If you want to maximize your team’s ability to be creative and innovate, the most important thing you can do is less.

This is something I think people understand easily. Take an example:

You’re on fire, and being chased by a bear.
Now learn this new concept OR DIE.

You can’t. It’s impossible. When your brain is in survival mode, it’s not taking in information & synthesizing it into new things. All you can do is survive.

When you’re working at maximum capacity on a tight deadline, you’re constantly in survival mode. And in pursuit of what folks believe is “resource efficiency”, they want every individual working at max capacity all the time.

Literally every single revelatory creative moment for me has come from walking the dog, lying in the bathtub, sitting on the beach. The critical thing is that during that time, I am not doing anything. I’m not *trying* to solve problems. If anything, I’m trying to do nothing (and failing).

I’ve solved challenges under the gun. I’ve made things work at 3am, scrambling to get a build done before a big demo the next day. These things are satisfying, sure, but they’re not the places where I’ve been able to make step-function changes to the success of a product. All of those – every single one – has appeared spontaneously in my head while I was doing nothing.

And when I say that, what I mean is, “These ideas have been set in motion through hard work and conscious analysis. They’ve baked for wildly unpredictable times in my unconscious mind, and a bit of downtime allowed them to pop back from my unconscious mind to my conscious one.”

If you want your team to be maximally creative, you need to do less. You need to be inefficient. You need to have space where employees do not have pressing tasks. You need to have time when they are at work, but are not cranking out widgets, or code, or anything visible. You need to have time where their mind can wander, where they can experiment, and where they wield the entire depth of their knowledge, conscious and unconscious.

It will look like nothing is happening, and make you feel uncomfortable.

You will want to give them tasks and fill their time with stuff.
That would be a mistake.

If you’ve hired smart, creative, hard-working, well-intentioned folks who want to make awesome things… sometimes a bit of nothing may be the best thing you can do.