Andrea Chiarelli, Confidently Creative?
At some point, you may become the one setting the limits you used to resent.
‘Confidently Creative?’ is a joint series with Sven Brodmerkel (PhD). Together we are talking to original thinkers across different fields about creative confidence: what it is, why so few people act on it, and what makes conditions either conducive or hostile to it.
Our next guest is Andrea Chiarelli.
Andrea is a management consultant based in the UK. He advises universities, research funders, and government on strategy and research design. He writes The Art of Asking Questions on Substack, where he helps over 84,000 subscribers think clearly in a world flooded with AI output.
Q1. Is creativity something you do or is creative something you are?
I would say both, but the order matters. I think almost everyone is creative in the sense that we are recombining, pattern-finding creatures by default. So the raw equipment we have is close to universal. The tricky part in thinking about ourselves as “a creative person” is that it licenses everyone who doesn’t identify that way to opt out. I personally like to think about creativity the same way I treat my other (professional, but not only) capabilities: it’s a thing I do, repeatedly, under conditions that either encourage it or don’t. My identity as a creative person follows from my practice, not the other way round. I am making this point because the people who most need permission to start “being creative” are usually the ones who have decided the identity isn’t available to them.
Q2. Was there a moment when you first felt creatively confident or a moment when you realised you hadn’t been?
For the first stretch of my career I was good at producing strong work inside frames other people had already set. The framework was usually chosen, and the approach broadly agreed by colleagues who were ultimately the ones accountable for the work. I was effective within that, and probably creative within those boundaries, but not truly creative.
The shift came when I started leading projects in my own right, owning them from the shaping stage rather than picking up delivery. That meant deciding how to read a client rather than inheriting someone else’s read and making the approach genuinely mine rather than a competent execution of someone else’s ideas. In practice, as long as a more senior colleague was ultimately responsible, any idea I had was effectively underwritten by someone else and I never felt properly responsible for my creativity. The moment the call was mine, these situations shifted completely, and I was empowered to be creative - because if I wasn’t, nobody else would be in my place. That’s exciting, but also scary! It took a while to shift from being able to be creative towards being confidently creative.
Q3. How do you distinguish creative confidence from creative ability?
I would say that creative ability is the capacity to generate and develop ideas that are worth something. So to see a connection, frame a problem usefully, push a thought past its first form. On the other hand, I’d describe confidence as the willingness to act on that capacity and voice it. The distinction worth pausing on is that ability can be built in private, on your own, with no one ever seeing it, whereas confidence depends heavily on conditions you don’t fully control. Something called the COM-B model is helpful in thinking about this: behaviour follows from capability, opportunity and motivation. If creative ability is roughly the capability term, then confidence is what happens when that capability meets enough opportunity and motivation for someone to actually act. And the component that fails is almost never the capability. The “willingness” I talk about above carries a social cost, and whether you’re prepared to pay it depends a great deal on where you stand and what the environment makes safe. That’s why so much apparent absence of creative ability is really an absence of the conditions under which anyone would risk showing it.
Q4. Can you walk us through a specific moment when you had an idea and chose not to share it? What was the context? And what role did the environment play?
I first started to get involved in governance a few years ago, where I became a governor for a secondary school in Nottingham. During one of my first few committee meetings, there was a decision that was moving in a direction that I thought was a mistake. Not catastrophically, but enough that I had a clear, articulable objection. But I didn’t raise it.
The calculation was almost entirely social in that case. The decision had momentum, and most of the group wanted it closed. So saying my piece would have made me the one reopening something everyone was relieved to be finishing. The cost to pay was to become, in that room, the “difficult one” who slows things down. So I stayed quiet, and the decision went through. I have no idea whether it was the wrong call because it was never tested against the objection, and to be frank it was one of my first meetings with that group. Either way, the problem here was that I did not feel like I would be heard, so I stayed quiet.
The environment’s role in this case was straightforward: consensus pressure, timing, and a calculation about my standing in the group.
What strikes me about this is that the decision was a fairly objective one. There was a defensible case to be made on the merits, and I still didn’t make it. If the conditions in that meeting could silence an objection that was rational and largely impersonal, consider what they do to a genuinely creative contribution. Being creative means exposing a part of how you actually think, something far more personal and far harder to defend than a procedural objection. If I wouldn’t risk the safe version, the barrier for the exposed one is higher still. That is part of why people so often keep their creative thinking to themselves.
Q5. What are the signs that creative leadership is absent and what can get in its way?
In my experience, the clearest sign is not the absence of ideas but the predictability of which ones are taken up. If you can reliably guess whose contributions will be taken seriously before anyone has spoken, then the (poor) leadership has already done its work. Other signs of low creative leadership might be meetings where the first confident voice sets the frame and nothing afterwards genuinely reopens it, or a culture where certain kinds of thinking are expected to be fully formed and defensible before they’re even allowed to be voiced.
I should add that what gets in the way is rarely a villain. Things like hierarchies and a desire for certainty are natural and not actively hostile to creativity. But, if left on their own, they really will stifle innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. In my experience, what works best is setting meetings that are deliberately about creative and open exploration, whilst keeping other things like management review and compliance discussions focused on the details.
Q6. Think of someone you’ve helped become more creatively confident. What did you actually do and what did you deliberately not do?
The most honest answer I can give isn’t a colleague. It’s being a parent! My son is the clearest evidence I have that capacity for creativity is simply there by default, and that the thing that builds or erodes it is almost entirely the conditions around it.
What I try to do is resist the three reflexes that would stifle creativity: correcting his ideas so they are ‘right’; tidying them so they are legible to an adult; and finishing his thoughts because I can see where they’re going faster than he can. What you should deliberately avoid is taking the idea over. The hard part is that the better you are at a skill, the stronger the pull will be to step in. And stepping in is precisely what teaches a child that an idea has to be correct before it’s allowed to exist.
Now think about the work environment. Doesn’t this description above (the three things I avoid, the not stepping in) apply exactly in the same way, with no adaptation whatsoever? I’d say this is even more evidence that capacity for creativity is innate, and we as leaders regulate its flow (whether consciously or not!).
Q7. To what extent is creative thinking domain-specific?
I would say it’s less domain-specific than domain experts like to believe. The underlying behaviours (like reframing a problem, finding the connection across two unrelated things, knowing when to abandon the first answer) do generalise. And that’s the premise of treating synthesis, curiosity and adaptability as transferable skills at all.
But fluency is achieved locally. Knowing what counts as a good idea or where the constraints are, as well as what will make a particular audience sit up, does not transfer. I’ve had to be careful about this in my own work: a principle that holds in one field is often a genuine step removed once you move it into another. And pretending otherwise produces confident-sounding thinking that is subtly wrong. This might make you think about writing with AI. It can simulate lots of genuinely amazing creative thinking, which is something I use a lot. But you need a stance behind it, to take a tenable position that will resonate with your audience. That’s domain specific, and requires real (not simulated) experts, with a true stake.
Q8. What’s the relationship between creative thinking and being wrong in public? Can you have one without a tolerance for the other? If so, what can you do to become more tolerant/resilient?
You can have creative thinking without tolerance for being wrong. But if that’s the case, then your ideas will just be private opinions. Exposure means accepting a guaranteed rate of being visibly wrong.
To make this more concrete, consider that I publish an argument under my own name every week to a large audience. The precondition for doing that at all is having made my peace with the fact that some of those arguments will not survive contact with readers, and that this will happen where people can see it. So the creative work has to leave your head to make a difference, and a tolerance for being wrong in public isn’t optional.
What makes it bearable is mostly mechanical in my experience, rather than temperamental. A great tip is to lower the stakes for each attempt, so that no single instance is decisive or terribly embarrassing: frequent, smaller, lower-consequence exposure builds more resilience than rare high-stakes bets ever will. And the other thing is that you need to separate the idea from yourself deliberately, so that any feedback can be treated as data about the idea rather than a verdict on you as a human being. Overall, your goal should be to think about whether your contribution, whether right or wrong, helped move the thinking forward. For me, this is the only metric that makes being wrong in public tolerable enough to keep doing it.
Q9. What role does AI play in your creative endeavours? How does it affect your creative process and agency?
AI has really shortened the distance between having an idea and having an artefact. Production, like having a first draft or the structure, is now cheap and fast. But there is a lot that AI doesn’t supply: knowing which question is worth asking or having a point of view worth the reader’s time are deeply human skills (at least today!). If you have used AI for writing, you’ll already be familiar with how every output sounds good, but actually is not of sufficiently good quality in its own right.
Personally, I would describe myself as a heavy user of AI, for both writing and coding. I use it as a thinking partner on a daily basis, and the process I follow is keeping ownership of the parts that carry the agency. Because I would argue that the risk isn’t really that a tool might write some sentences for you, but that if you let it it will also decide what’s interesting and how it should be framed. This is precisely what makes you you. And, quite frankly, I don’t care about the opinion (if you could even call it that) of a probabilistic machine.
Q10. What do you know now about building creative capability that you wish you’d understood years ago?
That it’s a structural problem, but keeps being attributed to personality. For a long time the implicit model (mine included) was that some people have it and the job is to find them. A more useful way of thinking about this is that the capacity is widely distributed and the conditions are not, so the leverage is almost entirely in designing the conditions rather than auditing the people. As I said in a previous response, nothing made this obvious to me faster than watching my own son: the raw capacity is plainly innate, and whether it survives depends almost entirely on the conditions around it.
The second thing is that capability is built and refined by acting, not by preparing to act. The instinct to refine things privately until the idea is unimpeachable is the single most reliable way to never develop creative confidence, because this is a product of exposure and small recoverable failures.
If I had known these things earlier, I would have spent less time looking for “creative people” and far more time removing the blockers that were stopping those already around me.
Q11. Do you have a ‘creative hero’? If so, what makes this person special?
I’ll say Edward de Bono, and I’m aware of the irony of naming the man who coined ‘lateral thinking’ in response to a question about thinking differently. He’s also been so absorbed into the corporate-workshop circuit that choosing him can feel like a confession rather than a recommendation.
But that’s exactly why I’ll defend it. What’s still powerful in de Bono’s work is the idea that creative thinking isn’t an innate gift but a set of habits you can deliberately learn and practice. On that view, most failures to think differently come down to method and conditions, not talent. And that’s a much more useful (and demanding) way to think about creativity.
Q12.If you could recommend a book or another relevant source on creativity, which one would it be?
My go-to recommendation for creativity would be Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, which sits comfortably on one of my living room shelves. It’s a short, punchy read that completely reframes how you think about originality. Instead of feeling pressured to create something from scratch, Kleon argues that all creative work builds on what came before, and that’s not a bad thing. The core idea is simple but liberating: study the creators you love, absorb their influences, and let that shape your own voice rather than trying to force something “original” out of thin air.
It’s the kind of book you can finish in an afternoon but find yourself going back to over and over again. If you’ve ever felt stuck creatively or paralysed by the fear that everything’s already been done, this book is essentially a permission slip to just start.
Optional extra question.
What question do you wish we’d asked you and why?
I’d say: “Where in your own life are you now the senior colleague setting the safe boundaries you used to resent?”
I’d want this asked because a series like this makes it very easy for everyone to locate the problem in other people and other meetings. This framing, on the other hand, turns things back on the person answering. It’s uncomfortable to think that I am now, in various rooms, the person whose caution, whose preference for the sanctioned approach, is setting boundaries for somebody else’s creativity. I am sure that most readers would recognise something like this in their own experience.
So the reason this is the question I’d want is that it’s the only one that doesn’t let me off the hook. Every other answer risks being a diagnosis of other people’s conditions. Whereas this framing forces me to remember that I should not be reproducing behaviours and structures that I found difficult to live through earlier on in my life.
Our next guest is Louise Vigeant, PhD. A philosopher and educator, Louise has spent her career helping people think more clearly and effectively. She writes Think Therefore AI on Substack, where she shows the curious, the sceptical, and the creative how using AI can make us smarter.
Louise also explains the importance of philosophy, teaching and the joy of sharing big ideas with others.
More on Tuesday!
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