Here’s a secret about imaginative teams: they are not born, they are permitted. Imagination isn’t a personality trait that some lucky departments have and others don’t. It’s a climate, and the leader is the thermostat. Set the temperature wrong and even your most creative people will quietly file their spaceship ideas under “maybe when I leave.”
I’ve written about why imagination is a business skill and how teams can refuel it. This one is for the person at the front of the room, because more than any framework or workshop, your team’s imagination is a mirror of your behaviour. Here’s what it reflects.
Your Face Is Policy
Every team learns its real rules by watching what happens to the first person who says something strange in a meeting. Not the values on the wall. Your face. If the first wild idea gets a sigh, a smirk, or a “let’s stay focused”, the message is received instantly and permanently: keep the weird stuff at home.
So when the strange idea lands, lean in. Ask a follow-up. Thank them. You’re not committing to build it, you’re keeping the channel open. Less judgey boss, more curious coach. The good stuff only arrives after people are sure the strange stuff won’t get them hurt.
Ask Questions You Don’t Know the Answer To
Leaders are often expected to have the answers, which is exactly the problem. A leader with all the answers raises a team with no questions. Flip it. Become the chief asker of “why?”, “why not?”, and “what if?”, especially about things everyone treats as settled.
Then comes the hard part: wait. Ask the question and let the silence sit, even when it gets awkward. Some of the best ideas in any room live in the heads of the quietest people, and they arrive about four seconds after the point where most leaders give up and answer their own question. Hold the pause. It’s uncomfortable and it’s worth it.
Go Second, Not First
When the boss speaks first, something predictable happens: every idea after that orbits the boss’s idea. You didn’t mean to shut down the room. You just anchored it. So on questions of what to build or try, go last, and watch how much wider the ideas range.
There is one thing you should go first on: imperfection. Share your own half-baked thoughts, your rough sketches, your “this might be nonsense, but”. When the leader is visibly unafraid to think out loud, everyone else gets permission to do the same. And while you’re at it, make sure the room itself is mixed, because a table of people who all think like you will politely agree its way to nothing new.
Pay for It With Your Calendar
Every leader says they value imagination. Few can point to where it lives in the schedule. Time for tinkering, brainstorming that isn’t squeezed into the last ten minutes, tools people actually enjoy using, the odd workshop that has nothing to do with quarterly targets. These are not perks. They are the rent imagination charges.
Your budget and your calendar are your real vision statement. Teams read them fluently.
Celebrate the Attempt, Not Just the Win
What gets celebrated gets repeated. If the only thing that ever earns applause is the safe project that landed, you will get an endless supply of safe projects. So when someone brings a brilliant idea, shout about it. And when someone runs a smart experiment that flops, shout about that too: what they tried, what everyone learned, what it made possible.
A team that has watched a failed experiment get a round of applause will take risks you couldn’t pay them to take otherwise.
Connect It to the Why
Finally, imagination with no destination is just doodling on company time. It becomes powerful when people can see how their wild ideas serve something bigger: the customer whose day gets easier, the community that gets access, the mission that actually matters. Purpose is the difference between “brainstorm because the calendar says so” and “brainstorm because we’re building something.”
The Mirror Test
None of this requires a magic wand, a bigger budget, or a personality transplant. It requires being the safest person in the building to bring a strange idea to. That’s the whole job. Because your team’s imagination will always be a mirror, and the only part of it you fully control is what you show it.
Fancy a Trip Down the Rabbit Hole?
If this post scratched an itch, there’s a whole book of it. Wonderland at Work: Creating a Workplace Where Imagination Runs Wild is my full playbook for building a workplace where “what if?” is the most common question and “why not?” is the default answer, from running brainstorms that actually produce ideas to turning wild concepts into real innovations and keeping the creative spark alive long after the workshop ends. It costs less than your coffee, and unlike your coffee, it works all year.
