Fresh Take on Leading for Creativity in Business (Pt 1 of 5)

Part One (Quantum Culture) of a five-part series bridging arts, science, and business to reclaim a sense of wonder in American innovation.

Breathitt County author Jerry “Bucky” Deaton describes it as an easy place to love but a hard place to live. That resonates deeply with me.

Tucked in the rural Appalachian foothills of southeastern Kentucky, my family has called this place home for many generations. It’s the same place JD Vance says he calls home.

For those interested in exploring narratives beyond Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy," there are numerous sources that capture the richness and complexity of Breathitt County. One is "Our Breathitt," a project I co-led a few years ago, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.?

While Vance’s politics and mine differ, we share common interests. We are both, in our own way, deeply involved in entrepreneurship and innovation. And we both find grounding in Breathitt County. Because of this, we can likely agree on four drivers of the human side of innovation that we first learned in those southeast Kentucky hills.

1. Driver #1 - Power of Creativity?
2. Driver #2 - Power of Stories
3. Driver #3 - Power of Love
4. Driver #4 - Power of Culture

Driver #1: The Human Side of Creativity Shapes Innovation Outcomes

Make no mistake—the creativity and entrepreneurship in Appalachia are on par with anything I have seen anywhere—it just looks different. A different set of boundary conditions shapes it than is the norm in places like Silicon Valley. Perhaps this insight is one reason Vance’s Narya Capital invests in start-ups outside traditional tech hubs.

Boundary conditions are the context in which people work, learn, live, play, and pray. Take, for example, the boundary condition of time and well-being. We all have 24 hours in a day. In economically poor communities, making healthy choices may be a luxury if a person is working two jobs, can’t find a job, is taking care of a sick parent, or is trying to find ways to help a loved one in the grip of addiction. Time poverty is real.

We all have a limited number of years in a lifetime. In Breathitt County, it is a statistical fact that the average life expectancy is about nine years less than the average American. There are roughly 13,000 people who live in Breathitt County. Just doing some basic math, this means that Breathitt County families have 42,705,000 fewer days than the average American community of a similar size. Forty-two million seven hundred five thousand fewer days to live, work, worship, learn, and play. Forty-two million seven hundred five thousand fewer days to love and laugh. 42,705,000 fewer days.

But when I think about my home, I don’t think about statistics. I think about the stories.

Driver #2: Stories Shape the Human Side of Creativity

Stories shape the human side of creativity—they are the experiential data revealing what people see as possible and valuable.

Due to Vance’s candidacy, the national media is now focusing more attention on Breathitt County. I wonder what the impact of others telling the story of this place will be. Research shows that in the same way lead puts toxins into the environment, the constant drumbeat of negative messaging releases social toxins that impact our emotional and physical well-being.

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working with diverse groups and businesses across America. Though each is special and unique, one thing is consistent: the story each believes about its culture either ignites well-being, opportunity, and imagination among its members or hijacks it.

So, each time I begin working with a group, I focus on a series of questions I first heard from Eric Lui:

• Who tells your story?
• What story do they tell?
• Who benefits from your story being told a certain way?
• What possibilities exist for a new story to emerge?

These are powerful questions for thinking about how culture and policy can become self-fulfilling negative outcomes or become assets and tools for unlocking the human creative potential of innovation teams of all kinds and in all places.

In his book Narrative Economics, Nobel economist Robert Shiller documents how powerful stories are in shaping the future. “Popular stories,” he says, “affect individual and collective economic behavior.”

Popular, not necessarily true, is the key here. As Schiller points out, if the stories we are habituated to tell go on long enough, a form of cultural contagion begins to obscure what is believed to be possible and valuable. When this happens, the “outputs” (e.g., poverty) from misaligned systems get twisted in our social imagination. Many, like Vance, begin to think of them as “inputs” —the personal failures of people. When these stories are repeated long enough, they become ingrained in our collective mindset.

This phenomenon becomes even more significant when we consider the roles of love and fear in our lives. These powerful emotions can either inhibit or unlock our creative potential.

Driver #3: Love and Fear Play Major Roles in Transforming Human Creative Potential into Value

Growing up neurodiverse and gay in Appalachia taught me how to navigate the day-to-day by cultivating a combination of skills in analytical and creative thinking, self-awareness, resilience, curiosity, emotional intelligence, and storytelling. Using these skills to recognize patterns and develop strategic foresight was vital. Through it all, and a point of connection I share with Vance, there were strong mountain women in my life. They were my teachers and guides.

By the time I reached my first jobs in corporate healthcare in the 1990s, the labyrinth of psychological spaces I encountered in business was familiar territory. I professionally thrived as a strategist in uncertain market conditions like those shaping healthcare during that period. I had a knack for seeing things others would miss. I could see the connection between things and bring them together in ways where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. I would use this same skills advantage in the following years to succeed professionally as an artist, social entrepreneur, analytics inventor, and academic researcher.?

Reflecting back, these skills in strategic foresight were most useful when I focused them through the language of love, a language first learned in Breathitt County. The language of love helped me to stay clear on what I was running toward, even if others couldn’t yet see it. Importantly, too, there is a special brand of wit, tenacity, and fierce ability for critique that comes along with love learned from mountain women. The love learned from the mountain women in my life growing up was not idle; it was an action— an act of courageous imagination and hope.

I’ve carried this with me throughout my career. While other executives, arts and academic leaders, and entrepreneurs around me seemed often driven more by what they were running from, I could stay clear on what I was running toward.

Our innovation language today feels more like a response to fear than an act of courageous imagination driven by love. With each passing year, our innovation language seems smaller and smaller. Like the words used to describe the memory of a friend from long ago, an outline is there, but as time passes, it gets harder to remember what filled it out.

Today, at times, the incremental nature of our business innovation ambition seems to stumble around, looking for a point of meaningful connection. In the intuition of our boundless human creative potential, we know something waits for our calling. But somehow, it always seems just beyond our reach.?In business innovation teams, it’s this intuitive“human side knowing” that can often cause pain and?grief. We know something important is possible. But just like the secret language that liberates the genie from the bottle, a new source code has yet to be revealed.

Creativity is this source code. Love is the cipher that liberates the story from the stone, but it’s not the only one. Fear, too, is a cipher. Creativity is neither benevolent nor malevolent. Its ultimate form depends on the goals of those using it. On this last point, neuroscience and Kentuckians, from musician Tyler Childers to scholar and poet bell hooks, point to a common idea: love is navigational to the creative process and outcomes.

Driver #4: Quantum Cultures & Rethinking Organizational Potential

When Vance writes and speaks about Appalachia, he paints a bleak picture of a culture trapped by its own shortcomings. Many business leaders unconsciously adopt a similar view about their own organizations, seeing culture as a fixed, often problematic entity that limits growth and innovation. But what if we're looking at culture all wrong?

I've witnessed a far more complex reality in Breathitt County, where I grew up. Our culture isn't a cage; it's pure potential in need of investment. It's resilient, creative, and constantly evolving.

Much like the quantum science that defies our classical understanding of physics, a quantum perspective on culture offers a powerful lens for business leaders. In quantum physics, particles can exist in multiple states of possibilities until observed. Similarly, an organization's innovation, growth, and transformation potential exists in this same kind of superposition state. The culture you nurture, the stories you tell, and the potential you choose to see all play a role in determining which possibilities become reality.

This isn't just philosophical musing. It's a call to action for leaders to move beyond simplistic cultural assessments and quick-fix solutions and develop a nuanced understanding of the systemic factors and latent potential within their teams.

In Breathitt County, I've seen how our shared stories—whether driven by love or fear—can have immediate and profound impacts on our community's creativity and resilience. The same holds in a company. Culture is responsive and dynamic. The narratives you promote, either actively or passively, will shape your company's future.?

Embracing a quantum view of culture means becoming comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. It means seeing ambiguity and creative tension not as threats but as sources of opportunity. You actively shape this view through intention and attention.

The future belongs to leaders who can see their organization's culture not as a limiting factor but as a dynamic force for growth and innovation. The potential is there, waiting to be realized. The challenge is how to bring it into being.

What’s Ahead in this Series: Leading Creativity in Business

The future I see cultivates wonder, connection, and courageous imagination. It moves innovation beyond the mundane toward the liberating and exponential. Vance, it seems, has a different approach.

However, this series is not about Appalachia or politics. It is a fresh take on leading creativity in business. Across the series, I leverage the creative brain skills I learned in Breathitt County—analytical and creative thinking, self-awareness, resilience, curiosity, emotional intelligence, and storytelling—to explore new possibilities in American innovation beyond current conventional wisdom.

Over the next four days, I’ll publish a new article each day exploring unexpected insights into the new leadership of creativity in business. Together, we’ll explore the intersection of the arts, brain science, and business culture that give life to the Wonder Economy—the human side of technology and the future of work.

Join me in this quest to find unexpected answers for rekindling the lifeblood of American innovation: creativity.?

ACCESS THE FULL FIVE-PART SERIES

PART ONE: QUANTUM CULTURE Beyond the political, JD Vance and I can likely agree on four things about Breathitt County.?

PART TWO: MAKING THE HUMAN SIDE A SHARED VALUE Leadership needs a glow-up to match the boldness of our visionaries, entrepreneurs, and innovators.

PART THREE: BUILDING STRATEGIC FORESIGHT Finding the intersection of technology with human creativity in our search for awakening and understanding in a world that often feels chaotic and bewildering.

PART FOUR: DEVELOPING CO-CREATIVE ECOSYSTEMS. Information goes in through the heart and other things Steve Jobs taught us about moving from the “me” to the “we” of innovation.

PART FIVE: FUTURE-PROOFING TALENT A hope-fueled drive to actively shape a more creative and kind future that pushes us to go beyond old notions of creative economy while reconnecting us to something greater than ourselves.

Theo Edmonds, Culture Futurist? & Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation?

?2024 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved. Please credit the author when using any of this content.?The views expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any organization with which the author is affiliated.

1 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1524839921996796

2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-024-00714-1

3 https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/01/15/psychological-stress-and-social-media-use-2/