Creativity isn’t soft
It’s infrastructure
Creative Oxygen™ was built on an observation made in a clinical environment.
Ali Mapletoft, founder of Creative Oxygen™, tells the story.
When my daughter Iris was 14 months old, she went into anaphylactic shock due to an allergy. The paramedics arrived within two minutes. By the time we reached A&E, the department was already in motion, equipment appearing, teams assembling, a controlled urgency that felt, from the outside, like organised chaos.
In the middle of it, one of the paramedics turned to me and, matter of factly, asked me to hold her and sing to her. No explanation. He simply knew it was the right intervention at that moment.
I sang Row, Row, Row the Boat. It was what she liked me to sing at bedtime, and I'd sung it to her often during breastfeeding.
That day she needed epinephrine, antihistamines, and oxygen, but she was panicking so much that they were hard to administer. What the holding and singing did was bring her heart rate down and stop us both from panicking. In that scenario it mattered.
A calmer child and a calmer parent made the clinical work easier. It was one small creative intervention inside a much larger medical effort. But it was precisely the right one.
What that experience revealed wasn't just good clinical care. It was a team thinking flexibly under extreme pressure, making decisions that no protocol could have predicted, and creating the conditions for a frightened child to stabilise.
The paramedic who asked me to hug her and sing wasn't being whimsical. He was using his creative intelligence to be precise.
That capacity, to think creatively when the pressure is highest, isn't evenly distributed across organisations. In some teams it thrives, but in most, it's been squeezed out by the weight of process, hierarchy, and chronic overwhelm. When it goes, decision quality drops, communication breaks down, and people start to disengage. That's dangerous.
I built Creative Oxygen™ to restore it.
Meet the founder
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Ali Mapletoft
Founder of Creative Oxygen
I'm Ali Mapletoft
I didn't come to this work through a business school or a boardroom.
As a teenager I lived with my grandmother, who cared for my grandfather through the advanced stages of dementia. There was no protocol that worked. What my grandmother did, day after day, was improvise, stepping into his reality, becoming whatever character the moment required, because meeting him where he was caused less suffering than pulling him back to a world he could no longer reach.
It took creativity, humility, and profound compassion. And it worked.
That was my first education in what creative intelligence actually looks like under pressure. A precise, moment-by-moment flexible response to a situation that conventional thinking couldn't solve.
I grew up in Lesotho, Southern Africa, during the transition out of apartheid, where creativity wasn't a cultural luxury. It was how people found a way forward under impossible circumstances.
I went on to spend over 20 years as a film director, TV producer, and creative director working with various organisations including the BBC, Channel 4, Virgin, and Save the Children.
Artists and clinicians have more in common than either would expect. Both make high-stakes decisions under pressure, with incomplete information, in conditions that don't wait for certainty. The difference is that artists are trained to embrace that discomfort and turn it into action.
That skill is learnable. That's what Creative Oxygen™ exists to teach.