Have you ever felt the kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with being overworked?
The exhaustion of always knowing the answer, of being the one in the room who has seen it before, solved it before, signed off on it before. Of running so efficiently that there is no longer any room for surprise.
We call it experience. Sometimes it is but sometimes it’s the slow draining of the one quality that made us effective in the first place: the ability to think differently.
Creativity is not a personality trait. It is a practice.
Creative thinking is the kind of contribution that cannot be automated, outsourced, or replicated. It comes from people who bring genuine creative judgment to their role, who see problems as puzzles rather than obstacles, who connect ideas across domains that others keep separate.
Tina Seelig at Stanford has spent decades studying what she calls the Innovation Engine: the intersection of knowledge, imagination, and attitude. Her finding is straightforward: creativity is not something you either have or don’t have. It is something you do, or stop doing.
What gets in the way
The higher we rise, the more we are rewarded for certainty. Stakeholders want confidence. Boards want predictability. Teams want direction. And so leaders learn to project a kind of settled authority that leaves very little room for “I don’t know yet, let’s explore.”
Leaders adapt to situations but adaptation has costs, and one of them is the creative reflex. The willingness to be a beginner, to play with an idea before you judge it, to make something bad before you make something good.
What it costs the organisation
When the leader stops experimenting, the team stops experimenting because they read the room. When curiosity is met with efficiency, people learn to bring solutions, not questions. The organisation gets faster at doing what it already does. It gets slower at doing anything new.
In a market that rewards adaptation, that is a strategic risk.
Getting it back
The good news is that the creative reflex doesn’t disappear. It waits.
It comes back when you do something with your hands. When you draw, build, write, or make something outside your domain of expertise. When you sit in a room with people who don’t know your title and try to solve a problem you’ve never encountered before. When you play and remember what it felt like to not yet know the answer.
The organisations that protect space for it will out-think, out-adapt, and outlast the ones that don’t.
Best Events Productions works with leadership teams across Malaysia and Southeast Asia on experiential programmes that reconnect leaders with the creative and adaptive capacities that drive real performance.
Reach us at hanniz@bestevents-asia.com