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Hey there, innovation champions!
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The Story Your Engineers Tell Themselves (And How to Change It)

I was first-chair viola in my high school chamber orchestra.
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The two violinists practiced constantly — before school, after school, weekends. I put in the bare minimum. Classical music wasn't my passion, and my effort reflected that.
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Not surprisingly, they were significantly more skilled than I was.
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Here's the part I got completely wrong.
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I didn't credit their ability to the hundreds of hours they'd invested. I looked at the gap between their playing and mine and reached a different conclusion entirely: they had something I didn't. Some innate musical capacity that I'd simply been born without.
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So I put down my viola. Stopped making music. Told myself the story for decades: "I'm not a real musician."
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The true story? I didn't practice as much as they did.
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That's it. That's the whole gap.
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The Most Expensive Equation in Your Organization

I see this exact mistaken math in analytical teams all the time.
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Someone in a brainstorm offers an idea that lands awkwardly. Or they sit through a creative exercise feeling stiff and uncertain while others seem comfortable. And they reach the same conclusion I reached at fifteen: I don't have it.
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What they're actually seeing isn't a talent differential. It's a permission differential.
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The people who look comfortable generating messy, half-formed ideas have had more practice doing it — in environments where it was safe to do it badly. They accumulated permission over time. That's not a personality type. That's a reps problem.
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And here's what makes it expensive for your organization: when analytical people quietly decide that the creativity conversation isn't theirs to have, they stop contributing the thing they're actually best at.
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Pattern recognition. Systematic thinking. The instinct to ask "what if this assumption is wrong?" The ability to connect dots across domains that no one else thought to connect.
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That's not the absence of creative thinking. That's creative thinking, running on a different operating system.
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The story — "I'm not creative" — is the only thing standing between your engineers and your next breakthrough.
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Two Myths, One Problem

There are two versions of this story, and both are costing you.
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The External Myth: "Creativity is for the creative people." This is the version that shows up in org charts — when the innovation team gets built, and somehow the engineers end up in implementation rather than ideation. Nobody said they weren't creative out loud. They just... weren't invited. The signal was received.
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The Internal Myth: "I'm not one of them." This is the version that lives inside the people themselves. It's the engineer who sits in a brainstorm, notices the discomfort of not knowing the right answer, and falls silent. They're not withholding. They've just decided, long ago, that this particular conversation belongs to someone else.
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Both myths compound. The external one reinforces the internal one. The internal one makes the external one invisible to fix.
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The good news: both are stories. And stories can change.
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What I Learned at Music Camp

I picked up a guitar in my 30s with (almost) zero ambition. I just wanted to back myself singing in my living room.
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Less than a year into guitar lessons, I went to music camp — and had a revelation that cracked something wide open.
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Music wasn't something only "real musicians" got to have.
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I got to have it. In my own way, at my own level, for my own reasons.
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And the story I'd been telling myself for over 15 years — the one that started when I measured my unpracticed playing against two violinists who'd poured their lives into their instruments — turned out to be wrong.
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Within four years, I was performing as a jazz singer around the Bay Area.
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Not because I suddenly "had" what those violinists had.
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Because I stopped living by a story that wasn't true.
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Your analytical team members are living inside stories like this right now. The question isn't how to find the "creative ones." The question is: what would it take for them to change the story?
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The Experiment That Starts Rewriting It

I ran this recently with a small group of strangers for The CLUB of Silicon Valley — a women’s leadership group. One woman in the group was dealing with a real, stressful challenge: her son was cutting school.
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We ran Experiment #6 from Innovation at Work: "Yes, And... That's Terrible!"
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Here's how it works:
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Start with a real challenge. Then someone opens with a deliberately absurd "solution" — the worse, the better.
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Each person responds with "Yes, and..." — building on the absurdity instead of correcting it. For the first several minutes, the goal is to keep the terrible idea growing.
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We started with "pay him for skipping school."
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"Yes, and pay for him to go to the beach." "Yes, and buy a ticket to send him to Hawaii." "Yes, and send ME to join him on a trip to Hawaii!"
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The room was laughing. And then something interesting happened.
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As the ideas kept building, what floated up — underneath the silliness — were real insights about how to genuinely support a kid who might be overwhelmed by school. About what kids actually need to thrive. About the difference between managing behavior and understanding what's driving it.
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The woman who'd offered the challenge said something shifted for her during the exercise. The anxiety she'd walked in with had loosened.
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That's what this experiment does: it removes the social risk of looking foolish, which removes the internal censor, which lets the useful stuff come up.
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How to run it with your team:

🟠 Start with a real challenge your team is currently stuck on.
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🟠 Open with the most ridiculous possible "solution" — model the absurdity yourself.
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🟠 Go around the room: everyone adds "Yes, and..." building on whatever came before.
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🟠 Run for 4–6 minutes, or to a natural stopping place. Keep it terrible on purpose.
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🟠 Debrief for 4 minutes: what unexpected directions emerged? What did you notice?
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Time: 12 minutes. Any size team. No materials required. Fully remote-compatible.
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The full experiment — with facilitation script, remote adaptation, and scale guidelines — is Experiment #6 in Innovation at Work (page 75).
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The PMI Moment That Proved It

Last year I worked with 125 project and program managers at the PMI San Francisco Bay Area Professional Development Day — people whose professional lives revolve around Gantt charts, risk registers, and structured process.
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Chatting with me in the lunch line, one of them said, almost apologetically: "I don't really think of myself as creative."
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But by the end of our session, something had shifted. He didn't suddenly believe he was "a creative person." But he'd started to question whether that framing had ever been accurate — or useful.
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"It was ELECTRIC," wrote one attendee.
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"[She] shared real tools and models (not just buzzwords) that participants could apply immediately," wrote another.
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The creativity was never missing. The permission was.
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What Leaders Can Actually Do

If you lead analytical or technical teams and you're trying to build a genuine innovation culture, here's the practical version:
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Stop waiting for your engineers to "become more creative." They already think creatively — they've just been told, through structure and exclusion and the story in their own heads, that the creativity conversation belongs to someone else.
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Make terrible the goal, explicitly and out loud. The experiment above works because it removes the social risk of being wrong. That's not a hack — it's the mechanism. Build more of it into your team's regular rhythms.
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Start with one experiment. Not a culture change initiative. Not a workshop. Twelve minutes at the top of your next team meeting.
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The story changes when the evidence changes. Give your team new evidence.

If you're curious what that looks like inside your organization specifically, I'd love to think through it with you. Book a complimentary 30-minute Innovation Strategy Session — no pitch, just a real conversation.
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Or grab Innovation at Work for 51 more experiments you can run right away. (Tip: You can also download the preview here and get four complete experiments without even buying the book!)
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Meanwhile, hit reply and tell me: who in your organization surprises you with creative thinking that their job title would never predict? I read every response.

📣 Fresh from the stage

Last Wednesday I delivered a virtual keynote for Project Management Institute Silver Spring — a room full of analytical, process-driven project managers.
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My favorite result: 100% of respondents shifted how they think about creativity and innovation in their PM work. Not the same shift — different shifts. Some now see creativity as a buildable skill. Others feel more permission to experiment. And 20% walked away seeing their analytical mind as an innovation asset rather than a liability.

88% planned to try one of the session experiments with their team within 7 days.

Turns out, skeptics make the best innovators. They just need the right framework. 😄
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If you're sitting with an innovation mandate and a team full of skeptics, let's talk: Book a complimentary Innovation Strategy Session​

Creatively yours,
Melissa

​P.S. Three ways I can help you move from "innovation initiative" to innovation practice so you can Create the Impossible™:
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🔍 Find your bottleneck — discover what’s actually stalling your team in just 2 minutes with my Innovation Bottleneck Finder. Your results will tell you the specific pattern that’s stalling your team, and exactly where to focus first.
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📗 Download a free preview of Innovation at Work — the first 50 pages, including 3 full experiments
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📅 Book a Strategy Session — 30 minutes, complimentary, no pitch
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