MIKE GARNER
Why do the things that work best resist explanation?
That question has shaped my career. I’ve spent forty years as a creative director and creative strategist - helping found agencies in Dublin for Saatchi & Saatchi and Ogilvy as well our own agency Chemistry,
My work has won at Cannes, D&AD, The One Show, and the Effies. I’ve built businesses, led campaigns on homelessness, climate change, and gender inequality, and established the first first School for Effectiveness.
But the deeper discovery came from watching the creative process itself, thousands of times, from the inside. The best work always depended on something that couldn’t be written in a brief, justified in a focus group, or captured in a metric. The worst work was always the work where everything could be explained. Something operated beneath conscious awareness — tacit, embodied, beyond articulation — and it was more powerful than anything the official account could describe.
In 2015, my essay “Here Be Dragons: Towards a New Definition of Creativity” proposed a distinction between two fundamentally different creative modes — one that machines can replicate and one they structurally cannot. It won a WPP Atticus Award and was selected by WARC as representing important original thinking about the issues shaping business, industry, and society.
Since then, I’ve discovered that other independent lines of inquiry - Iain McGilchrist’s neuroscience of hemispheric attention, and Orlando Wood’s empirical testing against the IPA effectiveness databank - converge on the same conclusion.
The tacit dimension is not a lesser form of knowing. It is the foundation on which everything explicit depends. And our culture is systematically dismantling it.
I’m now writing about what this means — not just for advertising but for creativity, for education, for how we navigate the complex problems that algorithms cannot solve. The argument draws on neuroscience, complexity theory, anthropology, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the evidence from a century of advertising effectiveness research.
I’m interested in conversations with anyone interested in working at the intersection of creativity, technology, and what it means to be human. ,