‘Confidently Creative?’ is a joint series with . 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.

This week’s guest is

Dan has a master’s degree in Chemistry from Western Washington University. He spent more than six years managing in fast-paced, high-consequence work environments, an experience that clarified, at close quarters, what leadership actually demands and what most leaders never get taught.

He co-founded Kestryl Edge to address that gap directly. The firm runs emotional intelligence workshops and retention programmes for small teams, using EQ assessment and in-person work to surface what usually stays unspoken. The premise is simple: you cannot build trust or creative confidence in a culture that has not yet learned to be honest with itself.

Q1. Is creativity something you do or is creative something you are?

Creativity is the self confidence that what you think, write, make, say is worth bringing into the world and sharing. I believe it’s both. It’s being willing to share yourself. Then the sharing.

It’s a willingness to feel something new and will it into existence.

I think we are all creative but we all have different barriers holding us back from sharing and honing that creativity.

Q2. Was there a moment when you first felt creatively confident or a moment when you realised you hadn’t been?

Growing up I loved story. Especially human stories. I would listen to This American Life on CDs, then my iPod classic.

As I’ve grown up, writing has felt wonderful to me. There is something so satisfying at conveying a thought or idea in just the right way. I love to write how I talk. And to read the words I write. To adjust their flow and cadence. Making them the perfect sentences for my neurodivergent brain.

I’ve had to work on the way I express ideas my whole life. I took remedial penmanship in grade school because my handwriting was so bad they IQ tested me to make sure I could keep up.

In college I wrote some experimental essays reflecting about my childhood experiences. My parents got pissed because they said the essays reflected poorly upon them and made me take them down. I was conflicted. I had older students and classmates saying they really liked my writing. But I felt like I had to choose between my parents’ acceptance and upholding their image with engaging in a form of expression. It soured writing for me and I stopped writing then. It had become inauthentic, gated. Measured.

I started writing again this year, more than a decade later, and it’s made my life feel better. Like I’m more myself. This is my moment of creative confidence. I’ve never felt so free in my expression. And to have people positively engage in my work?! What a wonderful feeling.

I write about my feelings, my thoughts, my observations, my ideas for the book I’m working on, the research I read, the books I finish. It’s something I get to do and something I HAVE to do. I’ve had days where all I can do is sit and work to get thoughts out of my head and onto paper until my reservoir is empty. Sometimes an idea just itches at me until I get it on paper. It feels great to get positive feedback but the act of polishing my thoughts and having fun with it is so nice I think I’d still write even if my whole audience vanished. Maybe my writing would be even better if I knew no one was watching…

Q3. How do you distinguish creative confidence from creative ability?

I have two answers. Short and long. :)

Short: Confidence is the self-trust you can do something. Ability is the physical requirements.

Long: I run ultra marathons. Trail only. And even when I’ve trained my ass off I still don’t feel confident going into them. So much can happen along the way. You’re balancing exertion, hydration, nutrition, and mental state for hours on end. Do I have the ability? Yes. I’ve finished. But the confidence has only come from being across the finish line. Until then it’s months of wondering if I can finish. And wondering the same question but louder while I pound out the miles during the race.

In this way ability is a physical checklist of whether or not the math is there to support the outcome. To me, confidence is an earned wisdom only granted through trial and error. Confidence is a question with a variety of answers that are earned and lost through experience.

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 was in a small company and the leadership was hell bent on doing things their way. New ideas were threats to the status quo. You had to fight tooth and nail or do it behind closed doors then show people it worked after the fact.

The environment actually made it harder to leave when I should have. I overstayed my welcome. I gained weight, became depressed, and put my personal health on the line for the dream I had. The initial environment was awesome. A true scientific start up. It was different every day. Rules were sparse. You could do what you wanted to. Do what you needed to do. Test. And learn.

I kept telling myself things would change. That this meeting was different. That the leaders would finally listen to how upset we were and would change something. That this time my 1:1 with the boss where he would write down my frustrations… he would do something about it. Anything.

Toxic leadership is a slow poison. The leaders would shut down creativity and ideas — they needed it to be done their way. Meetings to pitch ideas were met with “you don’t know what you’re doing.”

During a project where I had done meetings with the national head of safety regulation for the industry we were in I was presenting why we needed to complete a project a certain way and the CEO told me “You’re just trying to hide behind safety. You have no idea about any of this.”

Our lead engineer, a grown man with a family, cried in my arms in the parking lot that day and quit weeks later. He said he would stay if our management promised a way to reel in the CEO’s behavior. They couldn’t make that promise. He had made significant technical improvements to the product. He was creative. He was hard working. He was a genius. He showed up early and stayed late to get done what was on his plate because he cared. A handful of us left soon after.

That’s how I know the power of dreams and the power of toxicity in the workplace. Alas! I remember the fun times, the laughs, the feelings of accomplishment, and I really wish the leadership had listened a little more. Been willing to work on themselves a little more.

Just today I got two different messages from current employees who want my help getting out and moving onto something new.

Leadership is an art. It’s a collection of skills. The environments we build are a reflection of our progress in those skills and our awareness of ourselves and those around us. The creativity we’re able to foster is a by-product of having the skills in the art of leadership to create an environment where psychological safety can grow.

I am dismayed and feel sorrowful for the leaders who point the finger at everyone but themselves.

Q5. What are the signs that creative leadership is absent and what can get in its way?

Creative leadership is about being open minded and enabling others to do the same. It’s about supporting failures and lifting up those around you.

If creative leadership is absent there will be a big emphasis on rules, procedures, SOPs, rigorous adherence to norms and the status quo.

Q6. Think of someone you’ve helped become more creatively confident. What did you actually do and what did you deliberately not do?

I met them where they were at. I always found something I loved about their work and shared that with them. I edited with grace and wisdom and pushed them just the right amount between drafts.

In short, I watered the plant in front of me. Small plant? Just a bit of water. Wait. Letting them grow. Then more, over time. Never suffocating the roots.

Q7. To what extent is creative thinking domain-specific?

It’s not. Creativity belongs everywhere. It’s breathing life into everything around you. Even a dog walk can be creative. In fact, cross-domain creativity is where we get the biggest disruptive innovation cycles. Bringing people who’ve learned lessons and thoughts from particular industries and skills and bringing them to something new to think “how could this apply?”

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?

Creative thinking is being willing to be wrong in public. You can think creatively and not ever take your thoughts, ideas, and expression into the wild… but that’s a suffocating life. Like a caged animal or a tree in a cramped greenhouse.

Trees in greenhouses tend to die. Researchers found that the wind that blows on them causes them to grow deeper roots than they would otherwise. This is the relationship of creative thinking, being wrong in public, and resilience.

Being wrong is wind. It can blow us over, or we can grow deeper roots. Deeper roots allow us to stay grounded and grow taller despite stronger wind. At some point the wind doesn’t even matter anymore. It just cleans the dust off our leaves.

Q9. What role does AI play in your creative endeavours? How does it affect your creative process and agency?

AI is a tool I use when researching, formatting, spell checking, and creating a bibliography. It does my tedious work.

I work in emotional intelligence. I ask my clients and people who read my work to think critically about their emotions. I ask them to think about their feelings. AI has no place in being apart of my critical thinking process or the words I put down on paper.

I could save hours a week if I let AI write my work for me… I have thought about how much time I could get back. But I would never respect myself or feel worthy of asking others to consider their emotions and write about why that’s important if I wasn’t genuine enough to do it from my own heart, mind, and soul.

Q10. What do you know now about building creative capability that you wish you’d understood years ago?

That it makes me happy, it helps me think, it grounds me, and in all these ways and more… it’s worth my time. When writing something new, I often make myself laugh and smile.

I wish I knew that writing makes me a better listener and emotional processor. I carry a notebook everywhere I go. I record ideas, thoughts, notes, things people say. I also write down emotions, reactions, triggers.

This process helps me become a more stable and grounded person.

I would tell myself that it doesn’t matter what the end result is. Where the writing ends up. How neat it is. Who likes it. I would encourage myself to do it for the sake of doing it.

Q11. Do you have a ‘creative hero’? If so, what makes this person special?

No. :) No creative hero for me. I think there are a number of people who I’m inspired by. I see them out there working at their craft and it makes me want to be out there with them, working hard at something we both care about side by side.

There are people I admire like the authors of book series I love. Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks are one of the best worlds I’ve ever gotten to escape into.

But there’s no one who I’d say irrevocably is my creative hero.

Q12. If you could recommend a book or another relevant source on creativity, which one would it be?

Read fantasy. Read Sci-Fi. Both are genres that ask “what if?” and take us on a journey as we learn the answer.

Read stories about real people living human experiences. Learn what it means to be human for someone else through their own words.

Before I was medicated, I didn’t have enough attention span to read more than short stories or listen to short books and podcasts on audiobook. Also, I couldn’t just do that — I HAD to be doing something else at the same time or I would get distracted.

I remember the feeling of being able to sit down and do nothing but read and actually retain the information. It was an amazing feeling. Like my mind which is usually a storm was now a focused stream.

In that way I consume media that serves me. Do I want to escape to a world? Dungeon Crawler Carl, Red Rising, The Stormlight Archives.

Do I need to learn about how to grow my business? Alex Hormozi. There are probably more names here but a lot of business advice I find to be snake oil. Check back in with me in 5 years and I’ll have more recommendations here.

Do I need to grow my inner self to show up in the ways I need to for my team, my job, my business, my family, and my friends? Brené Brown, Simon Sinek, Jocko Willink, Matthew Jones.

I don’t have any one recommendation. My recommendation is just to read, listen, watch, and let the things you find change you.

Our next guest is . A VP of people operations and an experienced HR professional, Jennifer writes Uncompliant on Substack: dispatches for anyone trying to do good work inside systems that were never built to support them. She put a question to us that we haven’t been able to shake: “Who benefits when people stop believing they’re creative? Once people stop trusting their own thinking, imagination, or instincts, they become far easier to contain.”

More next week!

‘Confidently Creative?’ is a joint series with 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.

This week’s guest is .

Hala spent over a decade at Google and YouTube, most of it building and leading commercial partnerships across the MENA region. She left to set up on her own, working with organisations on agentic AI workflows and with creators on the conditions that make creative confidence possible.

She runs Batala, a programme for female content creators in MENA: the name means “female hero” in Arabic, and the work is exactly that. It addresses the structural reasons, cultural, familial, and institutional, why talented women in the region hold back from visible creative work.

Q1. Is creativity something you do or is creative something you are?

Both, but I think the framing is part of the problem. When we talk about creativity as something you “are”, we accidentally turn it into a personality trait, which means most people decide quite early that they aren’t it. I’ve watched brilliant strategists at YouTube sit silently in rooms because they’d decided the “creative people” were the ones with the design background or the agency CV. They were wrong, but the environment had taught them they were right.

So I’d flip it: creativity is a muscle you build, and some people just get more practice than others, usually because the conditions around them make it safer to try. The “are” version of creativity is mostly an artefact of who got permission early on.

Q2. Was there a moment when you first felt creatively confident or a moment when you realised you hadn’t been?

The realisation came first, and it came late. I’d spent over a decade at Google and YouTube being told I was good at what I did, and I was. But I noticed I’d developed a very specific habit: I would workshop an idea privately with one or two trusted people before bringing it to the room. I told myself this was strategic, but it wasn’t. I was doing it to make sure my ideas arrived pre-validated, because the cost of being wrong or embarrassed in certain rooms was higher than the cost of being quiet.

The confidence came when I left. Setting up halajil.com forced me to put unfinished thinking in front of clients who were paying me for it, and nothing teaches you faster that your half-formed ideas are often better than other people’s polished ones.

Q3. How do you distinguish creative confidence from creative ability?

Ability is whether you can have the idea, and confidence is whether you actually say it out loud. They’re two completely different skills, and most organisations only train one of them.

I’ve worked with creators who could generate twenty viable concepts in an afternoon and would still ask me which one was “right” before publishing. And I’ve worked with senior leaders whose ideas were average but whose conviction was absolute, and they got applauded every time. Ability without confidence is a private hobby, whereas confidence without ability is a career, unfortunately.

The interesting question isn’t which matters more, it’s why we keep designing organisations that favour the second one and call it leadership.

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 had a manager at Google for a few years who managed through diminishment. She’d put people down in meetings, make smart people feel stupid, and the room would absorb it because she was senior and the rest of us weren’t. It was, I now understand, her own insecurity playing out in public.

What made it harder was that she could be extraordinarily charming when she wanted to be, so you never knew whether to love her or hate her, and you certainly never knew which version of her was about to walk into the room. That unpredictability is the part that messed me up the most, because you can build a coping strategy for someone who’s consistently difficult, but you can’t build one for someone whose mood is the variable.

I went silent. Not because I didn’t have ideas, but because the cost of being wrong, or even right in the wrong way, was a public dressing down in front of peers. There’s a thing that happens in those situations where you go either silent or violent, and I went silent, boiling on the inside and polite on the outside.

I dealt with a lot of PTSD after she left, and it took longer than I’d like to admit to recover the instinct to speak first and refine later. But the experience taught me something I wouldn’t have learned any other way, which is the power of contrast: you don’t grow in comfort, you grow in the recovery from something that nearly broke the part of you that wanted to try. I’m a better consultant now because I know exactly what that environment feels like, and I can spot it inside a client’s organisation in about ten minutes.

Q5. What are the signs that creative leadership is absent and what can get in its way?

For me, the clearest sign is rigid, by-the-book managers. Real leadership empowers people to express themselves and have healthy debates, and when you don’t have that, you get the same voices speaking in every meeting and everyone else staying silent and tuning out. That’s a huge amount of creative energy walking out of the room.

Another sign is when people shut down ideas before fully hearing them out, usually with a casual “we tried that before”. An idea isn’t final just because someone says it out loud, it can morph into something else entirely through group debate, which is really just brainstorming with better manners.

A lot of leaders have confused being decisive with being directive, and have quietly trained themselves out of any tolerance for unfinished thinking. Most senior environments reward people for arriving at meetings with polished conclusions, but polished conclusions are where ideas go to die. Everyone is too busy being credible to be useful.

Q6. Think of someone you’ve helped become more creatively confident. What did you actually do and what did you deliberately not do?

I work with a lot of women, specifically female creators in MENA. I run a programme called Batala, which means “female hero” in Arabic, that helps female content creators learn, grow and connect with each other.

The programme exists because so many women in the region aren’t confident enough to express themselves or create content freely, and the reasons are structural: cultural norms, family expectations, and being told from a young age that visibility is “forbidden” for a woman. The talent is there, but the permission isn’t.

What I actually do in the programme is help them identify the specific voices in their heads that hold them back, and then strip those beliefs away one by one. Not in a self-help way, but quite practically. We get specific about whose voice it actually is, whether that’s a mother, a teacher, a former boss, or a comment someone made when they were fifteen, because once you can name the source, the belief starts to lose its authority. The cathartic tears and energy in that room are indescribable.

What I deliberately don’t do is tell them what their content should be, because that would just replace one external voice with another, mine. The point isn’t for them to make content I’d approve of, it’s for them to recover the part of themselves that knew what they wanted to say before the world taught them not to say it.

The most rewarding moments are months later, when they send me messages showing me what they’ve made post-programme, full of ideas about how they want to keep going. They press publish without asking anyone’s permission first, including mine.

These women aren’t just building content online, they’re building businesses for themselves and their families.

Q7. To what extent is creative thinking domain-specific?

Less than people claim, but more than the “creativity is universal” crowd will admit. The underlying moves transfer pretty well between domains: pattern recognition, comfort with ambiguity, the willingness to combine things that don’t obviously belong together. Those are portable.

What doesn’t transfer is taste. Taste is built through immersion, and you can’t shortcut it, which is why a brilliant creative thinker dropped into a domain they don’t know will generate ideas that sound clever but miss the point entirely. The thinking framework is fine, the taste is absent, and the audience always knows.

The engine is portable, but the fuel isn’t.

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’t have one without the other, not at any meaningful level. Every interesting idea requires a position, and every position is a bet on being more right than wrong. If you can’t tolerate the wrong half, you’ll only ever take positions that are safe, which is to say not really positions at all.

The thing that helped me most wasn’t a mindset shift, it was a frequency shift. I started publishing on LinkedIn properly this year and forced myself to post things I wasn’t completely sure about, and the first few times were awful. By the tenth time, the cost of being wrong had gone down because I’d discovered I could survive it. Resilience isn’t a trait you cultivate in private, it’s a callus you build in public.

Q9. What role does AI play in your creative endeavours? How does it affect your creative process and agency?

This is where I diverge from most of the conversation, because I build agentic AI workflows for a living and I think most people are using AI in ways that actively reduce their creative agency.

The dominant pattern is treating AI as an answer machine: you prompt, it produces, you accept or tweak, and that’s a recipe for creative atrophy. The interesting use is treating AI as a thinking partner that forces you to articulate what you actually believe. I’ll often draft a position, ask Claude to argue against it, then notice which of its counterarguments genuinely shift my view and which ones don’t. The ones that don’t shift me are usually where my real conviction lives, and I wouldn’t have found that without the friction.

Agency is the part of this I genuinely worry about. I’m watching smart, capable people hand their judgement over to a tool, and not notice they’ve done it. That’s the slow version of the same problem I see with the women I work with in Batala: a voice going quiet because the conditions around it made silence easier. Just in reverse this time, because the silencing is voluntary.

AI hasn’t made me more creative, it’s made me more deliberate about where my judgement actually adds value, and that’s a different and better thing.

Q10. What do you know now about building creative capability that you wish you’d understood years ago?

That capability isn’t built through training, it’s built through structural permission. I spent years thinking the answer was better workshops, better frameworks, better “creative thinking” content, but none of it works if the conditions around the person punish them for using it.

The real work is unsexy: it’s redesigning meetings so the right people get the floor, making decision rights explicit so good ideas don’t die in ambiguity, and giving leaders permission to say “I don’t know” without it being a career risk. Capability follows conditions, never the other way round.

Q11. Do you have a ‘creative hero’? If so, what makes this person special?

I don’t have one hero. So many people have inspired me, including my late father, Sir David Attenborough, Rumi, Kate Winslet, Jane Austen, and many others I can’t think of right now.

What they all have in common is that they sat with the bad in order to experience the good. None of them produced their best work in comfort. They produced it through grief, through illness, through exile, through obscurity, through being misunderstood for long stretches at a time. That’s the alchemy I find most interesting: the turning of lead into gold. You can’t have one without the other, and pretending otherwise is what kills creativity in most people long before they realise it has gone.

Q12.If you could recommend a book or another relevant source on creativity, which one would it be?

Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch, and The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar.

I read Conversations with God after my father passed, and it helped me understand where we come from and where we go back to. My father used to tell me that we only think on one “plane of thought” or “dimension”, and that there’s so much more we don’t know or can’t connect to when we’re in our human minds and bodies. The book picked up where his words left off, and gave me a framework for the parts I’d been carrying around without language for them.

The Conference of the Birds sits alongside it for me. A twelfth-century Sufi poem about birds going on a long, painful journey to find God, only to discover that the divine they’d been searching for was inside them all along. I know The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho has the same theme, but I hated that book. It was too obvious. Farid ud-Din Attar does it in a far more poetic way, and the journey itself is the point, not the punchline.

It’s the same idea most of my work comes back to: the thing you’re searching for externally is usually a permission you haven’t yet given yourself internally.

Optional extra question.

What question do you wish we’d asked you and why?

I’d have asked: what does creative confidence look like in someone who isn’t loud?

Most of this conversation defaults to a particular archetype, the person who speaks up, takes up space, posts publicly, builds in public. That’s one expression of confidence and it’s the one our culture rewards, but I’ve worked with deeply creatively confident people whose confidence shows up as patience, as the willingness to sit with an idea for months before it’s ready, as the refusal to be hurried into expression.

I’d want us to take that seriously, because if we don’t, “creative confidence” becomes another thing extroverts are naturally better at, and we miss most of the talent in the room.

Our guest next week is . With over a decade in leadership and management and now co-founder of Kestryl Edge, Dan runs in-person EQ workshops for managers and team leads. He has a line on creative resilience that is a peach: “Being wrong is wind. It can blow us over, or we can grow deeper roots. At some point, it just cleans the dust off our leaves.”

More next week!

‘Confidently Creative?’ is a joint series created with . 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 first guest is .

John calls himself Head of Crayons. At Group Partners, the visual strategy consultancy he founded in 2001, that title is not whimsical. It is a signal: drawing and storifying a challenge achieves something that verbal discussion cannot.

He has been proving this for over four decades. He began his career at Acorn Computer in Cambridge, during the BBC Micro launch. He built a marketing agency that won awards for Benetton, SAP and IBM, sold it to WPP in 1996, and went on to create Structured Visual Thinking™ and Framework Science™. His conviction, running through all of it: organisations fail not because they lack ideas, but because they design conditions that prevent those ideas from ever being said aloud.

He writes All In Our Imagination on Substack.

Q1. Is creativity something you do or is creative something you are?

Both are correct. But the question raises a bugbear. The ‘something you do’ lobby is what gets us process frameworks, ideation sprints, and post-it notes arranged in herringbone patterns on glass walls. It’s characterised as a deployable skill. A toolkit. Something you switch on as you go to work. It’s the least interesting part.

Something you are is closer to the truth. Not the ‘creative person’ title that ends up on a LinkedIn profile. I mean the frequency you were born tuned to. And that society has a knack of beating out of you in favour of conformity.

My dad was a Draughtsman, an engineer, an avid fly fisherman and a water bailiff. As a small child I watched him wade chest-deep in a chalk stream with a scythe, clearing reeds, oxygenating the water. Much later I realised one of many lessons. I saw how the world actually works and that things left to stagnate die, that keeping something alive requires the willingness to get wet, to cut back, to disturb the surface.

Creativity wasn’t just a tool. It was the physics of that river and a tremendous lesson in solving any problem in life. If you allow it, creativity runs through you, whether or not you wish to label it or how you wish to label it. I guess another question is what made folk forget that, and what will it take to get them to remember.

Q2. Was there a moment when you first felt creatively confident or a moment when you realised you hadn’t been?

This is an interesting question. I was confident when I was a child with a sketchbook, colouring in, using pencils, paint, and a pair of scissors for chopping things up.

I would draw pictures of boxes. After a while, I was showing my friends how, when they asked me how come I can draw and they couldn’t, to teach them how to draw a box. I couldn’t stop shading the box to make it look real on the page. I couldn’t stop wanting to give everyone the skill and the capability to do it.

I was very lucky. I went to a school where they saw that and encouraged it. When I left that school and came into the real world, my confidence was shattered by art school. My confidence was shattered because they tried to teach me creativity as if it were maths. There was something formulaic and institutional about it that I absolutely couldn’t bear. The illusions of my definition of creativity were in bits.

I became a DJ. My confidence was restored by choosing the right music to keep the crowds dancing.

My confidence lifted again as I realised that the kinds of things I learned would help me in my first real job. I would start drawing again on the walls to help people comprehend what they were trying to say, to help them say it better.

I used that confidence to start my own business. I could use it with clients to get better answers for them and greater outcomes.

In those days, the use of the word creative was what I did. I created ads and campaigns and brands and stories. A narrow definition to be sure. I sold into a creative holding company. It wasn’t creative. It was a financial company.

My confidence was shattered again.

I realised that some clients couldn’t appreciate the value of creativity as a way to achieve genuine performance. They did everything they could to avoid the truth that I could see, but they chose not to.
That was then. I’m confident again now because I start each day with a clean sheet of paper.

Q3. How do you distinguish creative confidence from creative ability?

Creative ability is the raw material, the capacity everyone is born with. Creative confidence is the willingness to deploy it. They are not the same thing, and they are not guaranteed to travel together.

Everyone is born with creativity. The acid test is how much permission they’re given to exercise the muscle. And once that muscle is exercised and allowed to flourish, in a culture where it’s okay to make mistakes, where it’s allowed to make a mess and break things, where experimentation is genuinely welcome, creative ability can only grow.

Nobody ever spotted famous creativity at birth. But we know what happens when the conditions exist. Creative confidence is the result.

Without conditions that make it safe to put something half-formed into the world (without fear of it being used against you) you can definitely have extraordinary ability and zero confidence.

The history of every organisation that has ever bored itself to death is largely the story of those people sitting quietly in meetings, knowing they’re never going to feel quite safe enough to say anything. Creativity denied.

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?

Japan. A long while back. A large pharmaceutical organisation, a third party who had brought me in, and a conversation that was heading steadily in the wrong direction.

I was doing what I always do, working visually, collaboratively, in a way that was genuinely unusual in that context and in that era. Highly physical. Highly different from the way that room expected a meeting to be run. I was running side by side with my partner but somewhere in the middle of it, I could see clearly what the client actually needed. A reframe. A different conversation entirely. One that would have cut through everything and landed somewhere useful.

I didn’t say it.

Because saying it would have flown directly in the face of the colleague who had brought me in. It would have been obvious to everyone present that I was repositioning the entire conversation, and in doing so, I would have undermined him in front of his own client. He could have lost the business. I chose not to do that.

Looking back, this was totally my fault. And a big error not to have done the right thing for the client at the expense of someone intent on not solving the real problem.

It was the first time I’d been in that situation and I hadn’t set the rules of the engagement clearly enough beforehand. Now I do.

Before any collaboration, I make it explicit: I may well see things differently, I may push in a direction you don’t expect, and that needs to be acceptable to everyone in the room before we start. In this case it wasn’t, in any case over the weeks that followed it became clear we wouldn’t work together again.

The environment? It played no role. The room didn’t suppress the idea. I did.

Q5. What are the signs that creative leadership is absent and what can get in its way?

Creative leadership is absent when whoever is being creative has ignored the reason why creativity was required in the first place.

The solution, the reframe, the suggested strategy - however brilliant in isolation - bears no relation to what was actually needed.

What definitely gets in the way in a corporate environment is the absence of values, principles, and contextual understanding: the things that keep creative energy pointed at the right problem rather than simply an interesting one.

Which raises the deeper point for me. In the purest sense, true creativity doesn’t require leadership at all. What it requires is experience - the hard-won internal understanding of why and how creative thinking should be deployed in a specific situation. And that could be to wander through a forest.

This is what I think of as ingenuity - the conjoining of the words creativity and innovation. Not creativity as self-expression, but creativity as the art of using what’s already lying around, bringing disparate things together until a problem disappears, or until the sum of the parts becomes something greater than its individual components.

That is craft. And craft comes from experience, not from a leadership model.

Q6. Think of someone you’ve helped become more creatively confident. What did you actually do and what did you deliberately not do?

I didn’t start out by trying to help them become more creatively confident. That wasn’t the framing and it wasn’t the goal. I think creativity is an output of curiosity, passion, determination, and the desire to understand how things work - and how the best answer is phrased or achieved. The moment you start calling it creativity, you’ve already made it harder.

I’m thinking of a senior leader I worked with over several months. Intelligent, experienced, capable, completely convinced that creativity was something other people did.

My job (in my own mind) wasn’t to fix that belief. It was to make it irrelevant.

What I actually did was ask questions. To make the familiar strange again. And then I got them to draw. Not drawing as art. Drawing as thinking made visible. The moment someone externalises an idea on a surface rather than describing it to present, something shifts. They stop performing and start exploring.

What I deliberately didn’t do was label any of it. I didn’t say this is the creative part. I didn’t frame it as a skill to develop. The more you explain creativity as a specific thing that needs to be achieved over time, the more it becomes a mountain, and most people will look for a way around rather than up it.

Which is exactly what’s happening now. People are defaulting to AI to produce answers they would never have reached themselves - skipping the curiosity, the wrestle, the determination that would have made the answer genuinely theirs.

The output just arrives. The thinking never happened. And the confidence that comes from having genuinely worked something out? Gone before it ever had a chance.

Q7. To what extent is creative thinking domain-specific?

Creative thinking is not domain specific at all.

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?

The question assumes resilience is the desired outcome. I’m not sure it is. I think it goes deeper than that, to motivation and intent.

If your motivation is always to be seen as right, then being wrong in public is a catastrophe. It undermines everything.

You’ll stay quiet, you’ll wait until the idea is airtight before you let it anywhere near anyone. At which point it’s too polished to be dangerous and too safe to be interesting.

But if your motivation is a genuine desire to find the best answer, to make something work that currently doesn’t, then being publicly wrong is just information. Expensive or uncomfortable sometimes. But useful. It tells you something. It moves you forward.

This is why I don’t think you can build tolerance for being wrong in public by working on resilience directly. You build it by getting clearer on why you’re in the middle of the challenge. If you’re there to protect a position, no amount of resilience training will save you. If you’re there because you care about the outcome more than the appearance of it, being wrong stops being the threat and starts being part of the process.

As a DJ you play the wrong record and the floor tells you immediately. There’s no ambiguity and no appeal. You adjust and try again. The DJ who can’t tolerate that feedback loop doesn’t last long, not because they lack resilience, but because they made a mistake, didn’t read the energy or were playing for themselves rather than the room.

Q9. What role does AI play in your creative endeavours? How does it affect your creative process and agency?

I use AI(s) rather like an increasing number of people. That is by using my imagination throughout if I can. I have an idea, write as much of it down as I can, live with it, reflect on it, sit with it, improve it, get it as far as I can. If i’m comfortable with it, then that’s good. No AI.

But summarising and research is well done by AI. Business documents and proposals, pretty much the core of it is done by hand and my own imagination, but I use AI to do aspects of it that are a time suck.

AI helps me riff with myself. I imagine I’m a more sophisticated user by now, having been on AI since it first became widely available. I’ve trained it extensively with my own nuances and my own versions and definitions of my skills, my own likes and dislikes, so that it knows me better than any other co-partner.

As a creative person from both an agency and consulting perspective now preoccupied with solving complex problems, I need a partner to help me avoid driving over a cliff or getting too close to see the bigger picture.

AI is a critical friend that’s prepared to tell me something is rubbish or I’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole. I use AI, like a lot of other people, to summarise, research, and identify dimensions that I just may have missed.

It’s rather like having a conversation with someone I’ve come to trust and respect over time. It affects my creative process in very positive ways, and a lot of the time I just ignore the response because it’s my judgement that makes the difference. I will never use it if it starts replacing the areas where my imagination is being bypassed.

There’s a seagull sitting on a fence.

No AI was used writing any of this.

Q10. What do you know now about building creative capability that you wish you’d understood years ago?

This is a personal journey so it will be unique to each individual. Someone bought me juggling balls as a present. Leather things. Fine items they were. Great to hold but the juggling bit was frustrating as hell.

There was a small diagram that gave me the instructions. They were more frustrating as they were extremely simple. And like all instructions you felt they were aimed at other people.

After several hours of immense unenjoyment, I sat and read them one more time. I finally noticed a small line running up the side of the diagram, the typeface was tiny, that said something like: if you can’t do it, don’t worry, go to sleep, and in the morning you will be able to juggle.

Well, blow me down.

The mind is an incredible thing. You could argue it doesn’t need us. I wish I had learned far earlier that if you have patience, then your mind is there for you. You can go and do something else. It won’t be forgotten. Do as much as you can to spark that creativity in real time but then stop. Forget it. Go for that walk. Listen to music or a podcast. Sleep.

As long as you are pushing that imagination all over the place it will spring back when you are least expecting it and you will be juggling.

Those juggling balls taught me as much about building creative capability than any workshop, framework, or methodology I’ve either attended or delivered since.

Creative capability isn’t something you install. It’s something you exercise or, at worst, have to unblock.

I wish I’d understood earlier the value of the pause. The deliberate act of sitting with something unresolved, of letting the not-knowing do its work before the answer is ready to appear. I was in too much of a hurry for too long.

Q11. Do you have a ‘creative hero’? If so, what makes this person special?

I probably don’t.

My list of people I think are special is enormous. Countless heroes among them. I’ve always thought creative people are special and have looked to them for inspiration in every field. In every sector, in every industry, you can name people who didn’t give up until they had broken the problem into pieces and solved incredible puzzles.

Heroic acts everywhere - from Jobs to Einstein, Gilmour to Hemingway.

But my Dad was the most powerful proxy for all of it. He gave me the conditions to dream. He made it safe for me to have an imagination. He drew aero engines on big drawing boards and would point to a plane in the sky and explain that’s why.

I can list great guitarists, lyricists, producers, bands that have accompanied me my entire life. Artists, poets, writers. Architects, scientists, physicists, philosophers. They’ve all made me dream. Dream that everything is possible.

I feel the opposite about politicians and those who own the story. They don’t care about our imaginations or our creativity - and are perfectly happy to serve us the opposite, because creativity is deeply dangerous for them.

Which is why the comics, the satirists, and the thousand scriptwriters somewhere deep in a tsunami of new theatre and film give me such hope.

They will soon be a new addition to my menagerie of heroes.

Q12. If you could recommend a book or another relevant source on creativity, which one would it be?

My instinct is to resist recommending a book about creativity.

But I will.

You will have heard this before, so this is a little predictable. A lot of them are part of the problem; they package the thing into a process, a toolkit, a set of steps.
They make it into something you achieve rather than something you release. If you’ve read this far, you’ll know that’s precisely what I’ve spent these answers arguing against.

So instead, try Ways of Seeing by John Berger. Probably the only book I’ve properly read twice.

Written in 1972, originally to accompany a BBC television series, it is not, on the surface, about creativity at all. It’s about how we look at things. What we see and don’t see. What our assumptions, our conditioning, and our cultural context do to the act of perception before we’ve even begun to think.

Which is everything.

Because you cannot think creatively about something you haven’t learned to look at properly first. The logical structures, the drawings, the walls, the markers - everything I’ve spent my career doing - starts here.

Not with the idea but with the quality of attention brought to what’s actually in front of you. Berger’s book is short, deliberately visual, occasionally uncomfortable, and completely free of methodology. It will not teach you how to be creative. It will make you suspicious of everything you thought you could already see.

Which, in my experience, is exactly where the interesting thinking begins.

Optional extra question. What question do you wish we’d asked you and why?

Q. With all this creativity and human imagination, why isn’t there more attention given to it throughout our education?

Because the system wasn’t designed for it.

Education, as we inherited it, was built to produce reliable outputs. Compliance. Measurable achievement. People who could answer the question correctly, rather than question whether it was the right question in the first place.

It is done by design, therefore.

I was lucky. I had a school that saw something in me and made it safe to follow it. But for every school that creates the conditions for a child’s imagination to flourish, there are a hundred that quietly, efficiently, professionally do the opposite.

This is not out of malice, but because the measures they’re held to reward the expected answer, not the interesting one.

A deeper problem is that creativity is genuinely hard to measure. And in a world built on bloody KPIs and metrics, what can’t be measured tends to disappear from the agenda. So (cliche warning) we teach what we can test. We test what we’ve taught.
The curriculum becomes a loop outside which sits the imagination, waiting.
There’s a political dimension here too, which rarely gets said out loud. Creative, questioning, imaginatively alive citizens are considerably harder to manage than those trained to accept what they’re given.

Some may call it a conspiracy. But it’s, at the very least, an inconvenient alignment of incentives.

The profound irony here is that we are at the exact moment in history when this failure has its sharpest consequences. AI can produce the right answer faster than any human. The one thing it cannot do is ask the better question. That capacity, our creativity and imagination, is the one we’ve systematically under-invested in for a century, is the most valuable thing a human being can offer.

And we’re still not teaching it.

Our guest next week is . A decade at Google and YouTube, now working independently on AI workflows in the MENA region. She has a line on creative confidence that will stop you: "Ability without confidence is a private hobby. Confidence without ability is a career, unfortunately." More next week!

TL;DR

Most conversations about creativity focus on output: the idea, the product, the result. This series is about something earlier, and more important: the internal conditions that determine whether an idea gets voiced at all.

AI has collapsed the gap between ideation and implementation. The organisations that thrive in this evolving landscape will be the ones that can access the creative thinking of all their people, not just those with the right job titles. Creative confidence has never mattered more, yet most organisations are still designing conditions that suppress it.

The brainchild of and , ‘Confidently Creative?’ interviews original thinkers from all walks of life and asks them about creative confidence: what it is, why so few people seem to act on their creative instincts, and what makes the conditions around us either conducive or hostile to original thinking.

This series matters to us because the most honest stories about creative confidence rarely make it into the professional development literature. We want to hear from people who have been in rooms that worked and rooms that didn’t, and who can tell us, specifically, what made the difference. This is not about success stories but honest ones. Real insights and lived experience from people who have thought hard about this across different fields.

The contributors we are bringing into this conversation have thought hard about this across very different fields and contexts. We cannot wait to share what they have to say.

Edition One Coming Soon!

In the meantime, here are our own initial, scene-setting thoughts on this topic.

Sven Brodmerkel

There is a particular kind of professional development workshop that goes something like this: You are given a prompt. You are told there are no wrong answers. You are encouraged to think freely, speak boldly, and silence your inner critic. By the end of the session, you have a worksheet, a renewed sense of possibility, and possibly a sticky note with an affirmation on it.

And then you go back to your desk. Back to the meeting where the same three people speak and the same ideas get approved. Back to the feedback that arrives as a vague unease rather than a clear direction. Back to the environment that was there before the workshop, unchanged, waiting.

This is the central problem with how many organisations seem to approach creative confidence. They treat it as a personal achievement — something you build inside yourself through the right mindset, the right habits, the right willingness to back yourself. And that framing is not entirely wrong. Inner obstacles are real. The inner critic is real. The fear of looking foolish in a room is real.

But it is, at best, half the story.

Creative confidence is relational, but we keep pretending it isn’t.

The research on psychological safety — and on creativity more broadly — points consistently in the same direction: the conditions under which people take creative risks are overwhelmingly social. They depend on who is in the room, who holds status, whose ideas get developed and whose get politely set aside, whether the person at the front of the room is genuinely curious or merely performing curiosity.

In other words, creative confidence is not primarily something you have. It is something that exists — or fails to exist — in the space between people.

This has uncomfortable implications. It means that an organisation investing heavily in individual creative confidence programmes while leaving its culture, hierarchy, and feedback structures untouched is not solving the problem. It is, at best, making individuals more resilient in the face of a system that will continue to work against them. At worst, it is asking people to carry what the organisation should be fixing.

The sticky note on the desk changes nothing about what happens in the meeting.

Who pays the highest price?

This gap between individual intervention and systemic reality is not evenly distributed. For neurodivergent professionals — people whose ideas have often been received as too much, too lateral, too early, or simply too hard to follow — the message that creative confidence is a personal development challenge can land as a quiet indictment. As if the problem were always their hesitation, rather than the room’s repeated failure to meet them.

Creative confidence for these professionals was never really the issue. The room was.

Where this leaves us

If creative confidence is relational, then building it is not primarily a personal project. It is a leadership one. It lives in the daily, granular decisions about whose ideas get airtime, how feedback is given, whether disagreement is genuinely welcome or merely tolerated, and whether the people at the top of the room are willing to be visibly wrong.

That is a much harder ask than a workshop. It is also, I would argue, the only ask that actually works.

Which raises the question I want to put to Des — someone who has spent decades not just thinking about creative leadership but practising and coaching it at close range: what does it actually look like, in real organisational life, to lead in a way that makes creative confidence possible for the people around you? And what can this series contribute to answering this question?

Des Kennedy

Before we can talk about building creative confidence, we need to be clear about what it is and what it isn’t.

Creativity has many facets, including:

• Creative skills: such as design, writing, facilitation and craft. Each is learnable, teachable and accreditable.

• Creative process: the methodology, the way you structure divergent thinking toward idea generation and convergent thinking toward decisions.

• Creative attainment: the output, the thing you made and the standard it reached.

Underneath all of that is something else. Creative confidence is what makes the others possible because without it, the skills stay theoretical, the process stays mechanical, and attainment stays safely within the bounds of what has already been done.

Here is the thing that changes the conversation entirely: everyone is creative. That is not a motivational claim; it’s a documented fact.

In research carried out for NASA, George Land tested 1,600 children aged three to five. 98% scored in the highly creative range. He retested the same cohort over time, and, by the age of thirty-one, only 2% remained there.

So what happened in between? Three words: School. Work. Life.

School is where you learn your type. If you go onto higher education, it turns into a qualification. Then at work, you learn that the brief requires evidence, the meeting requires a precedent, and the appraisal requires a measurable outcome. By the time most people arrive in an organisation, they have learned to mistrust the thing that matters most.

In an organisational setting, creativity is a team sport. The workshop, the brainstorm, the Synectics session: that is where it lives or dies.

If the goal is to get the most out of everyone in the room, the first task is to understand who is actually in it. Not just their role or their expertise, but their relationship to speaking up, how they experience being heard, and the particular dynamics of this team on this day.

Process design matters more than most people realise. Pre-questions give people time to think before the pressure of the room kicks in. Structured formats prevent the same voices from filling the space, and creating ways to contribute after the session ends captures the ideas that only crystallise on the walk back to the desk.

But there is something beneath the process that no agenda can fully control. Everybody brings themselves.

The same people on a different day are, in a real sense, different. Mood, energy, history with each other, and what happened before they walked in. The human being is a complex variable. You cannot standardise it, but you can design with it in mind.

Ideas do not arrive fully formed.

What enters the room is usually partial: a direction, an instinct, a fragment of something that hasn’t yet found its language. In the right conditions, someone builds on it. The fragment becomes a thread, and the thread becomes something worth pursuing.

But creative environments are rarely neutral. Time is allocated unevenly, contributions are acknowledged selectively, and status, whether explicit or simply felt, shapes whose half-formed thoughts get developed and whose get passed over. Often, without anyone intending it.

The result: the best ideas never leave the room. Not because they weren’t there but because when they surfaced, they weren’t ready, so nobody built on them.

Sven identifies the individual: the person the room repeatedly failed to meet. That cost is real, and it compounds. Each time a contribution goes unrecognised, the person makes a small, rational calculation that it is safer not to bother. Meaning the team pays too, and so does the organisation.

Every idea that died half-formed is a lost opportunity, and every person who learned not to offer their thinking is a diminished asset. The sessions that keep producing the same outputs from the same voices are not evidence of a good team: they are evidence of a system that has quietly trained everyone to stay inside the lines.

This is not sentiment, it’s arithmetic. The cost accumulates quietly, across individuals and teams and whole organisations, over time.

Why this matters now

Sanjeev Paul Choudary makes a point that most leaders are not yet sitting with: the impact of AI will not play out primarily through automation. That is a distraction. The real effect is the reshuffling of entire business architectures, the redrawing of industry boundaries and business models and the way value moves across whole sectors.

The organisations that navigate that reshuffling will not be the ones that automate fastest. They will be the ones who redirected the time and capacity automation releases toward the one thing AI cannot replicate: knowing what good looks and feels like, and trusting that judgement before you can defend it.

Tim Brown and Joe Gerber at IDEO call this the AI dividend, the surplus of human bandwidth that automation liberates. Right now, most organisations have no strategy to reinvest it.

Creative confidence is not a soft issue adjacent to this question; it is the question. If the people in your organisation have spent years learning not to trust the instinct that something is worth pursuing, the AI dividend will not compound; it will dissipate.

Creativity is not a special skill some people have; it’s innate to us all. The problem is how narrowly we have defined it. Attach it only to the arts, to design, to creative industries, and everyone else opts out. Broaden the definition, and you broaden who contributes.

In a world being reshaped before our eyes, that breadth is not optional. It is the only viable response and what makes it possible is creative leadership. Not as a job title but as a practice.

It means knowing yourself well enough to understand what you bring and what you tend to miss. It means seeing others clearly enough to recognise the creative potential in the room, not just the expertise on the org chart. It means having the humility to accept that no one sees it all, that it is only by bringing different perspectives and different lived experiences together that we begin to leverage what everyone in the room actually has.

That is a harder thing to build than a workshop. It is also, in the world we are walking into, the only thing worth building.

We’re looking forward to sharing all the insights from our interview guests with you.