Do you feel like your team isn’t really creative? Not coming up with any initiatives or ideas? Or when they do, is it all limited to tech fluff? You end up feeling like it all comes down to you (and, if you’re lucky, a couple of reliable people)?

No wonder. How can they be creative? Creativity requires two things that are often lacking in modern teams: safety and inspiration.

Creativity is critical, especially nowadays, when the lines of code are surely no longer the bottleneck; it’s about the ingenuity your team brings to the table. That’s what’s going to create moats and make all the difference. What do safety and inspiration mean in this context, and how can you provide your team with them?

Safety

In general, when people don’t feel like they can risk it, they aren’t likely to try anything innovative. After all, they want to succeed in their work, and thus, if they’re worried about something not working out, they’re more likely to stick with the regular way of doing things. Will you take a different route to work, that might be faster or just more interesting, if you’re afraid of getting there late? No, you’ll let your autopilot kick in and take the same one you always do.

If you want more creativity, you need to deliberately create the safety it entails. To start, be clear with your team about your expectations. They should know some experimentation is expected and that you understand it could mean things taking longer (or not working at all). Regularly add enough wiggle room from time to time in the things you’re working on so that people can have the ability to play around.

For example, you can have intermissions (the subject of the free sample chapter of my book that you can find here), or just regular experimentation baked into the work from time to time. When someone has an idea for an experiment, you discuss it and decide whether to add the extra time for the task or not, which can also be time blocked to ensure it doesn’t get too deep.

Inspiration

The other half is about the team actually having ideas for experiments. If you have ever looked into the history of the Renaissance, you have seen how a lot of the inspiration they got was from acute observation of the world. Studying ancient works. Experimenting. All that supplied artists with inspiration and helped them come up with all those works of art.

You need to ensure your team is not breathing its own exhaust. They need to regularly learn new things and get exposure to new concepts and different ways of doing things. If you value creativity, you should prioritize it, like ensuring that you don’t hire solely people from the same “pools” and have diversity. I’ve seen teams that were too homogenous when it came to people’s backgrounds, and thus were all alumni of the same company or university, and were all thinking similarly. Rather than having many minds with different ideas, they created echo chambers.

Have budgets for conferences. Encourage people to participate in meetups and communities. Schedule internal tech talks every couple of weeks and give people time to prepare interesting stuff.

Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We need to be exposed to things that inspire us and then have the time to tinker and play around.