Jamie Dobson, author of โVisionaries, Rebels and Machines: The story of humanityโs extraordinary journey from electrification to cloudificationโย looks at what we can learn from creative teams in today’s business environment…
So many organisations struggle to get the best from their technical teams, yet three fundamental principles have been present in the best creative and technical teams of the past 150 years.
Creative work requires systems thinking
Creative problems are never isolated; change one variable, and everything else shifts. Innovators need to see how their work fits into the larger whole.
Edison grasped this intuitively at his Menlo Park laboratory in the 1870s. When developing the light bulb, he wasn’t just perfecting a single component, he was designing an entire electrical distribution system. His teams needed to see how filaments, generators, wiring, and safety devices all worked together. This holistic understanding enabled them to solve problems that would have been impossible to address in isolation.
The principle remains relevant today. Technical systems work best when the people building them understand how their work fits into the larger whole. Teams need access to customer feedback, business metrics, and strategic context, not just technical specifications.
Environment shapes performance
The second principle recognises that physical and social environments profoundly influence how creative teams perform. Edison organised his “invention factory” around the needs of creative minds rather than the convenience of traditional management structures. His teams shared experiments, tools, and failures freely.
Oppenheimer did the same under extraordinary pressure. Despite wartime secrecy, he cultivated what psychologists later called psychological safety: a space where people could challenge ideas, debate openly, and learn together.
No one applied this principle more deliberately than Bob Taylor at Xerox PARC. Taylorโs beanbag meetings and open workspace design were not gimmicks but strategic tools to eliminate hierarchy and invite candour. The resultsโpersonal computing, ethernet networking, and the graphical user interfaceโreshaped modern life.
The pattern is unmistakable: when leaders design environments around trust, autonomy, and open exchange, creativity thrives. When they impose control and bureaucracy, creativity dies.
Failure must be normalised
The question is not whether creative teams will fail, but how they do so โ and whether they learn.
Edison framed failure as progress โ he hadnโt failed 1,000 times; heโd found 1,000 ways that didnโt work. That mindset defined his teamsโ resilience. Modern researchers echo this insight. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson distinguishes โintelligent failuresโ (which generate learning) from โbasic failures,โ which result from carelessness. Great teams maximise the former and minimise the latter.
Every innovative system breaks before it succeeds. The healthiest teams fail in controlled ways that yield insight rather than chaos.
Learn from creative teams and the psychology behind their management
What Edison, Oppenheimer, and Taylor knew intuitively has since been proven scientifically. Creative people are driven by learning, not performance.
Psychologists distinguish between performance-goal and learning-goal orientations. Performance-goal oriented individuals focus on demonstrating their competence and avoiding failure; they excel in structured, predictable settings. Learning-goal oriented individuals focus on developing their skills and understanding; they embrace uncertainty and see failure as feedback.
Leaders who understand this adapt their approach.
The power of psychological safety
Carl Rogers first identified psychological safety as essential for creativity in the 1960s, but Edmondsonโs research in the 1990s proved importance for team performance. Studying hospital teams, she expected to find that better teams made fewer mistakes, but the best teams reported more errorsโnot because they made more, but because they felt safe to discuss and fix them.
Google confirmed this decades later with Project Aristotle, which found that team composition mattered less than team climate. The best groups shared two traits: conversational turn-taking (everyone spoke roughly equally) and social sensitivity (team members were good at reading each other’s emotions) โ both hallmarks of psychological safety.
Taylorโs PARC beanbag meetings exemplified this approach. Everyone sat in identical seats, eliminating subtle hierarchies. When conflicts arose, he required each side to explain the otherโs view until both agreed it was understood. This turned disagreement into discovery.
Such practices allowed extraordinary collaboration among strong personalities โ a key reason PARC produced so many world-changing innovations.
A practical framework for leaders
Putting these ideas into practice begins with hiring for curiosity and collaboration, not just credentials. Learning-oriented people light up when asked about a time they failed and what they learned. Edison sought such mindsโtelegraph operators, machinists, and self-taught experimenters who shared relentless curiosity.
Next, replace bureaucracy with information. Give teams direct access to customer feedback, business metrics, and strategic goals so they can act with confidence. Autonomy works only when paired with clear context. Leaders become conductors rather than controllers, guiding rhythm and direction without playing every instrument.
Finally, institutionalise intelligent failure. Celebrate well-designed experiments, share lessons from mistakes, and design systems that make reversibility easy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamie Dobson is the founder of Container Solutions, and has been helping companies, across industries, move to cloud native ways of working for over ten years. Container Solutions develops a strategy, a clear plan and step by step implementation helping companies achieve a smooth digital transformation. With services including Internal Developer Platform Enablement, Cloud Modernisation, DevOps/DevSecOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Consultancy, Cloud Optimisation and creating a full Cloud Native Strategy, companies get much more than just engineering know-how.
Jamie is also author of โThe Cloud Native Attitudeโ and the recently published โVisionaries, Rebels and Machines: The story of humanityโs extraordinary journey from electrification to cloudificationโ. Both are available from Amazon and good bookstores.
