Creativity Does Not Photograph Well

Gartner recently declared that developer effectiveness should be assessed by creativity and innovation rather than velocity, deployment frequency, or lines of code. The industry nodded along like a congregation hearing scripture it had never planned to practice. Nobody raised a hand to ask the obvious question. How, exactly, do you measure creativity?

You can put story points on a Jira board. You can chart deployment frequency in a dashboard that makes executives feel like they understand engineering. You can count lines changed, tickets closed, pull requests merged. These numbers have weight. They fill slide decks. They survive quarterly reviews. Creativity does none of these things. It does not photograph well under fluorescent light.

And yet here we are, watching the same industry that spent decades worshipping throughput metrics pivot to a word it cannot define, let alone quantify. There is something almost poetic about it. We gamed velocity until it meant nothing, inflated story points until they measured negotiation skill more than engineering effort, split tickets into atoms so the deployment frequency chart would keep climbing up and to the right. The numbers looked extraordinary. The software, somehow, did not.

This is Goodhart's Law wearing a lanyard at a tech conference. Whatever gets measured becomes the target. Whatever becomes the target stops being the thing it was supposed to represent. We watched this happen in real time with every metric we canonized, and now the proposal is to do it again with the one quality that dissolves the moment you try to pin it under glass.

Software development has always been an act of creation. It lives on the border between art and science, and for decades we have pretended only one side of that border exists. We built management philosophies that treat code like a manufacturing process. Repeatable. Optimizable. Something with a cycle time you can shave down quarter over quarter. The language tells on us. We talk about shipping and throughput and pipeline and delivery, as if we are running a bottling plant and not conjuring systems out of thought.

I have been writing code for most of my life. I am also a musician and a visual artist. I have spent years moving between acts of creation in different mediums, and I can tell you that the best work, in any of them, has never once arrived on a schedule. The best code I have ever written came from sitting with a problem long enough to hear what it was actually asking for. Not sprinting toward it. Settling into it. Letting the shape of the solution emerge the way a melody finds its resolution, not because you forced it to the tonic, but because you finally stopped forcing it anywhere at all.

You do not rush a painting so it lands before sprint end. You do not measure a song in output per hour. And yet we have been measuring software exactly like that for years, then standing around the retro wondering why so much of what we build feels like it was assembled rather than composed.

The interesting thing about creativity is that it has preconditions, not inputs. You cannot produce it the way you produce a deployment artifact. But you can starve it to death with remarkable efficiency. Pack every hour with meetings. Require a ticket for every thought. Ask what someone is working on every time they stare out a window for more than three minutes. Creativity does not survive surveillance. It barely survives Slack.

What it needs is room. Slack in the schedule, not the app. Trust deep enough that someone can spend an afternoon at a whiteboard and not feel obligated to show output for it. Permission to follow an idea down a corridor that might be a dead end, because sometimes the dead end has a door in it that the roadmap never knew about.

A composer does not need a KPI. A composer needs a piano and some silence.

The shift Gartner is naming is real. Something is genuinely changing in how the industry thinks about what makes engineering organizations effective. But if the response is to build a Creativity Score and bolt it onto the dashboard next to the sprint burndown chart, we will have learned nothing at all. We will have just found a newer, shinier thing to Goodhart into oblivion.

The answer was never a better metric. It was always a better room.