You Don’t Lack Creativity, But the Courage to be Creative

Creativity is claimed as a prized leadership attribute. In 2010, IBM famously identified creativity as the most important leadership trait for navigating a complex world. Fast forward to 2025 and IBM’s latest report suggests a top challenge for CEOs is innovation, across product, service, and business models. Deloitte says “imagination” and that companies imbued with imagination are nearly twice as likely to see superior financial growth. McKinsey states, the most effective leaders are those who champion “unconventional thinkers.” What’s clear is that creativity or its buzzword progeny is what everyone is chasing.

But who walks the talk? While the rhetoric celebrates creativity, the reality often sharply deviates. The LIONS State of Creativity 2025 report reveals that only 13 percent of companies are truly open to creative risk. And that is companies in the business of creative work: marketers. But, why? Twenty years ago, Regent University in its leadership review identified “fear,” specifically the fear of ridicule or losing a promotion, as the primary killer of workplace innovation. That suggests on an individual level, nobody wants to step outside the box. On the one hand, companies say they want innovation and creativity, but they “reward order, control, and predictability,” says John Mauriello, industrial designer. Again, the Cannes Lions report; in 2023, 53 percent of brands focused on short-term tactical wins. By 2025, that number jumped to 63 percent. But what exactly does that mean? When the focus is on quarterly delivery, creativity, which requires time, some discomfort and uncertainty, is sacrificed in favour of predictability. For all the talk of creativity and imagination being highly desirable, even compellingly necessary, for tackling problems which face the world today, there is, broadly, little appetite to incubate the requisite environment, it seems.

Are they willing to pay the price?

Although it takes expertise and skill to produce imaginative ideas and creative work, it’s underpinned by the audacity of non-conformity. A certain comfort with discomfort. Luigi Colani was one of the most prolific designers of the 20^th century, producing over 4,000 design projects in his 60-plus year career. He redesigned concepts for major automotive brands, worked with aircraft manufacturers, created furniture, collaborated with Rosenthal homewares, Pelikan pens, Schimmel pianos, and Canon cameras. Yet, you may never have heard of him. The design intelligentsia hated Colani; often reduced to a caricature of an arrogant showman (and he spoke with unapologetic bluntness), but never seriously engaged with on an intellectual level. Students in Germany were banned from attending his exhibitions. 

Why? 

Colani bucked orthodoxy. Colani rejected the strict, straight lines that dominated German design. While tradition favoured simple geometric forms, he embraced curved, organic shapes inspired by nature. Some of his work was called ugly, impractical, and a manufacturing nightmare. “They don’t like me here,” Colani said in a television interview. “Germany is a country where you have to be obedient, to the law, to the industry, and to all the things around you. They are all like margarine cubes that you can stack in a shelf… if you are a ball, you are out of the game here. And that’s what I am.”

This essay is not one of design theories. Rather it makes the argument that creativity embraces non-conformity. They are symbiotic. Creativity lies in potential rejection and ridicule. That is the price. Luigi Colani embodied this idea. He operated in a culture that rejected his thinking. That rejected non-conformity; the round balls on square shelves.

Beyond the consulting buzzwords, first let’s understand what exactly creativity means.

Creativity, defined.

The manifestation of creativity is context dependent, but has common elements: an ability to produce ideas, solutions, or products that are novel and valuable. Both components are needed. Novelty without value is difference, surprising perhaps, eccentric maybe, but it does not solve, improve, or meaningfully contribute. But, it’s hard to add value to something existing without a dash of novelty. It’s not the size of improvement, but the application of new thinking that matters.

Creativity at scale may refer to major cultural movements that influence how society thinks about grand issues, or groundbreaking ideas like Einstein’s theories of relativity. Everyday creativity at work is grounded in practical problem solving and idea generation like solving customer issues or redesigning a workflow. In organisational contexts, we can frame creativity as the capacity to see possibilities others overlook. We could say creativity is the ability to recombine existing things in new ways that solve problems or create opportunities.

In this form, Netflix’s creativity extends from its combination of new technology for distribution and pricing models; they didn’t invent movies, the Internet, or subscriptions. Importantly, notice what it’s not about; it’s not about wild ideas and artistic flair and spontaneous inspiration. For a team leader it’s about sense-making and recombination and adaptation. Trainable, learnable skills. Being creative is built on reframing problems, challenging assumptions, connecting unrelated signals, and designing new responses to change.

What enables creativity?

If creativity is built on novelty and value then we should consider the environment and thinking that supports both these elements. Generating novel ideas requires the mind to escape, to resist default thinking, to see beyond the obvious, and consider the unrealistic. The ability to shift conceptual frames and ask different questions. For Luigi Colani, he asked: “Why does a motorcar look like it does? Is it right or wrong? What is an airplane? Why is it shaped like that?” Questioning underlying assumptions about how we see the world, the form and function of products, even reality itself is the type of thinking that serves novelty.

Closely related is connecting ideas from disparate domains. Nobody had meaningfully combined the Internet with movies and subscription models before Netflix. For Colani, associative thinking took a different form. He linked industrial design with biology, aerodynamics, and human experience. He argued that nature’s forms, refined over millions of years of evolution, embodied principles of efficiency, flow, and adaptation that human design too often ignored. From this conviction he championed biomorphism, the idea that design should follow the logic of living systems rather than rigid geometric conventions.

Novelty on its own is interesting but not necessarily creative. Value requires grounding new ideas in context, utility, and impact. Real creativity isn’t just wild imagination. It requires domain knowledge and expertise. Colani knew his domains deeply: he studied sculpture to understand form, aerodynamics to understand motion, and philosophy to understand why forms exist in the first place. This mix allowed him to bring a thoughtful lens to novelty.

Consider his work with Canon. In the 1980s the Japanese firm faced heavy competition, yet had a conservative, conformist culture, that had never collaborated with outside designers. So dire was their situation, they engaged Luigi Colani. “It took two years of me telling them that a camera is a thing between the human hand and the human eye, so it had to have ergonomics on both sides!” he said. Cameras at the dawn of the 80s were box-shaped metal bodies. Combining new plastic materials, Colani shaped the camera with rounded edges and finger grooves with control modules and the shutter button nestling inside the hand. He didn’t generate abstract shapes; he insisted the camera be shaped forthe human hand and eye, aligning novelty with ergonomic value. Whilst commonplace today, at the time, a radical design departure. That camera, the Canon T90, became enormously influential, and was subsequently copied by other manufacturers, and lives on in today’s camera lines.

Born creative or built?

As designer John Mauriello observes, “People think design schools teach creativity, but what they often teach is conformity. A lot of designers come out of that system restrained and cautious.” Creativity may be partly a trait. Some people seem naturally inclined toward openness, curiosity, and a comfort with uncertainty.

But it is increasingly understood as a skill, and one that is especially important for leaders. Like any skill, it can be developed. This is where creativity becomes powerful in practice. Leaders can strengthen it by learning to deliberately question assumptions as a starting point.

Much like Colani asked why is a car shaped this way, and is it right or wrong.

Creativity, Culture, and the Art of Non-conformity

Creativity is often spoken of as an asset, something organisations claim to value. In practice, it demands something less comfortable: a willingness to stand apart. Luigi Colani embodied this tension. He was willing to endure criticism and exclusion from parts of the design establishment. “I succeed in spite of them,” he once said. His work was frequently described as excessive or unrealistic. Even today, some of his designs still appear radical. Colani believed the greater danger was not boldness, but caution. “They are afraid,” he said of many contemporary designers. “They are copying each other. No one has the guts to go ahead.” His frustration was aimed not at disagreement, but at conformity. When asked about his design process, Colani replied, “most of the time I am getting upset about the design around us and this is triggering the action.”

Colani’s truck designs offer a telling example. Critics dismissed them because they did not resemble conventional forms and were unfeasible from a manufacturing and repairability standpoint. “They say Colani must not be right because everyone else is building boxes,” he remarked. His heavily streamlined aerodynamic prototypes reportedly delivered significant fuel efficiency gains, yet critics argued he sacrificed utility in the process. Even so, the notion that ‘everybody else does it this way,’ is classic groupthink. European regulations on truck design assume ‘what is a truck,’ what is its purpose, what is important in its design. It dictates what we are supposed to value. Colani may not be right, but neither might the underlying values.

Non-conformity, in this sense, is not rebellion for its own sake. It is the willingness to question what others treat as obvious, ‘the way we do things.’ Novelty and transformation require some departure from accepted thinking. It is difficult to produce genuinely new ideas while remaining fully “obedient,” as Colani remarked about German culture, to inherited assumptions. Much of Colani’s work never made it past prototypes. According to our definition of creativity, much of his work was novel, but lacking value. With 4,000 projects across a lifetime, there will be a substantial number of failures. 

And that is the point. Earlier, we said that fear of rejection, fear of ridicule, fear of losing a promotion, holds back creative thinking and innovation. Whatever Colani’s faults, his showmanship, his arrogance, he had the courage of conviction. Though we have said the design elite shunned him, he was wildly successful in other parts of the world. Embraced in Japan and China, he held a professorship at Tsinghua University and was named 1984 “Designer of the Year” in Japan. Car Styling magazine, an industry bible in the 1970s, featured his work in multiple editions. He won the Golden Rose prize at the 1954 Geneva Motor Show for a redesigned Fiat 1100 and contributed to Jaguar’s Le Mans win. In 1991 he set a world record for fuel economy with a streamlined Citroen achieving 1.7L per 100 kilometres.

Nothing was too sacred for Luigi Colani. Imagine the audacity to completely redesign and rebuild the body of a Ferrari. Yet, it’s what he did to a 1974 Daytona 365, creating a one-off machine. Many critics hated his creation. Then in 1989 Colani took a Ferrari Testarossa designed a more streamlined body, renamed that Testa d’Oro, and won the 1991 Bonneville Salt Flats Classic with a top speed of 218 mph.

Beyond the rhetoric. Walking the talk of creativity.

This is where you have to move beyond kicking tires. Where creativity becomes uncomfortable. Non-conformity carries social and professional risk. For leaders, the stakes are higher; visibility, reputation, and career consequences. Organisational cultures exert their own pull toward order, precedent, and predictability. And yet creativity lives at this edge. Creativity and non-conformity are not the same, but they are bedfellows. Creativity often depends on the willingness to diverge. Leaders cannot think differently if they are prisoners of consensus. This idea is not lost on IBM. In the report cited above, the #1 mindset shift recommended is: “Make courage your core.”

Colani’s career does not suggest that leaders must become radicals. It does suggest something quieter and more demanding: that creativity requires comfort with discomfort, and the resolve to pursue ideas that may not immediately fit the expectations of the crowd.

The question isn’t how to be more creative. It’s whether you have the gumption, the resolve, the courage to lean into non-conformity to truly awaken the creative within.