There is a persistent belief in the creative world that project management (or management of any sort) is the enemy of creativity. That once you introduce structure, plans, schedules, or budgets, the magic drains out of the work creativity gets “managed” to death.
I think this is a myth. And worse than that, I think it is a dangerous one.
I say this as someone who lives in both worlds. I am a musician. I am also an entrepreneur and a project management practitioner. I have seen creative projects soar, stall, collapse, and quietly disappear. In almost every case where something went wrong, it was not because the project was managed. It was because it was unmanaged, mismanaged, or managed in a way that was completely inappropriate for the kind of creative work being attempted.
The real tension is not between creativity and management. It is between creativity and the wrong kind of management.
What is Creativity?
Before we talk about managing creativity, it is worth being clear about what we actually mean by the word.
Creativity is not chaos, randomness, or the absence of structure. Creativity is the act of producing something new and meaningful. That “something” might be a song, a performance, a visual identity, a story, a product, or a piece of software. “New” does not mean it has never existed before in human history. It means it is new in its context. “Meaningful” means it has intent. It is trying to do something, say something, or change something.
A creative project, then, is any project where the outcome is not fully known at the start, where exploration, interpretation, and judgment play a central role, and where value is created through ideas, and expression.
This matters, because it explains why creative work feels different to manage. You cannot fully specify it upfront and you cannot simply follow a template. Discovery is part of the work and decisions emerge as the work takes shape. But none of this means creativity exists outside time, money, people, or expectations. It simply means those constraints need to be handled with care.
An Example
I’m going to start with an example to illustrate the point. I want to release my third album of music sometime this year and that’s the entire project at this stage.
How many songs will it have on it? I don’t know, maybe somewhere between 9 and 12 songs that I haven’t started writing yet.
How much will it cost? I don’t know that either. I have a figure in my head that I’d like it to cost but I sincerely doubt that it will because I haven’t chosen my producer and engineer yet, and I haven’t chosen the session musicians that will play on the album.
How long will it take? Again, I don’t know. I would really like to have it released in 2026 and that would be my goal but its really hard to say until I get the last song written and it goes off for recording. I know the sequence of events, just not the duration of each one.
Can I document the expected benefits of releasing this album? Not really. I certainly would like there to be some commercial benefits to it but if past history is anything to go by there won’t be and in fact the reason I am doing it is that I like writing and recording songs and that’s a fairly intangible quality or benefit that’s pretty hard to measure.
You can immediately see that I definitely have a project but I really don’t know that much about it, and I’m not going to know the answer to all of these things until we’re well into the project. Do I want a project manager now to come in and define exactly how many songs I will write, how long each song will be, what each song will be about, who the producer will be who the engineer will be through the mastering engineer will be and who all of the session musicians will be? No. That’s not the way I want to work as a creative person on this project.
Now all of this doesn’t mean my album project can’t be managed but it just needs to be managed in a creative way.
Why Creatives Distrust Management
The word “management” carries a lot of baggage in creative spaces. For many creative people, it conjures images of rigid control, commercial pressure, loss of autonomy, and someone telling you what to do with your own work. That reaction is understandable. Many creatives have been burned by heavy-handed processes, unrealistic deadlines, or people who valued efficiency over integrity.
But that experience does not mean that management itself is the problem. It means the application was wrong as creativity does not thrive under micromanagement, but it also does not thrive in chaos. Endless freedom with no direction often leads to drift, burnout, and unfinished work. Anyone who has an album half-written, a software half-developed, or a concept that never quite landed knows this feeling well.
The False Choice Between Freedom and Structure
We often frame this as a choice. Either the work is free and creative, or it is structured and managed but that framing is lazy. Most creative work already lives inside constraints. Song lengths. Budgets. Exhibition deadlines. Client briefs. Software release windows. Even the choice of medium is a constraint. These boundaries do not kill creativity, they shape it, and they give it something to push against with the right project management approach. Good project management not tell you what to create. It creates the conditions in which creation has the best chance of succeeding.
Why Creative Projects Need Management, Just Not Too Much
Creative projects are projects. They involve time, money, people, decisions, risks, trade-offs, and expectations. They create outputs and those outputs create value. Ignoring that reality does not make those factors disappear. It just means they are dealt with late, poorly, or painfully.
That said, creative projects do not need the same level or style of management as building a bridge or rolling out an ERP system. Applying heavyweight processes, rigid controls, or excessive documentation will absolutely suffocate creative energy. The key is the right amount of management, applied in the right way, at the right time, and there is no universal formula.
What is “right” depends on the project. A solo artist recording an album needs something very different from a design agency delivering a client campaign, which is different again from a software team building a creative platform. The scale, the risk, the budget, the number of collaborators, the degree of uncertainty, and the definition of success all matter.
Start With Outcomes, Not Outputs
One place where creative projects often go wrong is where they start. Many projects jump straight to outputs. The album. The exhibition. The logo. The app.
Creative projects benefit enormously from first agreeing on outcomes. Why does this work exist? What does success actually mean for this project? Artistic integrity, audience reach, revenue, learning, reputation, momentum, or something else entirely? And this needs to become the immutable guiding beacon of light for the entire project.
Until that question is answered, every decision is harder than it needs to be. Once it is answered, project management becomes a support act rather than a constraint. Decisions about scope, budget, collaborators, timelines, and trade-offs suddenly have a reference point.
In my experience, this focus on outcomes is often more important in creative projects than in traditional ones.
Project Management as Protection, Not Control
When applied well and appropriately, project management does not control creativity. It protects it in the following ways:
- It protects the artist’s time by reducing chaos and interference.
- It protects collaborators by making expectations crystal clear.
- It protects the work by ensuring it actually gets finished and released.
- It protects energy by preventing endless rework and decision fatigue.
Seen this way, project management is not a dirty word, it is an act of respect for the creative work and the people doing it.
To be clear, the idea that creativity should exist without structure is romantic, but it is also cruel. It places all the risk, stress, and failure on the creative person and then calls it freedom. Creative projects deserve to succeed. Appropriate, practical, and professional project management is one of the most reliable ways to make that happen.
NOTE: This blog is the first in a series of managing creative projects. Follow along to stay up to date.
