There is more intelligence inside our organizations and our teams than we are using.

It’s the job of leaders to unlock the creative power of their teams - not to generate solutions to all problems for them.

Leaders can do this by leading conversations that leverage the power of a creative process - finding new, unexpected and innovative solutions to challenging problems instead of business as usual. 

This creative process has gone by many names, has been studied for decades, and offers leaders powerful, practical tools to drive change and innovation through creative conversations. My book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter is just one of many, many books on this topic. In this essay I’ll break down some essential tools of leading creative conversations and share some other books on the topic for your further reading.

At various times, this process has been called Creative Problem Solving (CPS), and more recently known as Design Thinking. Over the decades these approaches have been hailed as practical and functional, or a terribly failed experiment.