Creativity & Climate (Engine)
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.
As much as we make things at work, work also makes us — and, happily, it can remake us too.
Creativity isn't a burst of genius that strikes the lucky. It's a rhythm between two modes — open and closed — and a great deal of what looks like brilliance is just someone who's learned to protect it. Here's the full cycle, and how to keep it turning.
A practical guide to using sound while you work — and knowing when to switch it off.
Six habits a newsroom trains into you - tell the truth, keep notes, think critically, be fair, protect what's private - and why they turn out to be the essence of ethical work.
On Nash's old pyramid of how we spend our time, why we move to escape when meaning goes missing, and the quiet waste of every evening we don't get back.
On the many intelligences we carry, why we reward the few that are easy to measure, and the subtle waste - mottainai - of every gift we never think to grow.
On protecting the fragile beginnings of ideas, in others and in yourself.
On the same February day in 1876, two men filed patents for the telephone, hours apart. Which tells you something about genius: the idea was never the rare part. On why the lone-genius story is almost always a team with the room cropped out.
On the PO method, lateral thinking, and why creativity was never a gift some people have. It's a device you can pick up off the nearest surface.