Creativity Is a Climate Problem

Why leadership isn’t about ideas — it’s about conditions

Most organisations don’t suffer from a lack of ideas.
They suffer from climates where ideas struggle to survive.

Creativity is often treated as a personality trait, a talent, or a “nice to have”. Something extra. Something optional. Something that appears when people try harder. Something we bolt on the end if we have time.

But that framing misses something fundamental.

Creativity is the engine of success in an organisation.
And it's fuel is care.

Here is the accompanying "Cultivated – Notes"

Creativity is also not primarily an act of self-expression.
It is a response to environment.

The same people, with the same skills and values, can be deeply creative in one setting — and completely shut down in another. Not because they’ve changed, but because the conditions and climate have.

Creativity, it turns out, is a climate problem.

The moment I understood this

A few years ago, I found myself drinking with a biker group in Tallinn.

Everything was fine at first. The atmosphere was warm. Open. Safe. Stories flowed. Curiosity was welcome. The climate was right.

Then a rival biker group appeared at the edge of the square.

Nothing about me changed.
But the environment did.

In that moment, the behaviours that had felt natural — listening, asking questions, being curious — no longer made sense. Creativity didn’t disappear because I ran out of ideas. It disappeared because the climate shifted.

That experience clarified something I now see everywhere in work.

Creativity doesn’t fail loudly or obviously.
It withdraws.
It retreats.
It waits for safer ground.

And whether it ever returns depends far less on talent — and far more on the conditions leaders create.

But here's the key.

Creativity is the engine of success in an organisation.
And it's fuel is care.

Creativity is how we take ideas, and turn them into something of value.

Why ideas alone aren’t enough

Every organisation is full of ideas.

Good ideas. Well-intentioned ideas. Solid ideas. Inspiring ideas.

What separates organisations that thrive from those that stall isn’t the quality of their ideas. It’s whether those ideas reliably turn into something useful, something valuable – and whether these ideas even surface in the first place.

In its simplest form, work follows a very human flow going from idea to value:

Idea → Invest → Create → Value

An idea emerges.
Someone chooses whether to invest — with time, energy, attention and money.
Something gets created.
And, if things go well, one of the four types of value appears.

When this flow works, work feels meaningful. People can see how their effort connects to something larger.

When it breaks — when ideas stall, investment is inconsistent, or creation becomes box-ticking — meaning evaporates. And when meaning disappears, creativity is usually the first thing to go.

The model explains how value is created.
The climate determines whether people care enough to create it.

The five climates creativity depends on

Over time, I’ve noticed five conditions that consistently determine whether creativity flourishes — or quietly shuts down.

They aren’t techniques.
They aren’t personality traits.
They are climates within an organisation.

1. Meaning — care needs a future to lean into

We don’t improve what we don’t care about.

And care doesn’t come from being busy. It comes from being able to see where the work is going – what it's all in service of.

In my work, I often talk about the painted picture. Not a strategy deck or a list of targets, but a felt sense of a better future — something compelling enough for people to lean towards.

Something people can see, feel and imagine in their minds.

When people can picture a future that’s more meaningful than the present, care switches on.

Care is not a soft extra.
Care is the fuel.

Emotion and motion share the same root for a reason. Without emotion, nothing moves — not ideas, not energy, not behaviour. Work becomes mechanical. Creativity becomes optional.

A climate of meaning exists when people can answer three questions:

• What are we moving towards?
• Why does it matter?
• And what happens if we don’t change?

Care doesn’t show up as enthusiasm.
It shows up as effort over time.

Our job as leaders then is not to try and motivate people to care. It is to make the future visible. A future that is compelling, interesting and exciting.

2. Space — creativity needs room to breathe

Even meaningful work cannot thrive without space.

Most organisations live almost entirely in closed mode: focused, efficient, decisive. Execution, judgement, delivery. Tasks. Meetings. Getting things done.

Closed mode is essential to build and create products and services. But creativity doesn’t live there and closed mode thinking alone will never create new products, new ways of doing things, new ways to remain viable in the marketplace.

Ideation and creativity requires open mode: curiosity, exploration, playfulness. A space where ideas are allowed to exist before they are evaluated.

The problem isn’t that people aren’t creative.
It’s that they’re rarely given time to arrive at creativity.

You can’t demand it on command.

Creativity is a rhythm: open to explore, closed to shape. Open to learn, closed to deliver. When organisations fail to design space for this rhythm, creativity gets squeezed out by constant urgency.

👉 See this article on the creative process

A climate of space exists when people have permission — and time — to think differently before being asked to decide.

3. Attention — creativity follows what we notice

Space alone isn’t enough. What matters is what we do with it.

Creativity doesn’t come from thinking harder.
It comes from noticing more.

Most organisational decisions aren’t bad decisions. They’re premature ones — made before anyone has really paid attention, gained knowledge and studied.

When attention is shallow, creativity becomes superficial, improvements don't improve much and new products or services are few and far between.
When attention is deep, patterns begin to emerge, connections form and new ideas emerge in large swathes.

Intelligence, in this sense, isn’t about knowing more. It’s about connecting more. Seeing relationships. Noticing what others miss.

Leaders shape attention constantly — through the questions they ask, what they measure, and what they ignore or pay attention to.

What an organisation pays attention to is what it gets more of and what it becomes good at.

A climate of attention exists when people are expected — and supported — to notice what’s really happening before trying to change it or generate new ways of doing things.

4. Safety — creativity involves risk

Seeing clearly creates a new problem.

Once people notice what’s really happening — inefficiencies, tensions, better ways of working — they have to feel safe enough to say it, and brave enough to try something different.

👉 See this post on the 10 behaviours of effective employees.

Creativity always involves uncertainty. There's always a risk something new might not work.

Failure is not the goal of creativity.
But it is sometimes a side effect of learning.

Importantly, not all mistakes are equal. Some are trivial. Some are costly. Some have serious consequences.

This is not about recklessness. It’s about responsibility.

Leaders don’t create safety by encouraging failure. They create it by clearly defining where experimentation is safe — and where precision matters.

A climate of safety exists when people know:

• what’s safe to try
• what needs extra care
• and that learning — not blame — will follow honest effort

When the edges are clear, people are far more willing to step forward.

5. Shape — constraints give creativity somewhere to land

One of the great myths of creativity is that it needs total freedom.

In reality, creativity struggles without constraints.

Constraints are not the enemy of creativity. They give it form.
Creativity always needs something to push against.

Clear priorities. Clear decision rights. Clear time boxes. A shared sense of what “good” looks like. A painted picture of the future.

Without shape, creativity becomes exhausting. People don’t know where to push — so they stop pushing altogether.

Shape is what turns creativity from energy into progress.

A climate of shape exists when people know:

• the boundaries they’re working within
• the constraints that matter
• and when something is good enough to move on

Creativity doesn’t need more freedom.
It needs better design.

And design is a leadership act.

The quiet responsibility of leadership

Creativity isn’t something leaders can demand.

It’s something people offer through their nature — when the conditions are right.

The people in your organisation already have ideas.
They already likely care.
They already see things that could be better.

What determines whether those ideas surface, whether care turns into action, and whether insight becomes value is the climate they work inside.

Often, the most creative act a leader can take isn’t adding something new.

It’s removing what gets in the way.

A final invitation

This week, notice the climate you’re creating.

In meetings.
In corridors.
In what you protect.
In what you rush.
In what you allow — and what you quietly discourage.

Because we don’t improve what we don’t care about.

And people don’t offer their creativity to systems that feel indifferent, or leaders that aren't designing the right climates for ideation and creativity to thrive.

Creativity doesn’t need permission.
It needs a place where ideas and creation can thrive.

This essay accompanies a Cultivated Notes video exploring creativity as climate, not personality — and how leaders can design the conditions where ideas turn into value.