Creative Problem Solving In Work

Creativity is an essential component in my life. And I would argue it’s an essential component in a good business too. Creativity is required to overcome problems.

I always describe problems and opportunities as being two sides of the same coin. When we embark on a new opportunity (new market, new product, new clients) it is typically a response to a problem we have. When we take the opportunity we create new problems. When we overcome problems we open up opportunities.

And on and on.

It's helpful to see problems and opportunities as joined together, as two sides of a coin, as a cause and effect.

For example, let's say that sales are dwindling in a market. This is a problem. A solution may be to venture into a new region or market. But this will also cause problems (recruitment, legal, compliance and delivery), but it will open opportunities.

Let's say we overcome a problem of slow delivery to our clients, we open up the opportunity for faster time to market, the ability to adapt and iterate, and a quicker time for cash to hit our bank. 

It's cyclical. You could say all opportunities are a result of overcoming a problem, and all problems are the results of other opportunities taken at some point.

Those problems that hang around your company unsolved...well, they're likely problems caused by an opportunity taken in the past, and just not resolved.

Whatever your view on problems and opportunities, you absolutely need creativity to overcome problems in their entirety. And I say entirety here because all too often people apply plasters (band aids) to the symptoms of problems, or they pass the burden of the problem to someone else.

This just masks the problem and pushes it down the road. It's also why companies don't tend to get better over the long term when they don't solve problems in their entirety.

All companies have problems, and as I’ve covered before on this site - overcoming problems is how to release business agility. 

Problems are the fodder for management. Managers should be surfacing problems and making them so exciting, compelling and interesting, that talented people want to solve them. 

Of course, some businesses have good problems that energise and galvanise. Other businesses have bad problems that drive people away and demoralise. Most companies tend to have both. 

To overcome a problem though, we need creativity. Creativity is not merely having ideas. Creativity is about bringing those ideas to life. 

In this post I am going to:

1. Share why creativity is important to your business
2. A model I use to show the cycle of creativity with open and closed modes
3. Some ideas on how to "run" each stage of the cycle
4. Some closing thoughts
5. Bibliography with links and sources to ponder.

But let’s not stop at why creativity is needed for problem solving - embracing it also has other effects, chief amongst them is the fact that people are encouraged to use their natural abilities and creative intelligence in the workplace too. A truly great thing for most employees.

In many organisations I have seen, creativity is hard to find unless you head to the typical "creative departments" like marketing or communication. Of course, many workplaces embrace creativity because it's the nature of their business. I'm talking about companies where creativity is what they sell (design agencies, creative agencies etc). But even these companies have problems.

You may find some naturally very creative people carving out time and space to fly below the radar in an organisation. They are often the mavericks who come up with new products, new ways of working and overcome systemic problems.

You may occasionally see a manager scheduling an “innovation sprint” into the delivery schedule (I dislike this as it suggests creativity is a one-off activity that can be forced into a short time window between delivery, but it's better than nothing) 

The reality is creativity requires time, space and energy.

In many organisations time, space and energy is usually focused on solving symptoms of problems, passing the burden of problems to others, politics around problems, defending work, justifying a role in the company, business as usual, delivery (the hard slog of banging our heads against problems) or dealing with internal processes that feel like they’ve been designed to really annoy everyone. 

To put it simply; we’re often too busy to be creative. 

Well, that’s a real shame for a number of reasons:

Firstly, to overcome the problems that matter (i.e. the systemic ones on the path towards your painted picture), you are going to need creative solutions.

Secondly, we are losing people’s natural inclination to be creative in the workplace. 

Thirdly, we are making the problem worse by merely working around them, only solving symptoms or bringing in IT solutions to automate the problems deeper and further into the organisation. 

As much as I tend to stay away from corporate MBA type stuff, the Harvard Business School did have an interesting article on why creativity is important. The author articulated four very good reasons for bringing more creativity to the workplace. (“The Importance of Creativity in Business | HBS Online,” 2022)

1. It encourages innovation
2. It improves productivity
3. It allows for adaptability
4. It fosters growth

Nice. I’m going to add one more to it. 

5. Better job satisfaction

When people are allowed, and given space, to be creative at work, I believe they’re also more engaged in that work. They will be using their natural human potential to solve problems, and this in turn will encourage retention, higher engagement and more joy in the workplace. It will also make the business better.

I often get criticised for focussing so much on “problems”. People don’t like to think they have problems. People often don’t like to lean into “bad” work. It’s much easier to pass the burden to someone else in the organisation, turn a blind eye to problems or sweep them under the carpet. 

Yet problems persist.

Problems are often hard to fix, certainly if you’re tackling the root cause of business problems. Problems are so plentiful that it can feel like you may spend your whole day solving them. Problems are everywhere.

But, problems don’t get the right focus in business, so linger for years, sometimes decades, until the business is so painfully slow and difficult to work in, that something has to give. 

On the other side of these problems though are opportunities.

And this is why I firmly believe that problems belong to leaders and managers. Managers and Leaders often created the problems in the first place and are responsible for the ultimate success of the business by overcoming that which stops people from doing a good job.

Managers and Leaders have more levers to pull, they can direct energy and attention in the business, and frankly, they are getting paid to make the business more effective AND keep their good staff.

But problem solving is hard because it requires creativity. And creativity requires Time, Space and Energy - much of which feels like it may be better put to use doing tasks and everyday work. 

And then the circular argument starts. 

If we’re not doing these tasks because we’re “doing creative problem solving”, then the business will grind to a halt. But “it’s SO hard to get anything done because we have these problems”. Round and round we go. 

It is hard to bring creativity into the workspace because it’s not a fast process you can switch on or off at the drop of a hat. 

The image you see here, and flow it represents, is the system I use to explain the cycle of creativity.

It helps to articulate why weaving in creativity is so hard. It also explains the hard work that is involved. 

I think a lot of leaders and managers believe creativity, and specifically creative problem solving, is easy, fun, exciting and “downtime” activities. But that is simply not true. It’s hard work as we’ll see as we go through this. 

It’s also why I’m not a fan of “innovation sprints” or “creative sprints” as a delivery milestone. These suggest that we can only be creative at certain times of the month or year. It assumes that we can simply apply our creativity in a fixed time window once or twice a year. And it assumes that everyone needs to be creative at the same time.

Problems often can't wait to be solved until a dedicated time block 3 months from now. New problems emerge throughout our entire work cycle, not just at a given time. Some problems simply cannot, and should not, be deferred until we have time in an innovation sprint. They need dealing with.

What I share in this article can be applied in a small one or two day window, or for a month at a time - and beyond. It’s the same cycle whether you’re coming up with new copy for a product, or solving a large scale delivery challenge, or writing a book. We may not need an entire team involved, but then again we may. It’s contextual. 

As such, I suggest you pick a small problem and try this cycle. If it works, pick something else that’s slightly harder or bigger. If it doesn’t work, modify it. As with all things here on Cultivated Management, we’re sharing ideas we’ve seen work, not absolutes. 

When I showed this diagram and process to a leader a few years back, he said it was too time consuming, too long and had too many steps. He asked me to make it shorter. I said "No". 

Creativity is not something that can be forced, mandated, slipped in during a 15 minute break or pulled out of a hat. It takes time (and a different mode of operating, which we'll come to in a minute).

And time is something many leaders and managers believe should be spent on something “more useful”, like simply delivering the massive workload, (as this leader told me). And the cycle begins again. You get the idea. 

What you see in the diagram is likely not 100% correct. It has no defined “does take time” as each creative project will be different, and each person involved will have a different time-journey through it. It has no guarantees at the end of it, but it does have some checkpoints and feedback loops to help people through a creative problem solving process. 

This model makes no statements about whether this whole activity and cycle is a group activity, a solo activity or a mixture. This model is what I use for my own personal work (books, podcasts, art), it’s also the very same model I use in the workplace with teams. The model is just a model, how you apply it is what matters.

Let’s jump through it. 

Step One - Care about something.

It starts with caring about the business, your team and your work.

One thing I’ve learned through my career is that when we care about something, we want to look after it and make it better. We want to help it, improve it, and ensure its success. We do this with people we love, and if we care about the business we’re working in, we’ll do it there too. 

The reality is some employees, leaders and managers simply don’t care enough about the business and the work. This sounds harsh but a growing number of people have disengaged, lost any enthusiasm they had for the business, are apathetic to problems, are quietly quitting, are protecting their own work, or are simply going through the motions. 

I meet plenty of people who have simply given up.

This sounds negative, but I see this a lot. People will complain privately about how hard it is to get their job done because of problems, but they simply don’t care enough to fix them or make it better. Or they did care but know nothing will happen, so they become apathetic.

Of course, the culture (behaviours) of the people in your organisation plays a large factor here. Will people get in to trouble, or shouted down, if they raise problems to managers and leaders?

You’ll see the people who want to make work better - they’re frustrated, vocal and energised. They are frustrated because they care and they want to do a good job, but they cannot. 

They care about the business but they’re struggling with some part of it. They want to do a good job but are blocked, hindered or banging their head against a wall.

These people are pointing at problems worth solving. They should be involved in the creative problem solving process too - you'll need that energy and enthusiasm. Creativity feeds on passion and care, and a desire to bring something new to the world.  

When we care, we see ways to make the business better.

It starts with a sense of irritation about something, until it becomes a need to solve it. We want to do a good job but can’t. We want to solve the irritation. We want to make some form of change. And if we cannot make the change in the organisation we often switch off, quietly quit or move to another company.

Step Two - Identifying Problems.

We now need to identify the actual problem that is irritating those people who care, or causing a problem for the business. 

Try asking these two questions to get data and insights:

1. “What problem are we trying to solve?” 
2. “Is it a problem worth solving?”

This could be a process in the business that sucks. It could be the ways of working. It could even be the way the organisation is structured. There are a myriad of problems in a business. 

This step is about understanding whether this really is a problem and whether it is worth investing time, energy and attention on solving it. 

Why is it a problem? What is the problem? Is it really worth solving, or could we work around it easily?

Step Three - Study and Research.

Now we’ve got a candidate problem, we need to truly understand the problem in more depth. Get studying. Knowledge is gained by studying - and there are plenty of ways to study, so find your preferred way. 

If we know what problem we’re trying to solve, and we believe it’s worth solving, we now need to ask “how do we know this is a problem?”

• What data do we have?
• What evidence do we have that this is a problem?
• How does the problem manifest itself?
• Is it always a problem?
• When is it not a problem?
• Is it a problem for everyone?
• How can we measure the problem?
• What are the effects of the problem?

The phoenix checklist is a wonderful tool here. So too is stapling yourself to work. We need different points of view, and different insights.

Here’s an old article on the phoenix checklist from my old blog and another one here from model thinkers.

I think it was Einstein that said that in order to solve a problem we need to fully understand it. This is studying.

Study, learn, study some more. But be careful, don’t let studying become a form of procrastination. We have time for procrastination later. 

Remember that you will never have all of the information you need or want, but we should gather enough to know the intricacies of the problem we are trying to solve.

Another way to think about this is by asking yourself:

“How will we know we’ve solved the problem?”

A lot of this work so far is about building a strong foundation to work from. We’ve not really jumped into the creative activities yet. We’re gaining insights to allow us to creatively solve the problem. We’re getting facts, data and evidence that allow us to confidently say whether we have solved the problem or not.

Step Four - Space and Time.

We now need time and space. And this is where leaders and managers can play a significant role in carving out this time and space.

Stop some work, delay a project, shift things around, do whatever is needed to give you, or your working team, some time and space. 

As much as John Cleese may or may not be getting canceled, his advice on creativity is GOLD. 

If you don’t object to his sometimes questionable views and comments, spend some time watching this talk. It’s a cracker - and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t inform my own work.

Open and Closed Modes

He calls on the work of Donald McKinnon who found there were two main modes we operate in:

1. Closed mode - action, email, lists, get stuff done, task focussed
2. Open mode - wonder, observation, problem solving, creativity

As you can imagine, we spend a lot of our work-day in a closed state. Meetings, action, email, slack, todo lists, school run etc. But creativity happens in an open mode. 

The open mode is one of wonder and observation, of calm and clarity. It’s where our ideas percolate and insights bounce into each other. It’s a state of nature. It’s a state of curiosity and openness.

Imagine how you feel laid on a beach with nothing to do. Listening to the waves and people having fun. Watching the waves crash back and forth. Relaxed. Open. Wonder. 

But, we can’t all disappear to a beach to solve problems, so we need to learn how to access our open mode in the workplace.

We’ll get to that because once you master that, you can really access and tap into what I would call our natural state. The way we are supposed to spend a significant part of our lives. A state we’ve almost certainly lost. A state we often crave; to switch off; to be mindful; to be present; to feel peace of mind; to wonder; to appreciate; to feel a sense of belonging; to be creative.

An important point here: Creativity is not about idea generation alone, it’s about bringing these ideas to life - to create something. The open mode is only one part of this - coming up with ideas and concepts.

We cannot spend all of our lives in an open mode. Open modes don’t tend to get things done. As such, we must learn to fluctuate between the open mode and the closed mode. 

We must enter the open mode to come up with ideas and insights. We must then enter the closed mode to get things done and perform deep, concentrated action. Then we must enter the open mode again to assess, test, get feedback, and iterate on the work. Then back into the closed mode. And then open. Then closed. Etc.

This is the cycle of creativity.

Rumour has it that Einstein’s hair turned grey due to a prolonged and serious amount of deep work after pondering an idea. Or it could be his age. Or having kids. But his process was in line with open and closed states. He would play the violin to open his mind, and then once an idea struck, he would work tirelessly until the outcome of that idea came to life. 

Winston Churchill was famous for building brick walls. Apparently. He’d take a break from running the country to reset his mind by building a brick wall. Famous authors have routines that often bring together an open and closed modes. (Clear, 2013)

Open mode for ideas and insights. Closed mode to get things done and created. Both are part of the creative cycle.

The open and closed idea is already pretty insightful, and we can all associate with likely spending too long in the closed mode. But how do you access the open mode, when you’re swamped with work, have tight deadlines and have no “time” to be creative? 

Sorry to give you the bad news, but you do need to find some time and space. 

As John Cleese states in his talk - you need space, time and more time. 

You need:

• Space
• Time
• Time
• Confidence
• Humour

You’ll see in my diagram that I’ve called out three dedicated milestones for space and time. I do this to ensure leaders and managers know when they need to carve out more space and time. 

You could argue you need this space to do the research and studying, but from my experience, this can often be done alongside every day work - but flex as you see fit.

Space

Cleese’s first point is about Space. You need to clear the calendar. Clear your workspace if needed. Clear commitments. Carve out a chunk of space in your busy calendar. Space is essential. Maybe you all need a dedicated office room, or an off-site, or a space in your home purely for open mode thinking?

Time to enter the open mode

You then need some time. And yes, he has time twice and I like the reasoning. The first block of time is to enable our brains to slow down and switch off from the myriad of tasks we have.

When we try to go quiet, we often think of tasks that need doing, emails we should have sent, conversations we should or shouldn’t have had, DIY tasks around the house, films we want to watch etc

And so you must find a way to quiet the mind - and that comes with time.

Maybe it’s 20 minutes at the start of this creative brainstorming session to simply sit quietly, listen to some music, meditate, or be distracted with an easy activity.

Experiment here.

We need time to clear our minds. This is about accessing the open mode. We must do all we can to switch from our task mind (closed mode) to an open and creative mind (open mode).

Time to come up with ideas (part two)

We then need more time. An uninterrupted long period of time (1-3 hours is my recommendation) where all we are doing is coming up with ideas and potential solutions to the problem.

We’re not doing any more studying, we’re not implementing any new activity, outcome, product or initiative. We’re merely pondering the problem and ideating. We’re letting our minds bounce ideas around, connect the dots, ponder ideas and merge together potential solutions.

If I do this with a group, I always ask people to brainstorm individually to start with. This is more effective.

Pose the problem in a form of question if you can. Get everything out. Every idea, no matter how big, small, silly or weird it is - it needs to be written down.

This is why I recommend doing this individually. There is little fear of sharing at this point, you are not influenced by someone else’s ideas, there is no one to shout you down or argue, or even build on it (not yet).

This is time to ideate. Let it all out. Don’t hold back. Nothing is a silly idea, they’re just ideas.

What we’re trying to do here is think in a diverse manner. Divergent (or lateral) thinking is about thinking broadly, widely and openly. There is time later for convergent thinking, which is typically about narrowing down the ideas and focusing on the outcomes.

There’s a good article here with plenty of ideas to get people into a divergent thinking zone.  

I then suggest bringing all of the ideas together on a whiteboard/mural and looking for synergies.

I ask people to build on other ideas, tie ideas together, mash them together to create a new idea and ponder the wider pool of ideas. You’d be amazed what comes from this activity. Try not to shut down any ideas. Try not to argue.

Challenge is welcome, as is constructive feedback, but don’t put people down. Try to build and mash in a positive way. You don’t want people to be discouraged by these creative sessions. You don’t want people to avoid them in the future, because people are mean. Build each other up. Build each idea up. Mash them together.

Confidence that answer will come

John Cleese then suggests you need confidence.

In order for the above to work, we need to have confidence that we will indeed find a solution. We need to feel confident that everyone in the room has our best interests at heart (if we’re working in a group).

If we have a time limit, which I always recommend, then this time constraint will drive our sense of confidence and urgency. We must remain confident that our ideas are all valid. We need to be confident we will find a potential solution. Maybe not there in the session, but at some time. We will always find a way. Things will always work out.

Humour

And finally we must have humour no matter how serious the situation at hand. Humour, playfulness, joy, fun - they are the rock bed of creativity. If we’re not having fun being creative (at least some of the time), we’ve got something wrong. Laughter and energy are the obvious signs this process is working in the workplace. 

At the end of this process you will have lots of ideas. They will have been morphed and mashed together, built upon and exploded out. But right now, we still don’t want to commit to a solution. Not just yet. Time to procrastinate a little.

(Note: End of John Cleese’s recommendations)

Steps Six and Seven - Procrastination.

Now we need even more time and space. We have ideas and potentially some fully fledged solutions but right now, we’re still not in solution mode. 

We need a break. We need to schedule in this time to procrastinate. We should all go and do something else. Go home. Cook tea. Go out in nature. Do simple tasks and activities not related to the problem.

This is built in procrastination. 

This time is to allow the subconscious parts of your brain to process the problem and potential solutions that came up during the ideation phase. Even if you feel one of the final ideas was the right solution, it’s still important to let your brain, or the collective brains, percolate the idea. 

This space is for your subconscious mind to work whilst you’re off doing something else. It’s those clever people in the back of your mind pondering the problem and inputs - and working their magic to come up with a refined solution. It happens EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Usually in the shower. 

It’s the aha moment. 

It's the convergent moment, bringing those ideas down together to a smaller list, sometimes a single solution.

Make sure you always carry a notebook and pen - and capture it, in all its detail as it comes to you. I wrote about this very process over on my Creative Soul Projects newsletter - how I had a lucid insight on the train - and how I captured it all in my notebook.

If you're working in a group then people may have this eureka moment at different times. It may take you hours, days or weeks, and some people may never have that moment, but remain confident that what does come from the group is the right outcome.

Bring the group back together fairly soon after the ideation stage, and listen to what came to them. You may find you can build and mix these further ideas together to come up with something even better. Or maybe everyone got the aha moment that it was indeed one of the solutions you'd already come up with in the ideation stage.

Clearly articulate the potential solution in as much detail as you can. This could be a revised delivery process, a new product to launch, or even a whole new structure of the organisation. It could be a new marketing campaign, or a new strategy, or a new content idea, or a book, or a film, or a revamped recruitment campaign.

Describe it and just do a final double check - does this solution potentially solve our problem?

Steps Eight to Twelve - Space, Time and Production

Now, we must find even more space and time to get into the closed mode. 

It’s time for deep, focussed and concentrated time to bring this idea to life. Focus, commit, work hard and bring this idea to life. Produce.

Large or small solution - the process is the same. Close that mind, focus on the task and get it done. It's no longer the time to ideate and wonder, it's time to deliver.

And then relax. Open the mind.

Find time and space to reflect, test and iterate. Get some feedback. Look at the measures that told you this was a problem in the first place - are they getting better? Are you solving the problem? Did you solve the problem? Are you confident this solution will address the problem?

How did it all go? Do we need to rework it? Do we need to learn from it? Can we iterate on it? Or are we ready to ship?

From this open mode now back into closed mode to modify, extend, build or complete the solution. Hard work, tasks being done, action being taken.

Of course, something can be iterative in nature like processes, ways of working etc. Some things are final and we ship it, like a book. So, this cycle continues for as long as needed.

Closed mode to action and produce. Open mode to iterate, tune and get feedback.

Once you're ready to ship the whole, or even part of it, check again whether you are solving the problem.

And then ship. And test. And reflect.

• How could you improve this cycle for next time?
• Did you give enough time and space?
• What did you learn?

And then move on to the next creative problem solving task.

An idea for managers and leaders.

I worked with one manager who let me have free reign with this process and we overcame a number of problems.

The team morale was high and people were getting better at delivery - overcoming the problems made it easier to ship. So, they wanted to do more problem solving. But this manager’s natural inclination was to build a process that she could "manage". 

We therefore worked on giving her some visibility of the process, without it affecting the creative freedom people needed to solve problems.

We implemented a simple Kanban Visualisation System. 

We started by building a simple column for an on-going backlog. In this backlog we would add frustrations and problems that needed further studying. 

From there we added a column to the right-hand side for every activity set from the diagram, excluding the space and time elements.

We tracked the outcomes from each section within the Kanban cards themselves. We used Trello for this but any system that supports cards or a Kanban workflow would work. 

It seems silly to map this out, but it gave this manager a quick visual to see how the teams were progressing with problems.

We set a limit of one active problem only at any given time. This prevented the team from starting the studying of several at a time, or trying to run brainstorming sessions for multiple problems.

Remember, the goal is to identify a problem > ideate and then deliver, with “deliver” being an essential output of this activity. We're not just researching for insights or ideas. We're not just coming up with ideas that go nowhere. We're using these stages to create something of value.

One positive side effect of mapping the process was that the Trello board became a single repository for all ideas, including the working ideas, the synthesis, the outcomes, the actual solution and all other notes captured along the way.

New starters could spend some time digesting the process and looking at the artefacts, and we could also go back and see a record of the good work we’d all done. 

Shouldn't work be constructed this way by default?

When we look at the process, I can’t help but wish that all of our work was structured this way.

Sadly, many people are working at 100% capacity in closed-mode all year, all decade, often with no clear purpose or problem to solve, other than maybe growth at all costs. It’s the natural state for many organisations - constant grind at capacity. Do more with less. Overload people.

But when we look at how creative teams, and even sports people operate, they don’t operate at 100% all the time.

In the creative world, they typically spend time coming up with an idea and then have intense action on it, then reflection and open thinking again.

In the world of sports, athletes are rarely working at 100% until game day. Intense action, breaks, train, work hard, rest, intense 100% action. 

Yet in the world of work we’re expected to do more with less, work hard all week, pull a 60 hour work week and never take a day off. It’s become the norm but we’re not designed to do that - at least not for prolonged periods of time. 

I can’t help but think that we’ve got the construct of work a little out of sync. If we can’t even structure our typical business-as-usual work in a way that brings space and time, there’s no wonder we’re often not bringing a lot of innovation and creativity to the workplace. 

We need breaks, we need a life, we need time and space for open mode thinking, we need to work on the right things with focus and determination. We need to balance the pillars of life. We need to overcome problem using our creative intelligence.

I think that many leaders and managers are kind of stuck in this weird place. A place where they know that giving people space and time to bring their creativity to problems will improve the business. But there's just always so much work in the mix it's hard to justify giving up time. It's hard to break free from that.

Clayton Christensen's talk on the lack of innovation in the workplace is a staggering and insightful look at what went wrong with management and leadership over the last decades.

He explains why innovation (creativity) leads to jobs and economic growth, but for some reason companies are trying to cut costs, be more efficient and do more with less. And this results in less investment in innovation, which shrinks the economy.

So, if you’re leading a team try to weave in time for people to move between the open and closed modes, enjoy time with friends and family, and take care of their health.

The work and problems will always be there, your people may not. And the best way to succeed in business, at least in my experience, is to be really clear about what you're trying to do - and overcome the problems that stand between where you are now, and what you desire. And that needs creativity, which needs time and space. And you never know, you may get that next amazing product off the back of it.

There is always work happening in an organisation that doesn't need to happen. And this is what I believe managers and leaders should be doing - finding ways to make the business better by removing non-value add work - and carving out time and space.

Not only is creativity good for people and your own business, it seems it's pretty good for society as a whole too.

Closing Out

For creative problem solving to thrive we need to care enough to want to solve the problem. We must clearly define and measure the problem. We may choose to use the open and closed concept to ideate and then create. And ultimately we’re looking for something to be created and delivered at the back end of this; something that solves the original problem (and doesn’t create too many more problems as a consequence).

Creativity is not about coming up with ideas. It's about turning those ideas into something tangible.

If we are serious about making the business better we have to overcome obstacles - and the best way I’ve found, is to gather talented people around an interesting problem, and let them bring their creative solutions to the table. And then help them deliver on this creation.

And all of this needs space, time, energy and attention. Carving out this space, protecting this space and fighting for this space, is very much something a good manager and leader should be doing. 

“The ideal business is composed of managers and dreamers, and it is the responsibility of the former to protect the latter.”

--Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid. I did a newsletter on this quote here.

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