Engine — Creativity & Climate
Creativity and climate — the conditions that allow good work to happen. Articles in this layer explore environment, energy, creative practice, and what leaders do to make good thinking more likely.
Music reliably helps with mood and stress at work. Its effect on performance is task-dependent and personality-dependent. What the research says — and what I actually do.
Most employee disengagement is not a personal failing. It is a system signal.
For decades, workplaces have prized one narrow form of intelligence — logical, mathematical, rational thinking. But there are at least eight kinds of intelligence.
Most barriers to creativity in organisations are managerial — not a lack of talent or ideas. This essay explores why keeping the dream alive is a management responsibility, and what it actually takes to create the conditions for imagination to survive.
The label genius is often misleading. We apply it to individuals — but when you look carefully at almost any significant creative achievement, the picture is more complicated.
Most workplace problems are solved too quickly, with the first plausible answer. The PO method — Problem + Object — deliberately disrupts that pattern. A practical guide to lateral thinking and creative problem-solving at work.
At the start of 2022, I set myself a creative constraint: one idea about creativity, every day, for a month. It failed after six days. This is what came from it
In most organisations, attention is drawn relentlessly toward problems. Appreciative Inquiry offers a different stance — not naïve optimism, but a deliberate practice of understanding where value already exists and asking how it might be amplified.
Before anyone puts pen to paper, the same things happen every time. Laughter. Nervous smiles. A low hum of anxiety. Then the disclaimers arrive. The drawing exercise is simple. What it reveals about fear and the creative process is not.