Is creativity the key to unlocking innovation?

In this episode of JUST Branding, we sit down with Melissa Dinwiddie — innovation strategist, keynote speaker, and author of The Creative Sandbox Way. Melissa’s journey from calligraphy and jazz to corporate consulting has given her a unique perspective on creativity in business.

She shares her Create the Impossible framework, a game-changing three-step process designed to help teams embrace play, imperfection, and rapid learning. We’ll explore why play isn’t just for kids, how artistic thinking fuels innovation, and how to bust through creative blocks that hold businesses back.

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If you’re looking to boost creativity, enhance collaboration, and drive innovation—this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss!

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The Create the Impossible Framework

Melissa’s framework is built on decades of creativity and innovation research. It has 3 core steps:

1. Play Hard

Embrace curiosity and experimentation. Think like a four-year-old in a sandbox: ask what if, explore fearlessly, and let go of judgment. Play lights up multiple brain networks while calming the fear center — perfect for innovation.

“Play is not a luxury — it’s a catalyst for productivity and creativity.”

2. Make Crap

Perfection kills progress. Innovation requires failure, iteration, and experimentation. Let it suck. You need bad ideas and failed attempts — they’re fertilizer for the breakthroughs.

“Organizations want vaccines but not the experiments that lead to them.”

3. Learn Fast

Build rapid feedback loops. Treat everything (especially the flops) as learning data. Share rough drafts early. Iterate constantly. This step loops you back to Play.

“You can’t get to the good stuff without the crap.”

Real-World Example: Meta Research Team

Melissa worked with a brilliant research team at Meta who struggled to get their insights heard. The issue? Over-communication, perfection paralysis, and poor timing.

Using the framework:

• They reframed communication as a creative challenge.

• They shared imperfect insights early.

• They gathered feedback quickly and adjusted.

Result? More impact, better buy-in, and a recommendation ripple across departments.

Workshop Techniques That Work

Melissa’s sessions often include interactive play-based activities. One standout is:

The Time Traveler Exercise

• One partner is from 2025, the other from 1525.

• The goal: explain a smartphone without being accused of witchcraft.

• The learning: You need empathy, analogies, and context-based communication.

This activity helps teams break jargon, find common ground, and communicate with clarity.

“It’s not that they’re stupid — they just don’t have your context.”

Yes, and… Not “Yeah, but”

Inspired by improv, “Yes, and” thinking builds trust and psychological safety. It allows ideas to grow instead of being shot down. It encourages contribution and risk-taking — essential in creative cultures.

How Leaders Can Integrate Play

Start small. Examples:

• Open meetings with playful check-ins (e.g. “What’s your mood in weather terms?”)

• Use the “Yes, and” approach during idea sessions.

• Try Wild Idea Wednesday: Share outlandish solutions. No judgment.

Tip: Leaders should go first with the craziest idea to set the tone.

Breaking Creative Blocks

Melissa shares tips from her own journey of rediscovering creativity:

1. Lower the bar — aim for progress, not perfection.

2. Make it ridiculously achievable — start with 2 minutes or 10 words a day.

3. Ignore the gremlins — that inner critic? Send it for a pedicure.

4. Play like a kid again — let your inner 4-year-old take over.

“You don’t get good before you start. You get good by doing.”

Let Ideas Incubate (But Don’t Stall)

Yes, ideas often need time to simmer. But don’t let incubation become avoidance.

“Set the intention to return. Don’t shelve your project indefinitely.”

Final Wisdom

• Creativity isn’t a special gift — it’s a human capacity.

• Everyone is born with it.

• The system may suppress it, but it can be reawakened.

“You can break through the glass ceilings in your mind. I’ve seen it thousands of times.”

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding. Today, we’ve got an incredible guest with us, Melissa Dinwiddie. She’s an innovation strategist, a keynote speaker and author, who’s all about helping people and organizations unlock their creative potential. Melissa’s background is anything but ordinary. She’s been a professional artist, a calligrapher, an improviser and even a jazz singer. So she brings a truly unique perspective to creativity and business. She’s the creator of the Create the Impossible Framework, which is a simple but powerful three-step process that helps drive innovation by embracing play, imperfection and fast learning. She’s worked with companies like Facebook, Google, Uber, Salesforce, never heard of them. She helps team break through creative blocks and builds cultures that thrive on innovation. She’s also the author of The Creative Sandbox Way, Your Path to a Full Color Life, a book that helps people rediscover their creativity and bring it to their work and lives. So get ready for an inspiring conversation on creativity, innovation, and making the impossible happen. So let’s jump in. Hello, Melissa. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Melissa, your journey is quite incredible, like dancing and calligraphy, jazz, you know, and corporate innovation. Can you take us through how you went from, like, believing you weren’t creative at all to making creativity your career?

Yeah, thanks for asking that. You know, it’s really funny because people look at me with my history of going to Juilliard in the dance division and having a 15-year career as an artist and performing and touring as a jazz singer and songwriter. And they think that I must have, you know, always have been brimming with creative confidence, but that is not actually the case. I have spent a lot of my life thinking that I was not a creative person and I have struggled with creative block. And, you know, I really relate to those people who think of themselves as not creative and who struggle with creative block because I have been there. So my story is that I was like, pretty much everybody, I, we all are born creative and, you know, kids just play in sandboxes and love to play with crayons and love to jump around and, you know, try things. And that was me as a kid. I was always drawing and singing and, you know, doing all the stuff that comes naturally. But as early as first grade, I started noticing what other kids were doing and comparing my own work to other kids’ work, like falling in what I call the comparison trap. There was a kid in first grade, Aaron Brody. In fact, I saw him at a reunion just a couple months ago and I was able to tell him this story. And he drew race cars and he drew these amazing race cars that were so realistic for first grade. And I remember thinking to myself, I can’t draw race cars like that. No, I actually had no desire to draw race cars, but I couldn’t draw the way that he could draw. And so I built this story in my head that I wasn’t as good as he was. Therefore, I wasn’t as good. Now, I didn’t look at my work through the lens of what I could do. I looked at my work through the lens of, I couldn’t do what he could do, therefore, I sucked. And it just sort of progressed from there until around age 13, when I just bought into the lie that other people were creative and I was not. By the time I was in college, I really believed that I was a non-creative person. And I basically quit doing art at 13. I quit doing music at 15. I did take up dance and that was my creative thing. And I ended up going to Juilliard. I took a year off after high school in order to dance really intensively and went to UC Berkeley for a year. And then I went to Juilliard for a year and then I got injured. So that was the end of the dance career. But in any case, I sort of fell backwards into when I rediscovered my creativity in my late 20s. I kind of, did you ever see The Wizard of Oz, the movie The Wizard of Oz? And it starts off all in black and white, right? And then Dorothy gets swept up in the tornado and she lands in Oz. And she exits the house that the tornado sweeps up and everything’s in technicolor. And that was my experience when I finally came back to creative pursuits in my late 20s. It was like, my creative spirit had been sort of locked away in a closet. And I started taking art classes and creative writing classes and doing all kinds of creative pursuits that I had not allowed myself to do because I had bought into this lie, this story that I was not a creative person, therefore I didn’t get to do these things. And so finally, I let myself do these things that just gave me so much joy and I didn’t get stuck in the requirement that I be good at them. And here’s the thing, we get good at things by doing them. And we, you know, if you let yourself suck at something and just do it, then guess what, you start to get better at it. So I sort of fell backwards into a career as a professional calligrapher and artist, and did that for 15 years. And that’s how I made my living. Ironically, as somebody who thought, I’m not an artist, I’m not creative, and I ended up making my living as an artist.

I love that, Melissa. Yeah, that metaphor was a bit of Oz, like the black and white to color. It’s a full kind of circle moment, I guess. And it kind of leads to your framework, which is what poked my interest when I came across your profiles, like Create the Impossible, and it’s such a strong line, right? So let’s break that down if you don’t mind, just the ideas of playing hard, making crap, learning fast. Can you walk us through each of these steps and explain why they work?

Absolutely. So my Create the Impossible framework, so it might sound really simple, but it’s built on decades of research into creativity and innovation, plus my own experience working with teams across different industries and my own life experience. So step one is play hard, and that is about embracing your inner four-year-old. People often hear play hard and they think, oh, I’ll go to Vegas and get wild. That is not what it’s about. It is about following your curiosity, experimenting, exploring, and not being concerned about what other people think, about making money, about winning awards. It is just about being in that playful state where our brains actually function differently. Play activates multiple brain networks simultaneously and it reduces activity in our fear center, which creates the ideal conditions for innovation. So that’s step one.

So when you say play, what’s your idea of play? What does that actually mean? How would you define that?

If you imagine a little child in a sandbox and when they’re playing in a sandbox, they’re exploring, they’re experimenting, they’re asking themselves, what would happen if I tried this? What would happen if I tried that? What would happen if I poured water on this structure that I just created? That’s what I mean by play hard. It’s asking those what-if questions, it’s following curiosity, it’s experimenting and exploring. And that can take lots of different forms, but it’s that general space of following curiosity. That’s what I mean by play hard.

All right. And then make crap is the next one.

Yeah, so the second step is make crap. This is where most people and organizations get stuck because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we end up making nothing. That’s perfectionist paralysis, that is fear of taking risks, that’s fear of looking bad in front of your colleagues, that is a lot of organizations don’t pay people to fail. They don’t want you to ever fail, but here’s the thing, innovation requires experimentation. Failure is part of the process. We need the crap to fertilize the good stuff. You can’t get to the good stuff without the fertilizer. Of course, experiments often fail. This is what people fail to understand about, say, the scientific process. They want the vaccine without all of the experimentation that gets to the vaccine, and the scientific process is all about a whole lot of iteration. Like, this is where we are now, but where we’re going to be a year from now is going to be different. So what we say is the right thing right now is going to change a year from now, or six months from now, or five years from now. That’s the scientific process. So making crap is all about letting it suck right now, lowering your standards so that you can make something so that you can get to the next thing, which is going to be better.

There’s a saying that I’d like to say, which is it takes a lot of crap to create a beautiful flower, which comes back to the fertilizer.

Exactly. Yeah, we’re on the same wavelength. Exactly. Yeah. Every failed prototype, every terrible first draft, every bad idea, they’re not waste of time, which unfortunately is how so many organizations see them, but they’re actually essential stepping stones to break through innovation.

I’ve got a little question. So in this process, how much time percentage-wise would you say would be worth somebody spending on step one, and then how much time would you suggest they spend on step two? And I know we’ve not got step three yet, but is there like, would you spend more time in the first step or not? Like what’s your thinking on focus, I guess?

Yeah, you know, that is a really great question. It’s a continual process. So I haven’t broken it down in terms of percentage of time, but I do see it as a, it’s a continual process. So you’re going to be playing hard, making crap, you know, those sort of go together. And then step three, which we haven’t gotten to is learn fast, which is going to take you back into that playful place, so that you can make more crap so that you can learn from it. So it’s just this constant cycle that you’re going through.

All right, let’s get to step three, and then we can perhaps open Pandora’s Box up again. By the way, my role in all of this, as usual, is just cause absolute chaos with questions I’ve not prepped. We’ve not prepped Melissa for, so apologies. Carry on, keep going.

No, that’s great. I love that. I’m an improviser, so bring it on. Okay, so step three is learn fast. This is about turning every experience, especially the failures, into valuable data. Instead of getting stuck in perfectionism or analysis paralysis, innovative teams create rapid feedback loops that accelerate learning. Again, it’s going to go back to that play hard space. So you don’t just get stuck in learn fast, you’re going back to playing hard, going back to making more crap, and learning fast from what you’ve made, and playing hard again. And it’s just this continual cycle that’s going to generate your breakthroughs and innovations.

Okay. So that’s kind of like the theory behind each of the steps. I’d love to hear an example of how that actually came to fruition. Perhaps with someone you’ve worked with or a team, for example.

Yeah. So one of my favorite examples is a research team at at Metta. So they were totally brilliant. These are genius level IQs with advanced degrees, but they were struggling to get their insights heard and implemented across the organization. So they’re not being very effective because they’ve got these amazing insights, but nothing’s happening. So the manager came to me and asked if I could help. The problem wasn’t that their research wasn’t valuable. It absolutely was. The issue was one of what I refer to as the three Cs. The three Cs that I typically help organizations with are connection, communication, and creativity. And their big issue was communication. It tends to be a big issue for a lot of organizations. They were so focused on getting every detail perfect, that they were either communicating too late, after decisions had already been made, or they were just overwhelming their stakeholders with a fire hose of information. There were other issues that were happening as well, but those were a couple of issues that are specifically relevant to the Create the Impossible framework. We applied the Create the Impossible framework starting with Playhard, and I introduced exercises that helped them approach communication as a creative challenge rather than a technical one. This shift in mindset was really crucial. And then we moved to make crap. So instead of waiting until they had perfect analyses, which is a tendency for these folks, they are, you know, they came from academia and they had this very particular way of operating, which tend to sort of mire them in perfectionist paralysis and, you know, getting stuck in that analysis place. Instead of getting stuck there, they started sharing rough draft insights earlier in the process. And this was really uncomfortable for them at first because, of course, they’re perfectionists, but they pushed through. And then the Learn Fast piece came in as they gathered feedback on their early insights and they started seeing patterns in what resonated with stakeholders versus what fell flat. And the transformation that happened was really remarkable, not only did their research begin having more impact across the organization, but managers started recommending my program to their friends in other departments. And I even had one participant tell me that they were able to salvage a meeting that was going sideways by applying a technique that they’d learned in one of our sessions. And that is one of my favorite examples. And what I really love about this case study is that it shows how this framework applies even to highly analytical work. It’s not just for the creative departments. It’s essential for anyone looking to innovate and make an impact.

Which should be everyone, right? Like ultimately, otherwise, you’re going to stay stale and you’re not going to progress and you’re not going to see opportunities or be able to seize them. So yeah, brilliant.

Let me go a little bit deeper on that. So how is this actually working? If you go into an organization and you’re saying they’re working together or playing hard together, what’s that actually look like and how are they coming together, getting feedback and so forth? Or is it like a workshop? Are they all in the room together and they converge and then go out on their own and then come back?

Yeah. Well, typically, the way that I work with organizations is I go in and I lead them through a series of workshops or if it’s a long-term engagement, it might be a series of workshops, leadership retreats, keynotes, that kind of thing. So then I’m helping them develop skills, build, essentially build muscles that then they, and I like to work with them long-term because it’s akin to going to the gym to develop physical muscles. You can’t just expect to go once and emerge with a whole bunch of muscles, right? You got to go consistently for a while to really develop those muscles over time. So I go in, I lead them through a series of activities. I can give you some examples of how I might work, like specifically what kinds of activities I might do.

Let’s do that. I think folks are super curious. I mean, if you’re willing to share like just one or two.

Yeah, absolutely. So here’s an example of communication activity that I often use with groups. Like for example, this research team or several research teams that I’ve worked with at Metta to help them communicate for greater impact and influence. One activity that I love to use, I call it Time Traveler. This one is incredibly effective for helping them understand, apply empathy and helping them understand how to communicate with somebody who comes from a different background, has different context than they do. So I pair people up and I’ve done this in virtual sessions and I’ve done this in in-person sessions. Same activity. So in their pairs, one person is from the present time and everything is normal for them. The other partner is a time traveler from 500 years ago. So first, we do as a group, before I send them off into their pairs, we do a little bit of brainstorming about how is life different for that time traveler from 500 years ago. It’s 1525. So what is life like for somebody walking around on the planet in 1525? And people popcorn, oh, there’s no electricity. There’s maybe no running water. How did they make their livings? Oh, they farmed. They didn’t have modern medicine. They just talk about various different things, right? How life actually was different for somebody in 1525 and maybe they’re in different parts of the planet. So then, before I send them off into their pairs, they get a task, and their task is, the person from the present time, their cell phone just rang, and they have to explain what this device is to their time-traveling partner. But remember, their time-traveling partner, there’s a high likelihood that they’re going to think that they’re a witch, because this is clearly witchcraft to somebody from 1525. So they’re going to have to not only explain what their cell phone is, but also convince their partner that they are not a witch. And they have two minutes to do this. Now, this is an impossible exercise, but that’s the task. So I send them off in their partners. They have two minutes. There’s a lot of laughter. It’s impossible. I bring them back after two minutes, and I ask them, OK, how many witches are in the room? Half the hands go up, because nobody succeeds at this exercise. However, some people maybe did something that was sort of effective. So I say, OK, time travelers, what did your partner do that was effective? And we pull the room and we discover what was effective. And invariably, the people who did something that was effective, they found some kind of common ground with their partner. And they used some kind of an analogy that their partner could understand that made sense to their partner according to their context from 1525, right? So then with that, you know, understanding, we then switch roles and I give them a different task that’s, you know, similar, but not exactly the same. So, they go off again and they have a little bit better success this time because now they really understand, oh my god, I have to find common ground with my time traveling partner and I have to use some kind of an analogy that they’re going to understand. What I have experienced when I run this exercise is that people then go off into their real lives and they meet other people, they have interactions with other people. For example, Laura, from one of my meta workshops, went off and had a meeting with a cross-functional teammate and was trying to explain something to him, and he didn’t understand what she was talking about, and she was getting frustrated and getting really annoyed, and then suddenly she realized he’s not being a jerk, he’s not stupid, he just has a different context, he doesn’t have my expertise in my area. I have to think from his perspective and his context and explain it using an analogy that he can understand just like the time traveler exercise, and that’s exactly what she did. He understood he was able to bring an insight that she hadn’t even thought about, and it was this amazing experience, and she brought that back the next week to share with the rest of the team, and I get that kind of feedback all the time from that exercise. Now, that is an example of the kind of thing that I do with teams. The exercises that I do are all different, but that’s an example where I send them off, or maybe it’s a group activity where we’re all doing something together that feels like play. Sometimes it might feel like it has nothing to do with the topic, whether it’s communication or leadership or whatever it is. It might feel like we’re just playing this silly game, it’s getting people laughing and connecting, and then I bring them back together for a debrief discussion that connects the dots between their daily work or whatever the topic is, and the light bulbs over their head start going off. They have these amazing insights, these aha moments, and the learning is so powerful because of they create the learning themselves. Rather than me sitting up at the front of the room and lecturing at them, which would make the learning go in one ear and out the other.

That’s a powerful exercise. And as you’re saying that, it reminded me of how I asked chatty between AI certain questions, like explain it like I’m five. So for example, I asked like quantum computing, like explain it like I’m five, because I still don’t really get quantum computing. And they literally explained it with an analogy. They were like, imagine light switches as on and off, right? With quantum computing, it’s neither on and off, it’s both at the same time. And I was like, that’s when the light bulb literally went off. I was like, okay, I kind of get that idea based on that analogy for like a five-year-old. But I think just it comes back to that middle ground, right? That common ground. You have to get on that level, bring it back to the level, understand their knowledge, and then reframe it.

Exactly. I had a medical appointment the other, just last week, and I was so impressed with Physician’s Assistant that I was dealing with because he did exactly that. I told him, I gave him an appreciation for it. He used an analogy and I said, this is what I teach when I work with these corporate teams. You did such a brilliant job of it because so often a medical person or a technical person will spout their jargon at you, and you just glaze over and you either feel bored or powerless, or you don’t understand it and it’s not helpful.

All right. I have a lot of follow-up questions, but I want to switch it around here and play devil’s advocate because there may be some leaders in here listening, well, play sounds well and good, but it sounds nice in theory. How would you, what would your argument be against that for a business environment?

Well, first of all, I would say I absolutely understand that concern completely. In fact, I hear it all the time, especially in tech, where deadlines are really tight and competition is fair. So I would validate their concern right off the bat. But here’s the thing, play is not a distraction from productivity, it is a catalyst for it. When we’re under pressure, our tendency is to double down, work harder, get more serious. But that approach actually activates our stress response, which literally shuts down part of our brain that is responsible for creative thinking and innovation. And play does the opposite. It activates the brain’s networks that are associated with creativity, while at the same time calming down our stress response. It’s actually the most practical approach to innovation in a fast-paced environment. And I’ve seen this first hand with tech teams on impossible deadlines. Just 10 to 15 minutes of intentional play can completely reset their thinking and lead to breakthroughs that might have taken, I don’t know, days of grinding to achieve, if they even achieved them at all. So I would tell that skeptical leader, don’t think of play as a, you know, nice to have luxury. Think of it as a strategic tool for getting better results faster, because that’s exactly what it is. And also, the way that I use play with teams, it’s not just as a something that you do outside of work. Like I bring play in as the work. This is how we get the work done, not we’re going to play and then do the work. We’re going to use play as our method of doing the work.

There’s a bit of a mindset thing. It’s not work or play. It’s kind of together, right?

Yeah.

Okay, so how would you say is a simple way to bring this into like a team environment, if you’re talking to a leader, for example?

First of all, the key is to start small and focus on activities that feel relevant to your team’s work, right? So here’s some really easy ways that you can begin. You can start your meetings with a quick and playful check-in. So instead of, you know, I don’t know, typical check-in might be like, how is everyone today? So instead of doing that, you could try something unexpected. For example, if your mood was a weather pattern, what would it be right now? Just a, that’s like a tiny little switch. It doesn’t take any more time than your usual check-in, but it’s a playful way of doing a check-in. And it immediately shifts the energy because it gets people thinking in a more playful manner. Second, I’m an improviser. I haven’t been improvising my whole life like some people have. I just started improvising in 2013, but it is a huge part of who I am and how I operate and what I bring to the work that I do. And if you’ve ever heard of improv, then you probably have heard of the phrase yes and. And yes and does not mean agreement. It means accepting offers and building on them. So validating other people’s ideas and building on those ideas. So the second thing I would say is to use the yes and technique from improv. So when somebody shares an idea, practice building on it, validating that idea and building on it, it doesn’t mean if they bring you some crazy off the wall idea that you know is never gonna work. It doesn’t mean that you’re actually gonna implement it. It just means that you validate that idea, which means you’re validating them for bringing an idea to you and build on it rather than immediately evaluating it, dismissing it or blocking it. And this is gonna create a more playful, generative conversation and it is also going to ensure that that person is gonna be more willing to come to you with ideas in the future.

I 100% agree with that. I’ve run creative teams before and I used to always think that the number one killer of creativity was fear. Right? If you’ve got a team of people and, you know, then someone has a wacky idea and they announce it to the room and they get shot down and made to look stupid, next time they have a wacky idea, which actually could be an amazing, brilliant off the wall idea that no one’s ever thought of, they’re gonna think twice about voicing it because they’re worried that they’re gonna look stupid. So like, I absolutely agree with that. I think that teams need to think about this very seriously. If you’re gonna say that should be anyone in any team in any business, no matter how small, if you want to become more efficient, if you want to create more value, you need to be thinking like this. And it’s rare, isn’t it? It’s funny as human beings, we kind of get into this kind of, I don’t know, we get institutionalized, don’t we? And then we start worrying about our next promotion. We’re worried that we worry about all these sorts of things. And that’s like not what we need in business. We need people who are fearless, who feel like, who within, obviously within reason, who can therefore come up with ideas and see the opportunities, or at least open themselves up to exploring them with others. And I think that’s what you’re talking about here, right? Like it’s that exploration, let’s go play, let’s find out new ideas. Has anyone else got any thoughts to add to this? How could we do this? And I think that’s beautiful. Yeah.

Yeah, there’s a reason why whenever I do any kind of workshops or programs around, whether it’s communication or creativity, it doesn’t matter. I am always starting with exercises around this concept of yes and. And it’s especially hard when it’s a team that is tasked with being the gatekeepers, the gatekeepers, because they feel like they can’t say yes. They feel like if they say, yes, and we could do this with it, they feel like that is going to mean we’re going to implement your idea. But that’s not what it has to mean. The intention behind yes and thinking is to validate other people’s ideas and to create this energy and environment of allowing just exactly what you were saying, making it psychologically safe for people to keep bringing ideas forward. Obviously, we’re not going to be able to implement every idea that comes forward. And there are places to say no. I’m not saying that you can’t ever say no to things. But if you want an innovative culture, a culture of innovation and creativity, you have to have a yes-and mindset. So especially if your goal is to be a brainstorming session, then you can’t bring ideas to me, here’s the idea space or whatever. You have to say, yes, Aaron, we could do this, yes, and we could do that. You have to approach it that way.

I just wonder if you have come across Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats technique, because it just reminds me of something in there, which is the yellow hat, which is where Teams, for those that haven’t heard of it, basically Edward de Bono wrote this book, I think he was a psychologist, I believe, a Portuguese psychologist. He wrote this book, Six Thinking Hats. I use it sometimes in my work with Teams when we’re assessing ideas or trying to come up with ideas. And basically, there’s these six thinking hats, these six modes of thinking. And what you do is you basically put that hat on, and everybody is supposed to, in the group, think in that mode of thought. So for example, there’s a black hat, which is where we think about all the negative things that we could ever think of to do with this scenario, this idea. And some people are great at that, like my dad, brilliant black hat thinker, like everything is chaos, it’s all going to fall apart, it’s going to be doom and gloom. On the other hand, there’s also the yellow hat. So when you move on to that hat, people more naturally who are thinking about benefits of this idea, and this is basically what you’re talking about, this is their time to shine. What could go right with this concept? And there’s other hats as well, so if you’re interested in that, have a look for that. But it just reminds me a little bit of that kind of mindset around setting that scene that, hey, look, this is okay to explore, this is all right, and that’s needed. And it’s funny because unless you say that, unless you create that space in a workshop or within your team environment, people shut down for sake of fear. And I always think it’s easier to be that cautious black hat thinker, that cautious person, particularly in risk-averse organizations, it’s easy to go, well, we’ve got to be careful because of X, Y, and Z, or the risk here is very high, the risk profile is high, or whatever. It’s easy to do that and shut an idea down so fast. But we need to think outside the box a little bit in my view sometimes, and get past that and say, well, okay, well, what if? As you were saying, yes, and. Brilliant. Anyway, I’ve sabotaged again. But yeah, so you’ve heard of Edward Bolognese. What’s your thoughts on Edward de Bono’s parallel thinking, six-thinking hat techniques?

I love it. I haven’t used it in my work with Teams. However, I’ve done two different LinkedIn learning courses that you can find on LinkedIn learning, one on communication and one on creativity. Oh my God, now I can’t remember which one it was. But one of them, I actually have a lesson on Edward de Bono’s. I mentioned Edward de Bono’s six-thinking hats in one of them, and then there’s a little extra bonus lesson where I actually have a little conversation with myself and the six-thinking hats wearing the hats. So I’m like, black hat, what do you think about this? Then I have the black hat on and I speak as the black hat. Then I say, oh, that’s interesting, and how about you, white hat? Then I have the white hat on and I speak as the white hat, etc. Going through all the hats. I wish I had the green hat with me because the green hat is actually an alien and it has little alien antenna on it. It’s very funny. The green hat is creativity.

Creativity, yes. Maybe that was more appropriate an example than the yellow hat that I was talking about earlier, which is more.

That one works too.

Yeah, green and yellow, they’re pretty good. I love that. That’s so funny. Jacob is often talking to himself and I’m wondering whether he’s going on.

I think it’s brilliant and we need that black hat perspective and my husband is a black hat thinker because he’s always concerned about what might go wrong and I get so annoyed with him sometimes because I’m much more of a positivity person of let’s look at the positive. But we balance each other out really well and his perspective on being a black hat thinker is we need to be aware of when we think about what might go wrong, it helps us to avoid what might go wrong, which is so important. But if all we look at is the risks and what might go wrong, then we’re never opening ourselves up to the vast array of amazing possibilities of what we might create. Our job in brainstorming sessions and just in general, looking for how we might create breakthrough innovations is, yes, we have to have that black hat awareness, but we have to constantly be looking for what are the possibilities out there. And that’s one of the things that I love helping people tap into their own innate creativity so that they can be able to be open in themselves to what they can create. Which brings me to, just before we move on to whatever your next question is going to be, another way that teams can start bringing more play into their workflow is something like implementing Wild Idea Wednesday, for example, or whatever day works for you. So just set aside like 10 minutes where team members share their most outlandish solutions to a current challenge. And the rule for a Wild Idea Wednesday or whatever day it might be is that no idea is too crazy. And a sub rule that I highly recommend is if you are the person whose this is your initiative, is you put out the first idea and make sure that that idea is just completely outlandish because the first idea that is put out there is going to set the bar for how wild and crazy ideas can be. People are going to be really afraid to put out crazy, wild, nutso ideas. So if you put out something that is just outside of the realm of what anybody else would be able to think of, it will help other people start coming out with crazy ideas too. So that’s another idea. I have more that I’m happy to share, or we can go on to another question.

I’m sure you have many. I was gonna move into creativity and creative blocks, right? So you’re people in a room and there’s no ideas coming out. How do you get over that barrier?

I have struggled with creative blocks a lot in my own life. That’s the reason that I wrote my book, actually, The Creative Sandbox Way. It’s sprang out of my own struggle with creative blocks. Many years ago, when I was a professional artist, I spent about 10 years not making any art for my own enjoyment. And although I was kind of living the dream of many artists, I was making my living from my art, but I was really pretty miserable because the only art that I made was for clients. And I discovered that that actually is not very fun. And it took me a long time to get back to making art for myself because I was mired in this story that everything I made had to bring in money. And also, by the way, it had to be amazing, right? Which is very paralyzing. So I finally realized like something had to change. And I realized that the way to get back to creating for myself was through play. But because I’d spent 10 years making art for, only art for clients, I’d forgotten how to play. And so I, I’m a rule follower. And so I created this little handful of little rules for myself to get me into that playful space that I needed to be in, in order to create for fun again. And at the time, the rules were things like, there is no wrong, which actually is still the first one of my guide posts in my book. And one of them was something like, if you have a piece that’s not done yet, and you know it needs something, but you’re afraid to add to it, because you’re afraid you’re going to ruin it, go ahead and ruin it. And things like, there were things like that. There were maybe four little handful of rules. And over the next couple of years, I expanded them into 10, and they now form the backbone of my book, The Creative Sandbox Way. So those 10, I now call them guideposts, because most creatives don’t like rules. And of those, I actually was just having a conversation with a friend of mine who wants to write a book. He’s a fellow speaker. And he’s got this very clear idea, and he’s super, like he’s really going for it, but he can’t get himself to write. And he came to me asking for advice, because he knows this is one of the things I do, is help people get past creative blocks. The number one thing that I tell people, and we talked about this already, is lower your standards. Let yourself make crap. So it really comes down to, comes right back to my framework. Get into that play space of being a four year old, play hard, and let yourself make crap. And I think about, if you imagine a pole vaulting bar, and if you want to make something, if you want to create something, and you’ve got this vision for how amazing it’s gonna be, you know, we all encounter starting friction when we’re wanting to start something new, especially when we want it to be amazing, right? And wanting to start something and have it be amazing, that is like trying to leap over a pole vaulting bar without a running start and without a pole. It’s impossible. But when we let ourselves make crap, that is like taking that bar and lowering it all the way down to the ground. You can just flip right over it. So, and the other thing that I also encourage people to do is people tend often to create these huge, I don’t know, goals for themselves in terms of the time commitment that they set for themselves. You know, it’s like a New Year’s resolution. I’m going to spend three hours a day working on my book or whatever the project is that they have for themselves. Make your commitment ridiculously achievable, ridiculously achievable. Now, that might be a time commitment, like I’m serious, like 15 minutes a day, or if that is too much, make it five minutes a day. Make it two minutes a day. Make it so tiny that you can’t not do it. Or it might be a size goal, like I’m gonna write 10 words or half a page or three words. I mean, I’m serious, ridiculously achievable. And the thing about a ridiculously achievable goal, I had a 15 minutes a day art making goal back in, I think it was 2010 or 2011. They’re so beautiful, because you can always go with more than that. And once you get going, the momentum will keep you going. And then you might find yourself actually spending, instead of 15 minutes, maybe you actually spend a half an hour or an hour. That’s great. It’s a bonus. You don’t put that expectation on yourself. All you require of yourself is the 15 minutes or the five minutes or whatever, whatever the ridiculously achievable amount is. So let yourself make crap, let it suck. It’s really hard. And then make that commitment ridiculously achievable. And then whatever it is you’re doing, whether it’s making art or writing something or creating a workshop or whatever it is that you are creating, think about the equivalent. I’m going to put it in artistic terms, but I imagine that I am taking my inner four-year-old and I am letting her inhabit the tip of my pen or my brush or whatever tool I’m using, and then I give her free rein. And I let her go. Now, I’ve got gremlins inside my head that are going to say, this is crap, this is crap, what are you doing? This is stupid. This is horrible. You need to stop. They’re going to be saying all these horrible things, right? My job is to be the bodyguard. So gremlins are not allowed in this creative sandbox that I’ve set up, but they don’t obey the rules. So they’re going to show up. And my job is to protect that inner four-year-old as she’s working. And I’m going to acknowledge those gremlins as they appear. I’ve got some gremlins here. Here’s a gremlin, here it is. Maw, maw, maw, maw, maw, maw, maw. Yeah, that sucks, that sucks. Yeah, maw, maw. Thank you so much for your concern. I see you’re trying to keep me safe, but you’re not being helpful. I’m gonna send you off to get a pedicure. That’s what I do with my gremlins. I’m gonna send it off to get a pedicure. You are not allowed in the Creative Sandbox. I send the gremlin away. Now gremlin, and then I can, my inner forald can keep going. But my job is to not notice that it is a gremlin. It is not the voice of truth. It is not the voice of wisdom. It is not the voice of reason. It is a gremlin. And my job is to just keep noticing when it appears, acknowledge that it is trying to keep me safe, but it is not helpful. And I’m just going to keep sending it off to get a pedicure so that my inner four-year-old can keep it working.

I’m going to have incredibly pedicured nails. Mine will have less pedicured nails than yours, I imagine. But that’s a great story. Hey, I was going to ask you a quick question. What do you think about the idea that ideas need some time? So in other words, like this concept of incubation. So yes, play, yes, explore, yes, try things. And if it’s still not working, like, don’t get too stressed, give it some time. Do you sort of subscribe to that idea that unconsciously the brain will start to work through some of these things and then it will come together in like a eureka moment towards the end?

Yes, and, so yes, I absolutely subscribe to that. And also, I find for myself that I have to be mindful that I don’t use my awareness that that is true to avoid pursuing whatever it is that I’m trying to do because I can use that as an excuse and just set this project that I’m trying to work on aside because, oh, it’s incubating. Incubation is real and I want to make sure that I’m not using the truth of incubation as an excuse to avoid.

That’s interesting because, like, I’ve run creative teams before where we’ve got a deadline, right, and we’re all scrambling around trying to find our idea. And, you know, we explore it. We may be play like you’ve suggested. And everyone’s getting, like, really disheartened because nothing is, we know it’s not quite, the gremlins are not going for their pedicures, right? And at that moment, if I’m a leader in that situation, this is a technique that I’ve used before, which is to say, right, everyone, like, I don’t want you staying late all night tonight, right? Because that’s gonna, we’re all gonna be shattered tomorrow. I just want everyone to go home, have a glass of wine this evening, just have a relaxing evening. And I’m telling you, when we come in tomorrow, something would have clicked with one of us, all right? Don’t stress. And as you say, it’s like that concept of expectation. If you can unload that somehow from the brain, it’s amazing how then, you know, that stress kind of goes. And as you rightly say, like, you can come up with amazing ideas, but you have to have done that groundwork first. You had to have sort of explored and pushed and prodded and thrown ideas around and smashed stuff together. And then that happens. But you can’t get to the end without that. And then sometimes a period of incubation, I find, is helpful. But that’s just me.

No, I absolutely agree with you. And that is often how it works for me when I’m writing, particularly. That is where a lot of my creativity is being channeled at the moment. And I’m using a lot of conversations with my AI tools to help me sort out, like, I’ll write something and I’ll be like, I don’t know where this is going. And then I’ll get help from my AI tool to help me figure out where it’s going. And then I still need, like, incubation is incredibly, incredibly important. Also, back when I was doing a lot more visual art, I would spend a lot of time just looking at a piece. And I’d have to look at it for a long time to figure out what the next step was going to be. And also just going to bed and waking up in the morning. And I totally agree with you. Setting that intention that I’m going to take a break, have dinner, go on a walk, go to bed, whatever it is. And when I get back, I will have the answer. Just having that kind of intention, I think is really helpful as well. The concern that I bring up or just the mindfulness that I bring up is what I see a lot that can happen is if people say, well, I’m going to incubate this. And then they set it on a shelf. And it sits on a shelf for weeks or months or whatever. And it never gets done. But especially when we have a deadline, I think it is so tempting to just grind and grind and grind and grind. And that often is counterproductive to what would be more productive is actually to take some incubation time, even though there’s the sense of urgency that, oh, we can’t stop. We can’t stop. So, yeah, and I think developing a sense of self-awareness around it is really important. It’s one of the reasons why my golden formula is self-awareness plus self-compassion equals the key to everything good.

Nice.

It’s a good one to end on, Melissa. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Do you have any final words for our listeners?

Oh, man. Well, I have a thank you gift for your listeners.

We like it.

That’s very kind. I don’t know if this shows up in full screen. I can move the QR code.

I’ll show it up for us. That’s cool.

Okay, cool. I have a QR code for everybody, and I have a link that I will give you as well. It’s bit.ly slash jbp for JUST Branding Podcast. Thank you, jbp. Thank you, all lowercase. And that is, we’ll send you to a page where you can download the first 50 pages of my book, no charge or anything.

Thank you so much for that.

Yeah, absolutely. Bit.ly slash jbp. Thank you.

Okay, great. Nailed it. Well, thank you so much for that generous gift and sharing your wisdom. The Creative Sandbox Way is your book. You can find it on most publishers or retail stores, I imagine. And where can people connect with you, like a website or LinkedIn or social?

Yeah, people can connect with me on my website at melissadinwiddie.com. I’m sure you’ll have a link there on the show notes and we can spell it right. And I’m also on LinkedIn at Melissa Dinwiddie. And you can find my LinkedIn learning courses there, especially my new one called How to Overcome and Avoid Creative Blocks, which just launched recently. And if you’d like to dive deeper into the Create the Impossible Framework and how it can transform your organization’s approach to innovation, then I do offer complimentary innovation strategy sessions that you can book through my website. And then of course, my book, you can find that on Amazon. And this has been so fun. I just also wanted to share with listeners that the most important message, every single person listening here, watching wherever you might see this, every single person has the capacity for extraordinary creativity and innovation. It is not a special talent that some people have and others don’t. It is a fundamental human capacity that can be developed and strengthened. And the challenge is that many of us have installed what I call these glass ceilings on our minds, limiting beliefs about our own creative potential. And they’re not our fault. They come from educational systems that prioritize standardized answers over exploration, over cultural messages about who gets to be creative, and from work environments that often punish rather than reward creative risk-taking. But the great news is that these glass ceilings can be shattered, and I’ve seen it happen thousands of times. So you can do it too.

100%. Thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. It’s been fun. So folks, get innovating. Thanks for listening.

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