Creativity is responsible for just about every awesome thing that humans have accomplished (and, yeah, okay, a lot of the bad, too). Within each of us lies incredible power to make unseen connections and bring new ideas to life. In some, this power is overflowing and will be halted by none. These are the rebels and mavericks that can bring revolutionary new products and services to the marketplace and they are the exceptions.

In others, creativity lies dormant. It’s something that’s often thought of being almost exclusively internal, but that’s simply not true. Inputs have tremendous influence on outputs. I think that environment plays a huge role in squashing or unleashing our creativity. New connections require experience and building blocks, and you need to be able to practice creativity and fail forward. As Edison put it, “I have not failed. I’ve just just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Our typical environments are riddled with rigid hierarchies which, by their very nature, stifle creative power. Consider this scenario: I’m a low-level employee with little agency. I have, piled on top of me, manager upon manager. My job title comes with specific responsibilities that I may not even have real ownership over, and my manager has her own job title with its own duties. She also doesn’t have much agency — just some control over the people below her. Neither of us do work that has much influence on the company and we’re easily replaced. We’re both stuck working with very limited knowledge about our company — as in politics, workplace transparency is one of those things that gets paid a lot of lip-service without actually being implemented.

This continues up the chain until you reach some executives who, at least theoretically have more creative power. But those executives probably don’t possess a particularly holistic understanding of what’s going on below them, which has its own problems. They’re also likely stretched super-thin with more decisions to make in a given day than they can handle.

Creativity needs breathing room.

If I am that lowly corporate employee and I have a breakthrough about my work (not very likely given the aforementioned conditions), it’s probably not going to go much of anywhere because of my lack of agency. When our ideas are repeatedly shut down, most of us either stop sharing them or quit trying to come up with new ideas altogether.

We end up with a plethora of otherwise-creative individuals who are downtrodden by virtue of their environments. This is a drain on society because it hampers growth of the individual and cripples the potential of the company.

We can see variations of this scenario everywhere, from our governments to our workplaces and schools, and even in our families. Follow the rules, keep your head down, that information is on a ‘need to know’ basis, don’t question, fall in line and you’ll do just fine. But maybe just fine isn’t good enough. When we embrace systems that are totally at odds with the very thing that makes our species soar, what are we missing out on?

It’s time to rethink how our hierarchies function and to breathe creative life into our environments, so that we can not only find out what doesn’t work, but discover what does.