For the first half of my life, I didn’t consider myself “creative,” or “original,” or “innovative.” I watched how others did things and imitated them. I read books for instruction on whatever new task I was tackling. Instead of creative thinking, I leaned towards “no need to reinvent the wheel” thinking.
So I encountered a conundrum when I first thought about writing a book. I remember lamenting to a friend over coffee one day—“I want to write, but I don’t really have anything new to say that hasn’t already been said.” Thankfully, my friend didn’t accept my self-doubt. Instead he responded with these profound words—“Ah, but Rob, when you write, with your voice, it is all new!”
One of the wisest men who ever lived, King Solomon, expressed a similar lament over one thousand years ago when he concluded that “there is nothing new under the sun.”
Solomon’s observation notwithstanding, you must be creative as a leader. Customer preferences change, technologies disrupt, and teams need fresh thinking to stay engaged. Creativity fuels innovation, problem-solving, and adaptability. With a creative mindset, you can challenge assumptions, imagine new possibilities, and connect ideas others overlook. You turn constraints into opportunities and uncertainty into advantage. Without creativity, your leadership becomes management—efficient but stagnant.
The Leadership Challenge
But creativity is difficult. One or more of three forces work against you:
Your environment.
There is a good chance you operate in a world fundamentally hostile to creativity. The constant pressure for predictability, results, and fear of failure stifle imagination. You live in reactive urgency — expectations, deadlines, and constant decision-making. You’re rewarded for execution, efficiency, and certainty. Those muscles become strong. Your creative muscles atrophy.
Calendar structure also works against you. Creativity doesn’t bloom in five-minute increments between back-to-back meetings. It requires margin and a different mental posture. But you rarely experience that kind of space. Your days are full. Your mind is crowded. Your attention is fragmented.
Your identity.
When your identity becomes defined by being the person who “knows” or has answers, creativity feels risky. You begin to equate creativity with losing control: “What if my idea isn’t good? What if this experiment fails? What if my team thinks I don’t know what I’m doing?” So you default to what you already know. You over-rely on your experience—useful, but not sufficient when new problems evolve faster than past solutions.
The shadow side of your leadership strengths.
Even the leadership habits we praise—responsiveness, decisiveness, availability—can smother creativity. Those habits keep you in reactive mode, constantly putting out fires instead of imagining what could be built, improved, or transformed. Creativity requires you to shift from urgency to openness, from “What do I need to fix right now?” to “What possibilities have I not yet explored?”
The challenge is straightforward to name but hard to embody: You cannot be creative at full speed, without margin, and without vulnerability.
The Leadership Opportunity
Fortunately, creativity is not a personality trait – something you have or don’t have. It is a discipline any leader can cultivate. And the first step is reframing creativity not as inspiration but as an intentional process.
My own breakthrough came from a small, 35-page book: A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young. Young, a legendary “Mad Men” era executive, argued that creativity is no more mysterious than manufacturing. There is an assembly line. There are inputs, stages, and outputs. And if leaders follow the steps, new ideas arrive more reliably.
His method unfolds in five steps:
1. Gather raw material around your seedling of an idea.
Read broadly. Listen deeply. Observe patterns. Talk to people outside your usual circle. Ask AI for ideas. Creativity demands raw material; without it, your brain has nothing to connect.
2. Digest the material.
Let it marinate. Think about it in the margins of your day, away from your workplace—brushing your teeth, driving, exercising. Give it focused attention, what neuroscientists now call “purposeful cognitive engagement.”
3. Step away—then return with rhythm and discipline.
Young believed the unconscious mind plays a crucial role in creativity. You need space, not grinding. This is where most leaders struggle—they never step away.
4. Wait for the idea to surface, often unexpectedly.
Your mind makes connections when you’re relaxed, not when you’re forcing it.
5. Refine the idea.
That first spark is rarely the whole idea. It must be shaped, edited, clarified. Stay with it and keep going.
Neuroscience now validates Young’s intuition. Focused attention activates the brain’s “executive networks,” while mind-wandering activates the “default mode network.” Creativity happens when the two networks interact—when leaders alternate between concentration and openness. This oscillation literally builds new synaptic connections – new thoughts! Creativity, it turns out, is brain chemistry.
How I Use This Process
I practice this almost daily – especially when I’m writing. My best ideas emerge early in the morning before the noise of the day fills my mind. I wake up, make coffee, sit quietly, and choose one small “seedling idea” to ponder. Then I read something—my writing or someone else’s—that feeds that seedling. I might use AI for a survey on the idea.
Next, I head out for a run or walk. While I do other workouts, nothing produces ideas for me like the steady rhythm of running. Sometimes chill instrumental music helps. I begin to think differently—loosely, freely, not in straight lines. This is where new connections form.
When the ideas come, I capture them immediately—sweat, scribbles, and all—because I’ve learned that ideas evaporate fast. If I wait thirty minutes, the spark dims.
Creativity is not something I “have.” It is something I practice.
You Can be Creative
When you intentionally adopt a creative rhythm — gathering inputs, giving ideas space, engaging the unconscious mind, and returning to refine their ideas – you will discover that creativity shows up far more often.
Even better, when you model curiosity and creative thinking, it will change your team’s culture. People feel permission to think differently. They experiment more. They share rough ideas earlier. They stop fearing failure and start pursuing possibility.
Creativity becomes contagious. And eventually, it becomes a competitive advantage.
Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” He was right. Creativity isn’t a personality trait—it’s a practice. A process. A discipline any leader can choose.