It’s been an eventful few weeks for mathematician, author, broadcaster and all-round cleverclogs, Hannah Fry. Not only did she appear on the Taskmaster New Year Treat – surely a career high – she has also been named the Professor for the Public Understanding of Mathematics at Cambridge University.

It’s hard to begrudge her this accolade. By fronting Radio 4’s Rutherford and Fry, various BBC television documentaries and Numberphile videos, she’s done more than many to drive home the power, importance and beauty of science and maths.

The pity, though, is that we need such a role in the first place.

Long division

Arguably, this goes much further than an ambivalence to mathematics. I find it weird and frustrating that it’s not only acceptable for someone to flout their antipathy to maths, it’s somehow considered cool. How did we get to a stage where a subject so fundamental to our lives – from household budgeting to understanding risks to our health, from the technology we all rely on to deciding whether or not to play the lottery – is flippantly dismissed as something only a select band of nerds and geeks need to know about?

It’s equally frustrating and bemusing when I hear other people – often, again, with a weird sense of pride – say that they never read a book. How rational and buttoned-up in your empirical worldview do you have to be to genuinely see no value in the insights and inspiration that only great writing can deliver?

The idea that you’re either a science or an arts person is introduced to us at an early age, often tacitly accepted by parents and teachers, before being actively reinforced by study choices kids make when they’re barely in their teens. And it’s clearly nothing new: in his seminal book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, CP Snow argued that the artificial schism between science and the humanities was a significant barrier to the world addressing its biggest challenges. This was in 1959.

Some argue that we’ve put much of this division behind us. And it’s certainly true that great swathes of modern cinema and music, not to mention the entire computer gaming industry, wouldn’t exist without people playing nicely together across both technology and creativity. But Cambridge doesn’t create new professorships on a whim. There’s clearly more work to be done.

Crunch time

And talking of work, divided attitudes to science and the arts are alive and kicking in the business world. We know because we’ve researched this exact question, and our findings suggest it’s holding some firms back. Watch this space for our full report on the power of imagination in business.

Businesses, of course, measure their very success or failure through numbers, so it’s no surprise that the lexicon of industry is shot through with terms like liquidity, ratios, margins, inflation and weighted averages, language that could have been lifted straight from a science textbook. And the current AI revolution means there’s never been a better time for businesses to be crunching numbers in the hunt for insights and opportunities.

You might think, then, that the more a business embraces data and applies scientific rigour to decision-making, the more successful it will be. But it turns out that it’s actually businesses prepared to embrace imagination and creativity who can be most confident of delivering growth in the turbulent times we’re living through.

We surveyed 500 decision-makers across the UK and the US to assess how their businesses foster and invest in behaviours and processes aligned to creativity and imagination. Of those businesses whose answers identified them as highly imaginative, 58% said their revenue had grown considerably in the last 12 months, and 63% said they were performing significantly better than their peers. At the other end of the scale, 92% of the least imaginative companies reported declining revenues, with the same proportion reporting little or no confidence in their resilience.

These figures are a stark reminder that no amount of data analysis – artificial or otherwise – will come up with a genuinely new idea. At best, it’s going to fine-tune what you’re doing already. At worst? Ask Blockbuster.

The best business leaders get this. They also recognise the risk and discomfort creativity in business can bring. In Business Stripped Bare, Richard Branson wrote: “Business is creative. It’s like painting. You start with a blank canvas. You can paint anything – anything – and right there is your first problem. For every good painting you might turn out, there are a zillion bad paintings just aching to drip off your brush. Scared? You should be. People in business who succeed have swallowed their fear and have set out to create something special, something to make a difference to people’s lives.”

In our survey, 61% of the more senior respondents agreed that opportunities for creative thinking and experimentation are very important. That number drops to 44% overall, though, suggesting a significant swathe of middle management who would instead carry on crunching data. And overall, only 29% of businesses said their companies allocated significant resources to empowering imagination. Too many businesses are all data, no dreams.

Striking a balance

Whether we’re talking about businesses or people, it feels like we’re in serious need of a reset, one that breaks down some of these artificial barriers once and for all.

Listening to both the scientist and the artist inside us can be transformative when facing life’s gnarlier decisions at a personal level (spoiler alert: don’t play the lottery). And only by getting people of all outlooks to come together to harness their collective imagination can businesses hope to thrive in today’s climate of uncertainty and reinvention. This doesn’t mean the end of number-crunching, incidentally. It’s still a vital way of testing and rationalising a creative possibility; just don’t expect it to come up with the possibility in the first place.

In summary, don’t let fancy analysis or fear of failure stifle your business’s creative thinking.

Oh and maths is cool. So are books. Maybe have a read of one of Dr Fry’s.