INTRODUCTION
Creativity: Not Just for Creatives
We all know the feeling of entering a room where all the joy and exuberance of creativity and open-minded thinking dried up years ago. We feel it the most when we’re dealing with old systems and giant bureaucracies—things like filing an insurance claim or applying for an extended travel visa. The experience is withering and exhausting, and we feel a mix of sympathy and derision for its enforcers: those robotic paper-pushers who never seem to stray from their scripts or fail to apply outdated rules.
Most of us today, luckily, work in organizations where innovation is encouraged and celebrated. Even so, that creativity-crushing feeling creeps into our jobs all too often. The forces that smother creativity ...
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