Terry van Rhyn, former daydreamer, part-time doodler and founder of Ashgrove Marketing, ponders the peculiar, perplexing, and profoundly useful brain of the creative professional.

Many years ago – and I mean the kind of years that show up in laugh lines and an increasing collection of reading glasses – I was accused by a very serious maths teacher of “drifting off”.

This was not, as you might hope, a metaphor for a daring sail into the unknown, or a scuba dive into the deepest oceans, but rather a frustrated observation of me staring out the window, mid-algebra lesson, sketching a dragon wearing sunglasses on the back of my notebook.

“You’ll never get anywhere with your head in the clouds,” she warned. To be fair, numbers and I have never worked well together.

But, dear Mrs Schultz, it turns out there is a market for cloud-based thinking. It’s called advertising!

It’s a perfect outlet for the peculiar wiring of the creative mind: a glorious mash-up of imagination, pattern recognition, caffeine dependency, and the insatiable curiosity to explore the unknown.

We are, of course, told that there are left and right brain functions. Let’s imagine the two on a bicycle together – each in charge of one pedal.

The classic theory goes something like this: the left brain is your strait-laced, spreadsheet-wielding analyst. It likes order, logic, and knowing precisely how many times the client has changed their mind this week. The right brain, meanwhile, is barefoot, covered in glitter, and whispering things like “what if we used interpretive dance to explain the annual report?”

It’s tempting to think creative people must have an overblown right brain function but, here’s the thing: real creativity isn’t about choosing one over the other. It’s about both of them pedalling the same bicycle through a minefield of client expectations and budget constraints.

Creativity in business is less about “thinking outside the box” and more about realising the box was actually a hat all along – and then turning it into a wildly successful social media campaign with unexpected emotional resonance.

If you’ve ever worked with a truly creative person, you’ll know they don’t walk from point A to B. They go from A to “what if B had a moustache?” via an unplanned detour through the museum of forgotten fonts and a lunchtime conversation about Victorian circus posters. Going down various rabbit holes, playing ‘what if” in this fashion, is not a flaw, but a gift.

The rabbit holes, the tangents, the connections no one else sees – these are the ingredients of innovation. They allow a creative thinker to approach complex business problems not as puzzles to be solved, but as stories to be rewritten.

While some might see chaos, the creative mind sees patterns – often obscure, often strange, but always promising. It’s how we end up with perfume ads that make no sense yet sell millions, or packaging design that makes someone feel something when they open a box of tea.

Creativity in the business world is not simply window dressing – it is often what separates your brand from the pack. There is a dangerous myth that creativity is the frosting on the cake of business. Something fluffy and nice-to-have, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the “serious stuff”.

But if you’ve ever launched a product, repositioned a brand, or tried to explain your USP in a way that doesn’t make people’s eyes glaze over – you’ll know that creative thinking is serious stuff.

Creativity is what takes a tired proposition and breathes life into it. It’s what turns a line of code into an app people love or transforms a dull insurance policy into a brand with heart. It’s what helps businesses connect with humans – and last time I checked, that’s still who we’re all selling to.

The creative psyche is loosely screwed on and lovingly tuned to receive. There is no doubt that creative people can be maddening. We’re contradictory creatures: curious but easily distracted, enthusiastic but sceptical, boundary-pushing but sensitive to criticism. We want freedom, but also feedback. We’ll ask you to “trust the process” while frantically reworking it five minutes before the deadline.

The payoff is that, when you give creative minds room to breathe, they bring you something extraordinary. Not just a new font or a cheeky headline – but a whole new way of looking at the problem. A fresh narrative and a solution that doesn’t just tick a box but creates a ripple.

In business, as in life, there’s comfort in logic. But there’s magic in the mess. The brands we remember, the campaigns that move us, the ideas that change the game – they don’t come from playing it safe. They come from the ones with heads in the clouds and feet occasionally on the ground.

So, the next time you see someone staring out the window or scribbling a mind map that looks like a conspiracy theory, don’t drag them back to the spreadsheet. Give them a cup of tea, let them chase the rabbit – and see what wonders they bring back.

After all, while logic can take you from A to B, creativity can take you to all the way to wow!