Are You Trying To Force The Spark?
Creative thinking isn’t about the setting, it’s about how you shape the thinking.
We’ve already talked about how people need time to process ideas, make connections, and be truly creative. A change of environment can certainly help … if it’s done well.
But saying,
“Let’s send the team to a Creativity and Innovation workshop. That’ll make them more creative and help us grow our business, right?”
...won’t necessarily do the trick.
It depends on what actually happens during that workshop. Will it be back-to-back sessions, offering no time to reflect or explore? Will the “creative” work still live firmly inside the company’s unspoken rules, even as people screech “Think outside the box!” between whiteboard sessions?
Creativity on demand is difficult. In modern work culture, we expect insight, innovation, and problem-solving at hyperspeed – but even with a few days away at a luxury resort, results won’t come unless people are given real space to think.
As a Subversive Manager, you don’t need an expensive off-site to spark creativity. What you need is a culture that encourages question-asking, curiosity, comfort with ambiguity, and critical thinking. These are all skills that can be fostered and learned over time. Some organisations are even hiring philosophers-in-residence to help spark this kind of deeper inquiry! (Seriously, search for it.)
The real trick is to build in time:
Time to explore.
Time to question.
Time to think.
Give people the tools. Give them the space. And give them permission to not have the answer immediately.
Insight doesn’t need a change of postcode. It needs a change of pace.