It would have been a real shame if people discouraged Jackson Pollock for that reason. Experts agree that Pollock had little native talent for art, and when you look at his early products, it showed. They also agree that he became one of the greatest American painters of the twentieth century and that he revolutionized modern art. How did he go from point A to point B?

Twyla Tharp, the world-famous choreographer and dancer, wrote a book called The Creative Habit. As you can guess from the title, she argues that creativity is not a magical act of inspiration. It’s the result of hard work and dedication. Even for Mozart. Remember the movie Amadeus? Remember how it showed Mozart easily churning out one masterpiece after another while Salieri, his rival, is dying of envy? Well, Tharp worked on that movie and she says: Hogwash! Nonsense! “There are no ‘natural’ geniuses.

Each individual has a meant-to-be, a particular blending of talents and capacities that can guide him to achievement. Everyone you recognise as creative - not only our speakers but also such luminaries as Einstein, Picasso, Beethoven - has in common the amazing ability to express his own unique purpose here on earth. They have found that true creativity is being themselves. When Leonardo DaVinci was asked to name his greatest accomplishment, he answered, “Leonardo DaVinci.

I don’t know which criteria are used to decide what might constitute good or significant art, but in some way what is valuable is the sense that it is necessary, authentic, disconcerting, and possibly dangerous.

The job of the artist or the poet or the educator or the business person is not just to paint what we want to see, write what we want to read and hear, teach what we want to learn or produce what we want to buy. Their role is to interpret the underlying high-level objectives that we seek from art, poetry, education, or goods and services more fully than we could ourselves articulate them. Success in recasting problems to achieve our objectives more effectively than we had conceived distinguishes the great from the merely competent and demonstrates why the direct approach is so often banal.

This is the paradigm shift that might be required — that organisations and systems can be like people, having purposes without a single goal. An artist doesn’t have a successful career by maximising their art; they do it by repeatedly producing work that they are proud of.

That’s what the world could look like if we got rid of the blind spots. Business ought to be like artists, not paperclip maximisers. The economic concept of optimisation, and the institutions of management and government which enforce its use, effectively act as a brutal information reducing filter. By taking away the pressure to maximise a single metric (and therefore to throw away information that doesn’t relate to it), organisations could apply their decision-making capabilities much more effectively. They could innovate more, design more sustainable solutions and build less adversarial, longer-term relationships with their people.