What is Brussels so afraid of?

With all the conversations about AI-generated content and "AI slop," it feels like an opportune moment to talk about creativity.

Yet in Brussels, many of us spend our days trying to influence policymakers, stakeholders, and decision-makers, while often shying away from creative approaches ourselves. The reasons are familiar:

"We don't have time."
"That's not how Brussels works."
"Our audience is policymakers."
"Creativity is for consumer brands."

Or my personal favourite: "That's for reaching the general public."

So when I saw a packed room at The POP Collective's latest event, I found myself wondering: who are these people? Are they professionals who have been trying to convince their organisations to embrace more creative thinking? Are they leaders looking for permission to do things differently? Or are they simply people who believe Brussels can be more imaginative than we give it credit for?

That got me curious.

So I sat down with the team behind The POP Collective — Gökşen Çalışkan and Emma Kersale — along with Shauny De Donder, head of communications at Fourtold, to explore what creativity really means in today's workplace, what role leadership plays in unlocking it, and whether the future of creativity may actually lie outside the industries traditionally associated with it.

What emerged was a conversation about risk, credibility, and the habits that make Brussels far more cautious than it likes to admit.

When no one cares, creativity becomes a necessity

There's a widely held assumption that "creative" industries — advertising, media, entertainment — are where the interesting work happens. Policy communications? Infrastructure? Energy transition? Boring by default.

But all three pushed back on this hierarchy.

De Donder pointed out that if you work for a consumer brand, you begin with a certain amount of built-in public interest. If you work in energy, industrial policy, sustainability, healthcare, manufacturing, or infrastructure, you do not. In those sectors, attention has to be earned.

Çalışkan made a similar point. In her view, sectors that nobody finds naturally interesting cannot simply show up and expect people to care. They need to find new ways of communicating if they want to cut through the noise and have any impact at all.

By contrast, she suggested that traditionally creative industries sometimes risk becoming formulaic: aesthetically polished, but reliant on familiar formats that no longer feel especially inventive.

Kersale agreed that less glamorous sectors are often pushed to innovate because they know from the outset that they are harder to make appealing. But she also noted that a certain conservatism still lingers in Brussels and beyond. There remains a persistent fear that being "too creative" will make an organisation seem less serious or less credible.

That tension feels central. The need for creativity is increasingly obvious. The willingness to fully embrace it is not.

Facts matter. But they do not move on their own

The second question was whether facts are enough, or whether policymakers need to be reached as human beings.

All three were clear on one point: evidence matters. None of this was an argument for replacing substance with style. If anything, the opposite. In a noisy and politically charged environment, credibility matters enormously.

But Çalışkan challenged the assumption that strong evidence automatically leads to action. Her point was that human beings do not make decisions like machines. Emotion, trust, identity, experience, and pressure all shape how people receive information long before they begin rationalising it.

That matters in Brussels, where communications often still behave as if the right spreadsheet, briefing, or policy line should be enough.

De Donder put it slightly differently. Two organisations can work from the same set of facts, she argued, yet only one succeeds in shaping the debate. What makes the difference is often the ability to frame those facts in ways that people can understand, remember, and care about.

Kersale's formulation was perhaps the neatest: facts give you credibility, but emotion gives you resonance.

That seems especially important in EU affairs. There is often a fear that introducing emotion into policy communications somehow cheapens the message. But when the subject is people's daily lives, pretending emotion has no place in the story can flatten the message just as much as overdoing it can distort it.

The issue is (what we have always known) whether Brussels is mature enough to accept that effective communication usually needs both.

Creative teams do not grow in ego-heavy cultures

The most uncomfortable question I put to them: can a leader who always needs to be right build a creative team?

The answer, from all three, was some version of absolutely not.

Kersale's answer was the most direct: no. Her view was that creativity requires people to drop their ego, because new ideas rarely emerge in polished form and almost never belong entirely to one person. In her telling, creativity is a group effort, and leaders who always need to be right tend to isolate themselves from the very conditions that make good ideas possible.

Çalışkan approached the same problem through what she called the three Cs: curiosity, courage, and compassion. A leader overly attached to being right, she argued, tends to lose access to all three. Curiosity shrinks because other perspectives stop feeling genuinely interesting. Courage weakens because experimentation means risking failure. Compassion becomes harder because other people's ideas start to feel threatening rather than useful.

De Donder focused on the effect this has on organisations. When leaders create cultures where approval matters more than exploration, people learn quickly what is rewarded and what is punished. Meetings become exercises in finding the safe answer rather than testing original ones. Over time, teams become less adaptable, less innovative, and more inclined to produce communications that pass internal review without making any external impact.

Her formulation of good leadership was simple and memorable: the goal is not to be the smartest person in the room, but to create a room where the smartest ideas can surface.

That is feels like a wider lesson for Brussels itself.

Perhaps this is not a creativity problem at all

At one point, De Donder reframed the whole issue: Brussels, he said, does not have a creativity problem so much as a confidence problem.

That line stayed with me because it gets closer to the real obstacle. i almost made that the title of this article.

Brussels is full of intelligent people working on complex and consequential issues. It is not short on expertise. It is not short on material. It is not even short on creative instinct. What it often lacks is the confidence to communicate differently - and the organisational permission to take that risk.

That hesitation is understandable. The stakes can feel high. Organisations are accountable to boards, members, investors, regulators, and policymakers. Communications processes are often designed, above all else, to avoid mistakes.

But the cost of that caution is rarely discussed with the same honesty. Safe communications may protect against internal discomfort, but they also risk becoming invisible.

So what is Brussels afraid of?

Not creativity itself, perhaps. But what creativity threatens.

It threatens control. It threatens the comfort of familiar formats. It threatens the internal consensus that comes from saying things the way they have always been said. And above all, it threatens the fear many organisations still carry: that if they sound more human, more distinctive, or more emotionally intelligent, they will somehow be taken less seriously.

The POP Collective brings together communications professionals working across EU affairs to explore more creative, more human approaches to policy communication.