Creativity & Innovation
Creative teams are built, not born.
Every organization has more creative capacity than it uses. Our Creative Alliances™ model shows how teams unlock it: bonds fuel tasks, tasks drive goals, and communication runs through all three.
Explore the interactive modelRead the essay →
01
Bonds
How we feel together. Climate, positive mindsets and emotions, character and collaborative partnerships: the conditions that make people willing to share an idea.
02
Tasks
What we do together. Understand, dream, experiment and flourish, the co-creation work at the center, with change and transitions all around it.
03
Goals
What we come to know and achieve. Engagement, efficiency, experience, expansion, efficacy and effectiveness, with excellence at the core.
Sound familiar?
Your people have ideas. Too many of them never make it to the table.
If you lead a team or an organization, some of this may sound like your week.
- The same few people bring every idea, and everyone else waits.
- Innovation got handed to one team, and the rest of the organization stopped trying.
- Meetings stay polite. Nobody pushes back, so nothing gets better.
- People are afraid of looking foolish, so they bring safe ideas or none at all.
- The team gets along fine, but the results don’t follow.
- Experiments get talked about, then quietly shelved.
None of this means your people aren’t creative. It usually means something in how the team works is getting in the way, and that can be changed.
Inside the model
Every goal takes the color of the bond that fuels it.
Start with the result your team is missing and the model points back to the bond worth investing in. Every path runs through co-creation, and communication carries trust, ideas and feedback between all three layers.
Bonds
How we feel together
- Climate
- Positive Mindsets & Emotions
- Character
- Collaborative Partnerships
- Core Conditions
Tasks
What we do together
- Understand
- Dream
- Experiment
- Flourish
Surrounded by change and transitions: the event that happens and the human response to it.
Goals
What we come to know and achieve
- Engagement
- Efficiency
- Experience
- Expansion
- Efficacy
- Effectiveness
- Excellence
The short version
Four things we know about creativity at work.
01
It belongs to everyone
Creativity is not a department, a personality type or a job title. It shows up in strategy, operations, service and leadership as much as in marketing or design.
02
Identity shapes action
How people see themselves, their creative role identity, shapes whether they bring ideas forward at all.
03
Leaders build bridges or barriers
Often without noticing. The leader’s job is to make it safe and expected for everyone to contribute.
04
Results run on three layers
High-performing teams connect how they feel together, what they do together and what they achieve.
Read
How teams turn creativity into results.
The Creative Alliance: The Operating System Behind High-Performing Teams
The essay behind Creative Alliances™: how bonds, tasks and goals work together.
Creativity is Not a Department
Why creativity belongs to everyone in an organization, not one team.
The Power of Building on Ideas
How to create a winning team dynamic by building on each other’s thinking.
Conflict Is Not Always a Bad Thing
When disagreement helps a team think better.
Artificial Intelligence, Creativity and Human-Centered Marketing
Where human creativity fits as AI tools enter the work.
From the research
Playing the Creative Advantage
Creative role identity is how much a person sees being creative as part of who they are in their role. Jules Morris’s doctoral research at the University of Tennessee (2025) studied it in female leaders: how they come to see themselves as creative, and what helps or holds that back. This series shares what the research found.
Frequently asked questions
Can creativity be developed, or are some people just creative?
It can be developed. Whether people use their creativity at work depends heavily on how they see their role and on the conditions leaders create, not only on talent.
What blocks creativity in organizations?
Common barriers include fear of looking foolish, treating creativity as one team’s job, and leaders who reward certainty over experimentation. Bridges & Barriers to Creativity covers both sides.
What is the Creative Alliances model?
A model of how high-performing teams work, developed by Jules and Lane Morris. It connects bonds (how we feel together), tasks (what we do together) and goals (what we come to know and achieve), with communication running through all three and change and transitions surrounding the work.
What is creative role identity?
The degree to which a person sees being creative as part of who they are in their role. It was the focus of Jules Morris’s dissertation, Playing the Creative Advantage: Creative Role Identity of Female Leaders.
Work with us
Ready to find the creativity already in your organization?
We work alongside leaders and teams to see where ideas are getting stuck and what would free them up. It starts with a conversation about what you’re seeing.