Confidently Creative?
The Problem With Making It Personal
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 Sven Brodmerkel (PhD) and Des Kennedy, ‘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.
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This is so great! I have very much felt that sort of creativity spark you mention at workshops only to have it go out the moment I get back to my desk. Looking forward to the series.
Great idea, looking forward to hearing more!