Why Small Creative Ideas Beat Big Budgets in Business

I was recently watching the brilliant Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy give a talk on creativity, and it struck a chord with me. His observation—that creativity is often lacking in business—rings painfully true.

Why? A few reasons stand out:

• Creativity carries risk. When there’s no guaranteed outcome, people tend to avoid it.
• There’s rarely a neat ROI upfront. Without a clear business case, projects and experiments get stuck in limbo.
• Accountants and risk managers dominate decision-making. When risk is high and payoff uncertain, most creative ideas never see the light of day.

During his talk, Rory showed a slide that I both laughed at and learned from — so much so that I recreated it here. It plots “stuff that has a big effect” against “stuff that costs a lot of money.”

Consultancy, somewhat hilariously, lands in the low effect / high cost corner (awkward, since that’s my trade!). Strategy is essential, but it can be expensive. Trivia, meanwhile, is cheap — and worth nothing.

But then there’s the Ministry of Detail, tucked away at the bottom right. These are the people — or sometimes just one sharp individual — who look at the problems that others overlook. They work within tight budgets, often with no funding at all, yet their creative fixes can have an outsized impact.

This is exactly how I like to build teams and approach my consultancy work.

• Apply constraints. Set a clear problem and strip away big budgets. Constraints sharpen creativity.
• Bring together diverse thinkers. Different perspectives unlock novel solutions.
• Provide cover for experimentation. Protect the team from bureaucracy so they can test bold ideas.

In my experience, the experiments born from these conditions—small budgets, clear problems, creative freedom—end up being the ones with the biggest impact.

Creativity doesn’t always need millions of pounds or sweeping transformation programmes. Sometimes, the smallest, scrappiest interventions are the ones that change everything.