Idea in brief: While the link between stillness and creativity may at first seem to be at odds, organisations can tap into employees’ innate creative potential by harnessing the surprising power of stillness.


Do you feel like your best ideas come in the shower? Or maybe on a walk out in nature? Then you’ve likely felt the effects that stillness can bring to your creative thinking. So why do we forget this when we walk through the office doors?

In our modern world of work where deadlines loom large, competing priorities fight for our attention and meetings take up most of our day, it is no wonder that we don’t feel like we have the time to be creative.

Our world and organisations are facing some of their biggest challenges yet in the form of the climate crisis, economic and geopolitical uncertainty, and adapting to a tech-driven world. At the same time, organisations also want their employees to be creative, with it being one of the most in-demand soft skills. But what happens when employees are stretched and struggle to balance daily tasks with creating space for creative work? They end up outsourcing their creativity to creative and innovation agencies. Of course, agencies are skilled at what they do, but an agency can’t be hired for every task that requires creative thinking.

As we enter a new phase with artificial intelligence showing off its creative chops and threatening to replace many kinds of creative jobs, we need to consider what role we as humans want to play in the creative process. It is not all doom and gloom, but technology can do certain parts of it much better than we ever could so it is important to find our place. How can we fully embed creativity as a core skill within organisations, rather than it becoming something to be outsourced to agencies or with technology? One way is through embracing stillness.


What is stillness?

I like to think of stillness as the space within us that gives rise to the awareness of our thoughts, feelings and actions. This ability to be aware is what we might refer to as mindfulness. It is this awareness that helps us break from the habitual thinking patterns of our mind, which is conditioned to think in certain ways.  Eckhart Tolle succinctly frames stillness as a state connected to our inner silence:

“The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is internal stillness.”

Cultivating mindfulness, which is our ability to observe our thoughts and feelings non-judgementally, helps us to reach these moments of stillness or inner silence.  Think back to the last time you finally got a chance to be by yourself after socialising with a lot of people. What kind of state did you arrive at after taking time to sit in silence? Consider the last time you had  a relaxing shower that took you away from your constant thoughts—that state of internal quietude is what stillness refers to.

However, we don’t have to wait for these moments to spontaneously occur. We can also create them. So how can you get into a state of stillness? It’s all about building moments of pause and giving yourself a chance to become more aware of the present moment. This could be through:

  • A guided meditation
  • Stopping whatever you’re doing to focus on your breathing
  • Making yourself some tea/coffee whilst not thinking of anything in particular
  • Going for a walk without listening to music/content and just noticing your thoughts as they come up

Taking these moments to pause, breathe, and become aware of your mind gives you the inner space that is stillness, and it is here where your creativity can also flourish.


What does stillness have to do with creativity?

"Stillness allows the mind to wander and imagine, which is the first step in creating something new." - David Lynch

At first, it may seem contradictory to think that becoming more still could lead us to being more creative, since the former is about cultivating inner calmness, and the latter is typically thought of as a messy and chaotic process. However, if we move away from that image of creativity and see it simply as William Plomer put it, “the power to connect the seemingly unconnected”, we can start to see how the two could be related.

To unearth connections that others haven’t yet, you must cultivate space within. This space gives room for those hidden connections to rise to the surface.  Your mind will be freed from being controlled by our constant stream of thinking, resulting in a higher level of awareness to notice those connections that you may otherwise have missed.

Being still doesn’t necessarily mean sparks of genius will fly at you immediately, but it does mean you will be more capable of directing your thinking patterns towards a particular theme or topic. Researchers have termed this “mindful mind-wandering” and have shown that it leads to improved levels of “insight problem-solving”, which are those “aha” moments where things seem to click into place.

This is why embracing the power of stillness would be immensely beneficial for organisations, but it won’t happen by just recommending that employees meditate.


How organisations can enable stillness

As mentioned above, stillness and mindfulness are very much connected.  Despite the significant growth of mindfulness programmes in the workplace as of late, mindfulness can be embedded in a company’s culture more deeply. Here are a variety of simple yet powerful ways to achieve that:

  • Encourage and enable meditation and mindfulness: This can be done through providing employees access to meditation apps like Headspace or Calm, and creating meditation spaces in the office.
  • Embed practices that encourage reflection: Instead of encouraging people to always make decisions in the moment or haphazardly, companies could instead suggest setting aside time in meetings for quiet self reflection. A prime example of this would be Amazon, who outlawed PowerPoint presentations in favour of 3-6 page memos, and reserved 30 minutes at the start of key meetings for everyone to read through them. Jack Dorsey adopted a similar approach at Square and Twitter where meetings are based on a Google Doc and everyone takes the first 10 minutes to quietly reflect and add comments into the tool directly.
  • Increase focus to the priorities that really matter: Our constant cycle of busyness often stems from doing too many things at the same time, and it’s not always possible for the people executing things to simply drop them. In these cases, leaders should step in to simplify and reduce the number of priorities to those that really matter. One of the most well-known examples of doing this being Steve Jobs’ turnaround at Apple when he returned as CEO, and subsequently reduced their product portfolio by 70%.
  • Establish better expectations and routines around expected response times and deadlines: When people feel the pressure to respond immediately to queries and requests, they will be conditioned to constantly be jumping back and forth between tasks rather than being able to truly focus on something for longer periods of time. To combat this, companies can encourage employees to communicate more mindfully to each other and reserve quick turnaround times for urgent tasks.
  • Simplify employees’ digital dispersion: When employees have to cycle through ten different applications to stay abreast of email, messages, company news and more, they are bound to become overwhelmed and distracted. Companies could thus configure default notification settings that are less intrusive and stick to as few channels as possible for communicating key information (e.g. just Slack, or email, or an intranet - but not all three).
  • Embrace uncertainty: When employees feel like they always have to know the answers and can’t be wrong, it creates a pressure which stifles creativity. We can’t explore new and innovative ways of doing things if we aren’t allowed to go into the unknown. Therefore, companies could develop a culture where uncertainty is embraced for the purpose of exploration, and employees are encouraged to accept what they don’t yet know.
  • Create a better meeting culture: We have all experienced meetings in which  we are not quite sure what the objective is or why we’re even there. Reducing meetings is one way to achieve a better meeting culture and has shown to increase employee productivity and engagement, and reduce stress. Some companies have started to take drastic steps, such as Shopify purging all recurring meetings with three or more people. While a complete purge of recurring meetings like this may not be the right choice for you or your team, we can all take steps to not only reduce meetings, but also implement practices that help create a more healthy meeting culture.


To stand out in an increasingly busy, noisy, and AI-driven world, we need to embrace moments of pause, reflection and mindfulness that give us the stillness we need to develop creative ideas that move the world forward.



Further reading

You can find more ways of cultivating stillness for yourself here

Get Eckhart Tolle’s book “Stillness Speaks” here (affiliate link)

Get Ryan Holliday’s book “Stillness is the Key” here (affiliate link)

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