Organizational development specialist Don Prentice makes clear the link between listening and creativity:

The only thing that I can come up with is that the real source of creativity is truth. The truth is endlessly creative. The problem with that is I don’t know what the truth is. Even less do I know what your truth is. What’s creative? It’s that truth. So how do I put this idea of creativity into practice? All I know is you listen to what’s going on at the moment, and you follow the truth of what’s going on in that moment - that’s how you do it. The essence of creativity is to listen.

Instead of prematurely asking what you should do, try something new. Ask no questions rather than an action question. Try meditating, exercising, sensing your arms and legs, or any of the approaches we have suggested for putting you in touch with your inner creative ability. Then try answering any or all of the following questions:

• What is it I don’t yet understand? This question or ones like it can penetrate the mind for clarity and understanding.

• What is it that I’m really feeling? When there is a problem there are usually emotions - fear, anger, hurt, or sorrow - and this question can help you become aware of seeing them specifically.

• What is it that I’m not seeing? Problems usually come from not seeing clearly. By asking about what you are not seeing specifically, almost as if it consists of material objects, you heighten your perceptual ability.

• What voice is speaking? Is it your Voice of Judgment, your objective intelligence, your voice of childhood emotions or fears, or the voice of your Essence speaking inside of you? You can bet that if you have a problem, the objective intelligence and the Essence are relatively silent. But personifying and identifying the inner voices contributing to a problem sometimes is enough in itself to achieve the clarity needed for action.

This kind of exploratory questioning for clarity doesn’t take long, especially when preceded or followed by meditation.

It is our job, then, to work each day to chart the right course and make corrections when, inevitably, we stray. I already can sense the next crisis coming around the corner. To keep a creative culture vibrant, we must not be afraid of constant uncertainty. We must accept it, just as we accept the weather. Uncertainty and change are life’s constants. And that’s the fun part.
The truth is, as challenges emerge, mistakes will always be made, and our work is never done. We will always have problems, many of which are hidden from our view; we must work to uncover them and assess our own role in them, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; when we then come across a problem, we must marshal all our energies to solve it. If those assertions sound familiar, that’s because I used them to kick off this book. There’s something else that bears repeating here: Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.

And because they’re ready, their confidence doesn’t crack. The venture capitalist Josh Wolfe likes to say, “Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.”

The bottom line: people who think about what is likely to go wrong and determine the actions they can take are more likely to succeed when things don’t go according to plan.

A smart way to assess your options is by using the following principle.

The Second-Level Thinking Principle: Ask yourself, “And then what?

Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”

If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision— what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it— you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:

Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.