For all the hype around innovation and creativity — one recent survey of 1,500 CEOs pegged creativity as the top skill for business leaders – these muscles remain some of the most underdeveloped in organizations. Even with the best innovation strategy in place, companies can’t develop new ideas and products until their teams become more creative. And the reason teams aren’t creative is because leaders have failed to understand how creativity really works.

In our work with companies and as design professors, we’ve found that most leaders who are frustrated with a lack of employee creativity have day-to-day systems and processes in place that don’t reflect their innovation goals. They’ve stifled nascent creativity with busy work and bureaucracy — think boring, in-office whiteboarding sessions, remote workdays packed with meetings, or advanced software that monitors worker “productivity.” In fact, one study found that “the single largest behavioral shift among employees (during the pandemic) was a statistically significant decline in curiosity.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Our time in meetings has tripled since before the pandemic. Managers use time tracking software to ensure that workers are doing something — anything — that seems useful.

These expectations about what work looks like are dampening creativity for everyone. Today’s organizations need to move away from defining work in terms of efficiency and productivity; creativity is rarely efficient. When it comes to innovation, effectiveness is what counts. If imagination and inspiration are fueled by rich, unexpected inputs to our thinking — experiences and insights that connect the dots in new ways — then the challenge is deliberately seeking new inputs and allowing ourselves the time and space to synthesize them into fresh connections. Creativity that leads to breakthrough innovations often doesn’t look like work, let alone efficient work.

We have helped dozens of organizations move from innovation efficiency to effectiveness. This includes helping financial services companies develop profitable ideas to reach young savers by studying environments like Urban Outfitters, working with premier golf brands to get more young people interested in golf by immersing themselves in tween boutiques, and partnering with Japanese conglomerates to reinvent workplace communication by spending the day with a doula, where they learned that “scripts” enable successful navigation of stressful situations.

The common thread behind these unique experiences? Leaving the office (or home workspace) to mine the world for unexpected insights. We have dubbed this disciplined pursuit of unexpected information seeking inspiration. Designers and “creatives” have sought fresh inputs to drive their creative outputs for generations, but for whatever reason, in the corporate context, “inspiration” has largely referred to cheesy posters in the halls that say things like “teamwork” and “courage.” Inspiration, from a cognitive and operational perspective, is actually about obsessing over the inputs to one’s thinking.

You might be thinking, Wow, this would require a real culture shift in my organization! Where does an individual leader begin to affect change in this area? As Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors notes: “They say [culture] can’t be changed, or it takes 10 years. To me, it’s behaviors. And that can be changed right away.” Culture change starts with giving folks permission to deviate from the conventional behavioral norms, and to try on new behaviors that result in new results. Ultimately, beginning to change the little things can eventually change the big things.

What are some of the foundational changes we’d recommend leaders champion amongst their teams, to affect the broader cultural transformation the above seems to require? Here [is the first of five] to try.

Generate lots of ideas — not just the good ones.

Legendary Stanford Professor Robert McKim is responsible for coaxing countless innovations and innovators into the world. Anytime a student asked for feedback on a new concept, he would give the same response: “Show me three.” He knew that options are often the key to breaking through.

Astro Teller, CEO of X, Google’s “moonshot factory,” agrees. “I ask teams for five ideas so consistently that teams actually try to game the system,” he told us.” They bring me four ‘dummy’ ideas alongside their pet favorite, but what they don’t realize is this: Often, one of the dummy ideas is every bit as good as their favorite. Forcing folks to generate options always improves outcomes.” Indeed, as leadership strategy coach David Noble and Harvard Medical School assistant professor Carol Kauffman recently noted, “great leaders generate options so that when an opportunity arises or a crisis hits, they can pivot in real time and make the optimal move.”

Our students and clients also find immense value in doing an idea quota: a deliberate practice of generating lots of options to solve a problem, instead of hemming and hawing over the “right” answer. One Singaporean executive told us, “The first four or five ideas are hard to come by, but then I remember ‘I don’t have to follow the rules.’” She said the floodgates always open “when I tell myself to try to think of something illegal.” She’s quick to note, “I don’t actually do the illegal thing. But the point is, there’s something about removing the barriers I usually carry around that really opens up the possibilities.

One of the most elegant questions a leader can ask a team looking to solve a wicked problem facing the business is, “What else are we trying?” It acknowledges the need for options, while giving permission to move forward in a lightweight manner.