Here’s a little experiment you can run almost anywhere. The next time you’re in a room full of people, a staff meeting, a dinner party, a back-to-school night, ask everyone in the group who considers themselves a creative person to raise their hand.

Now go ahead and picture it. How many hands actually go up? In my experience, not many. You’ll get a few brave souls, usually the ones who paint or play an instrument. And everyone else suddenly finds something deeply fascinating to look at on the floor.

But here’s the twist. Ask that same room to solve a problem, and watch what happens. They improvise. They negotiate. They come up with workarounds and connect ideas nobody else thought to connect. People are being creative constantly. They just don’t call it that. And that gap, between what people actually do and what they believe about themselves, is exactly why we need to start talking about creativity out loud.

This is the fifth action from The Future Creative: Initiate Discussions.

Initiate Discussions is about starting intentional conversations about creativity. What it means, where it shows up, and why it matters for our students.

You see, most people are walking around with a definition of creativity they inherited somewhere along the way and never actually questioned. And until we bring those assumptions out into the open, they quietly shape everything. What we teach, what we value, and most importantly, who gets to think of themselves as creative in the first place.

There are two myths that come up again and again in these conversations. The first is that creativity means being artistic, that it lives in the art room with the paint and the clay. The second is that creativity belongs only to a rare few extraordinary people.

And I love how one of our guests, Dr. Anna Abraham, pushes back on that second one. She said, Think about it this way: we don’t say, “I’ll never run as fast as Usain Bolt, so I’m not even going to bother jogging around the park.” But we use exactly that logic to disqualify ourselves from creativity all the time.

Here’s what the research tells us, and it honestly surprised even me. The strongest predictor of whether someone engages in creative work isn’t talent or training. It’s awareness. Simply being able to say the words “I am creative” changes how a person shows up. And as researcher Dr. James Kaufman reminded us, when it comes to creativity, “it all counts.” Reimagining a lesson, navigating a hard conversation, finding a new way to reach a student who’s checked out. It all counts.

But none of that surfaces on its own. If we never talk about creativity, it stays right where it tends to live in schools: on the back burner, behind the test scores and the pacing guides. The conversation is the thing that brings it forward.

So here’s what I want you to do this week. Start one conversation about creativity. It could be with a colleague over coffee, with your students in the first ten minutes of class, or even at your own dinner table. And here’s a question to get you going, one we come back to all the time: What does creativity mean to you, and where does it show up in what you do?

Now, one tip from years of facilitating these conversations. Share your own view last. When you let everyone else surface their ideas first, you get a much wider range of perspectives, and people are far more honest. The moment the expert in the room declares what creativity is, everyone else quietly folds their own idea back up and puts it away. So ask the question, then step back, and really listen.

Once you’ve had that first conversation, take it further. Notice who lights up. Notice the assumptions that come out, the disagreements, the surprises. Those moments are where a shared understanding of creativity starts to take root, not just in one classroom, but across a whole school.

In The Future Creative, we share a whole set of ways to take these conversations further. Here’s one of my favorites, and it comes from a question our guest Will Richardson asked that genuinely stopped me in my tracks: why do so many conversations about kids happen without the kids in the room?

So one strategy is to bring students directly into the dialogue about their creativity. A quick end-of-class reflection, a short survey, and an honest discussion about why it might be valuable to them. In the book, we get into how to facilitate these conversations at every level, with students, colleagues, parents, and even school boards. You’ll find the whole playbook inside.
So this week, start the conversation. And watch how quickly creativity moves from something people are sure they’re not, to something they realize they’ve been doing all along.