideas from one domain to another.

As Rory Sutherland once said, “The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea.” Fresh perspectives create entirely new possibilities, precisely because they disrupt the familiar ways of thinking. That might be treating public transport like a consumer packaged good, or with the mindset of a hospitality business. Perhaps its thinking about how an airport is also, for many, a place for working on the go? Or maybe how banking is really a means to an end, so showing more what your money does while you save is a good idea?

What could a filmmaker teach your IT department about storytelling? What could a psychologist show your marketing team about decision-making? What could an architect teach your operations team about systems design? What could the shopfloor staff show the executive team about those new targets they mandated? These aren’t just interesting thought experiments, they’re opportunities to inject fresh energy into a stale process.

Innovation doesn’t just thrive on creativity but also diversity of thought, and that means stepping outside the echo chamber of the industry, country, culture or even the usual talent pool, and embracing ideas from unexpected places.

Discomfort is part of the process, but that’s way better than staying locked in the false safety of the status quo until the sense of the world changing is sudden, and painful.

2025 Needs a Little Good Chaos

So, what do we do?

For starters, let’s stop pretending that the biggest risk is doing something bold. The real risk is doing nothing while the world gets ready to change without you realising. Going into 2025, we need to embrace that “interestingly less wrong” mentality. Here’s how we might do that.

1. Start Small, but Start Now: Stop waiting for perfect alignment. In fact, any employee that talks about ‘being aligned’ or needing time to get aligned, that’s an automatic $50 fine to be donated to the charity of your choice or next year’s Christmas party. The best ideas don’t emerge from formal meetings, workshops or Teams calls … they come from trying something and seeing what happens.

2. Hire Misfits: Look beyond the usual suspects. Sometimes the scrappy independent thinker, the one who doesn’t fit the mould, is exactly what you need to break out of the rut. Make it easier to do a few weird projects with freelancers, people with opinions and smaller agencies that aren’t on the procurement roster. It’s a bargain in terms of quality, and a bounty in terms of quantity vs. whatever McKinsey last did for you.

3. Value Curiosity Over Perfection: Be more interested in what’s possible than what’s provable. Innovation doesn’t come with guarantees, but with a willingness to explore. Emphasise the important on the momentum, the progress, and how that is better to at least be on the journey to somewhere.

4. Celebrate the Flops: Treat failures like a badge of honour. Each one gets you closer to something that works. Have a little eulogy or memorial service for each time something doesn’t quite work out, keep it light hearted, mucking something up is sometimes something to laugh about rather than hold an inquest over.

Get Uncomfortable, or Get Left Behind

The status quo might feel safe, but it’s often an illusion. If your organisation isn’t willing to get messy, try a few new things and embrace the discomfort of real creativity then you’re not preserving your future, you’re sealing your fate.

So, as we head into 2025, ask yourself this: is it the organisation’s ‘Now or Never moment?’ Because if it is, the time to act is now.

Innovation doesn’t wait. Neither should you.

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. And all that.

To seeing you for dinners, drinks and coffee gatherings next year. Dates and locations coming soon.