There is an old story about circus elephants. When they're young, they're tethered to a heavy stake so they can't move. As adults, a simple rope is enough to keep them in place. Not because they lack the strength to break free, but because they've learned not to try.

Britain often talks about creativity in much the same way.

Ask most Britons whether they're creative and, yeah, they'll tell you they are. And we can prove it.

According to new research we carried out, 64% of us describe ourselves as creative. That's a surprisingly healthy number. Even more encouragingly, 79% of people wish they could live more creative lives.

So far, so good.

But, press a little further and only 39% believe they're actually fulfilling their creative potential. That's a remarkable gap. A nation that sees itself as creative, wants to be more creative, yet somehow can't quite make creativity happen.

The usual response is to conclude that Britain needs more creativity, but I think that's the wrong diagnosis. Britain doesn't have a shortage of creativity; it has a failure to unlock it.

The evidence is all around us. Small children don't spend much time worrying whether they're creative. They simply are. They draw, build, invent, imagine and ask questions with reckless abandon. Yet somewhere along the way many people absorb the idea that creativity belongs to someone else.

That you need to be artistic, or gifted, or special, or a tortured genius. Or wear interesting glasses and work in agencies.

Over time, creativity becomes something we admire rather than something we practise. We stop seeing it as a human capability and start treating it as a specialist profession.

This means creativity hasn't disappeared, just that the confidence in our own creativity has, and unfortunately, the modern workplace often accelerates that decline.

Our research found that only 27% of employees feel their job allows them to be creative. Just 20% say their employer actively encourages creativity. Even more worryingly, only 18% believe their organisation genuinely values it.

That should concern all of us, because creativity isn't merely a nice-to-have or a decorative extra we add once the serious work is finished. Creativity is how societies solve problems, how businesses innovate and how economies grow.

When organisations prioritise efficiency at the expense of imagination, they may improve today's performance while quietly undermining tomorrow's.

Which leads me back to elephants - specifically, the massive one in almost every room in every business, Artificial Intelligence.

Before anyone accuses me of being a technological Luddite, let me be clear: AI is a remarkable tool. Used well, it can remove drudgery, accelerate learning and unlock new possibilities.

But every powerful technology comes with a temptation, and the temptation with AI is not that it will become smarter than us. It's that we will become lazier than we should. Creativity is a bit like a muscle. If we use it, it grows stronger. If we outsource it entirely, it weakens.

If every brief receives an instant answer, if every challenge is met with the first plausible solution, if every difficult thinking task is delegated to a machine, we risk creating a culture of cognitive atrophy. We become highly efficient producers of average ideas.

That might be good for output, but it is terrible for originality. But, like the elephant on the rope, we can all be retrained to think freely and break free of those shackles.

First, we need to rebuild creative confidence. Nobody is born boring and now everybody needs to nurture their imagination, more than ever. Abdicating creativity to a special minority or algorithm is simply not an option, whatever your background, age or job.

Second, we need to create environments that encourage playfulness rather than suppress it.

Many of the best ideas emerge through experimentation, exploration and, to use the technical term, mucking around. Yet organisations often eliminate precisely these behaviours because they appear inefficient.

The irony is that what looks inefficient in the short term often produces the breakthrough in the long term.

Third, we need to become more comfortable with risk.Great ideas rarely arrive pre-validated. If we only back concepts that already feel safe, familiar and predictable, we shouldn't be surprised when we get safe, familiar and predictable outcomes.

Finally, we need to protect time for thinking. Modern work increasingly rewards visible activity. Constant meetings. Constant messages. Constant output. But creativity doesn't thrive under permanent interruption.

Good ideas often emerge from properly interrogating a problem, discussing it with others, challenging assumptions and allowing thoughts to collide in unexpected ways, which requires space.

If we fail to challenge the conditions in which the creativity we already possess can flourish, we'll end up with a nation that knows it's creative, wishes it were more creative, but gradually forgets how to be.