Safe Danger: An Unexpected Method for Sparking Connection, Finding Purpose, and Inspiring Innovation
Ben Swire
Balance Book Group (October 2025)

How to think creatively about thinking creatively

I am a staunch advocate of what I characterize as “strategic reading” of business books. One of the most valuable tactics is to focus on a book’s subtitle. For example, in Safe Danger, Ben Swire provides “an unexpected method for sparking connection, finding purpose, and inspiring innovation.”

We soon realize that his book achieves separate but interdependent objectives:

o It thoroughly explains how to accelerate your personal growth and professional development. with a “paradoxical balance of opposing currents: safe danger. Risk, yes, but without serious consequences. Vulnerable, yes, but without feeling exposed. Seen, yes, but without feeling seen.”

o It also explains how you can help others to accelerate their own personal growth and professional development (i.e., family members, friends, colleagues at work). HOW? Swire thoroughly explains in this book.

Those who purchase a copy of Safe Danger will be delighted by Swire’s sense of humor that seems to have been influenced by Larry David, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Daffy Duck, and members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

In or near the central business district of most major cities, there is a farmer’s market at which (at least pre-COVID) merchants would offer slices of fresh fruit as samples of their wares. In that same spirit, I now offer a selection of brief excerpts from Safe Danger that suggest the thrust and flavor of Swire’s creative mind:

“I’ve found that creative activities that provide what I call ‘safe danger’ are the perfect tool to build productivity, purpose, bold thinking, resilience, collaboration, and community to prepare for the unknowns around the corner. Essentially, I use creative play to make the scary stuff more manageable. I think of creativity like oven mitts: It’s a safe way to manage dangerous material. My activities are not for learning about art; they’re for learning about each other through art. Empathy, not artistry.” (Page xv)

o Swire’s FIVE PRINCIPLES OF SAFETY (Pages 40-41)

1. Talent Agnosticism
2. Low Stakes
3. Decline with Dignity
4. Give and Receive
5. Everyone is Heard

Swire’s FIVE PRINCIPLES OF DANGER (41-42)

1. Skin in the Game
2. Make the Familiar and Unfamiliar
3. See the Forest and the Trees
4. Facts + Fseelings
5. The Why Behind the Why

o The KILLJOYS (65-67)

Inner Critic
Taskmaster
Perfectionist
Nervius Nelly
Control Freak
Green Eyed Monster
Protecting Pessimist

o The ANTI-KILLJOYS (65-68)

Love Your Enemies
Inside Out
Making Friends with The Opposite

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“Creativity isn’t learned, it’s practiced. You need to walk its streets and learn your way around so that navigating it becomes second nature and you can always find your way back to where you want to live. Doing these activities is how you build that familiarity. When you live somewhere, you learn how to connect that place to all the other places you need to go.” (189)

I commend Swire on the quality and abundance of resources that are provided in Safe Danger. In Chapters Four to Ten, for example, they include rigorous discussions of accelerating productivity, inspiring joy,  pinpointing purpose, inspiring vulnerability, energizing bold thinking, inspiring curiosity, fostering resilience, inspiring optimism, fueling collaboration, building community, inspiring trust, preparing for the unknown, and inspiring creativity.

* * *

As I worked my way through Swire’s lively and eloquent narrative, I was again reminded of several observations that are directly relevant to a collective commitment to accelerating personal growth and professional development within a workplace culture.

First, from Theodore Roosevelt: “People won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” Helen Keller

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” African Proverb

“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” Margaret Mead:

“If you’ve always done it that way, it’s probably wrong.” Charles Kettering:

And from Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Ben Swire provides a wealth of material (including creative activities) and explains a process that can help almost any individual or organization to increase and enrich their “productivity, purpose, bold thinking, resilience, collaboration, and community to prepare for the unknowns around the corner.”

Here in a single source, you and your organization have everything needed to create and then enrich a workplace culture within which high-impact communication, cooperation, and collaboration are most likely to thrive.

Safe Danger is a must-read for executives at all levels and in all areas,  whatever the given enterprise may be. It will be of greatest value to executives with direct reports entrusted to their care and supervision.

* * *

Here are two suggestions while you are reading Safe Danger: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a lined notebook kept near-at-hand, record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the set of “ACTIVITIES,” “EMPLEMENOTTOS: GOALS MADE VISIBLE” throughout Swire’s narrative and “HABIT BUILDER” suggestions that conclude each chapter.