Why the Air Force Is Bad at Creativity

This one came to me on a drive, and I think it’s baffling and kind of interesting.

The Air Force, and probably the DoD in general, is great at pushing the people skills. Communication, developing relationships, building teams, leadership, management styles. We’re all about it. We hand out the books and run the courses. Then we say we want creativity and innovation, too. We say it constantly. But the environment stifles it.

It isn’t malice. It’s design.

What creativity actually needs

Teresa Amabile at Harvard spent decades studying creativity at work. Her short version: creativity comes from expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation, and the most powerful lever a manager has is the last one. Intrinsic motivation. People doing the work because the challenge itself pulls them in.¹

She also found six things managers do that either feed creativity or kill it: challenge (matching people to work that stretches them), freedom (autonomy over how to reach a goal, even if leadership sets the goal), resources (enough time and money; she calls out fake deadlines and impossibly tight ones), diverse teams, supervisory encouragement (a boss who recognizes creative effort, even when an idea doesn’t pan out), and organizational support.

Now hold that list up against a normal squadron.

Freedom over the how? We standardize the how. We write checklists for the how, then inspect against them.

Time? Everything is due yesterday, and half the deadlines are fake. I wrote about that in Everything Is Priority One.

Tolerance for ideas that don’t pan out? We run a zero-defect culture. More on what that does to people in Dropping the Hammer.

Encouragement? The first question a new idea usually gets is, “Who approved this?”

Amabile’s most important point is that this usually happens by accident. Creativity gets undermined every day by work environments built, for good reasons, to maximize coordination, productivity, and control. That’s a near-perfect description of a military organization. The things that make us reliable are the same things that make us uncreative.

Innovation as a program

When the Air Force does go after creativity, it usually builds a program. The Department of the Air Force runs Spark Tank, an annual competition where Airmen and Guardians pitch ideas to senior leaders. The 2025 cycle drew a record 441 submissions, and 15 made the semifinals.

Spark Tank isn’t bad. It’s produced real things. But look at the shape of it: creativity becomes an annual event, with a submission portal, a vote, and a stage. Meanwhile, the normal Tuesday still runs on the same checklist, the same deadline, and the same “who approved this?”

You can’t bolt creativity onto an organization as a program if the daily work still punishes deviation. The Air Force doesn’t have a creativity problem. It has a culture problem that shows up as a creativity problem. And culture gets set by leaders, one Tuesday at a time. (More on that in Stop Controlling People, Change the Culture.)

Where it actually happens

In big organizations, a lot of the real creative work happens off the books.

A lot of mine has. Plenty of the tools and training I’ve built started on my own time, outside the system. My personal philosophy has mostly been: screw it, I’ll do it on my own time, and nobody can stop me. That works for me. But it’s not a strategy you can hand to an organization, and I’d rather see this stuff institutionalized than dependent on people who are too stubborn to quit.

Adam Grant’s Originals has a finding I like here.² We picture creative people as big risk-takers who bet everything. The data says otherwise. In one study, entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs while building their business were 33 percent less likely to fail than the ones who quit. Grant calls it a balanced risk portfolio: one foot in something stable, so you can take real swings with the other. That’s what working off the books inside an institution is. Your day job is the stable foot.

A peer looked at some of the tools I’ve built and asked me, fairly: where are you driving this from? Are you creating it just for the sake of creating it? Good question. The honest answer is that most of it came straight out of after-action reports, the same ones everybody else read. But my bigger answer is this: you shouldn’t need a catalyst. If you see a small, simple process and you want to make it better, just do it. And the rest of us should embrace it.

Even Skunk Works needed a carve-out

Lockheed’s Skunk Works is the most famous innovation shop in aviation history: the U-2, the SR-71, the first American operational jet fighter. Ben Rich’s Skunk Works tells the story,³ and the operating rules Kelly Johnson wrote for it are still published today.

Rule one says the Skunk Works manager has to be delegated “practically complete control” of the program and report to a division president or higher. Rule three says the number of people connected to the project has to be restricted “in an almost vicious manner.”

Read that again. The most legendary creative organization on the planet didn’t survive by being creative inside the main bureaucracy. It survived because a senior sponsor gave it a carve-out and protected it.

That’s the lesson for leaders. Your people don’t need a portal. They need a sponsor. That’s you.

If you’re the creative one and you’re told no

Some of you reading this are the person with the idea, working for someone who keeps saying no. The literature has two honest answers.

The first is that the institution usually wins. People who push without cover tend to burn out, get sidelined, or leave.

The second is that some people find a way anyway. Debra Meyerson at Stanford called them “tempered radicals”: people who are committed to their organization and also want to change it, and who do it quietly instead of loudly.⁴ They pick their fights. They go for small wins and stay persistent. They build credibility on the sanctioned work so the unsanctioned work gets some room.

My version: build the thing first. Then show it as the answer to a problem everyone already agrees exists. “Here’s the tool I built from the AAR you read” lands a lot better than “Can I have permission to try something?”

How a leader makes it normal

You can’t mandate creativity. But a leader can make it normal.

Amabile and Steven Kramer studied nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 professionals and found that the single biggest booster of people’s motivation and creative output was making progress on meaningful work, even small progress.⁵ The flip side: small setbacks hit even harder than small wins helped.

That puts a lot of power in your hands, because you control a lot of those small wins and setbacks. When someone makes a small process better, you either treat it as valuable or treat it as noise. And the whole shop is watching which one you pick.

The short version

1. Set the goal, let them own the how. Freedom over the means is the cheapest creativity you’ll ever buy.
2. Kill fake deadlines. Real urgency is fine. Manufactured urgency kills good ideas.
3. Celebrate the small fix out loud. The person who made a form shorter deserves the same spotlight as the Spark Tank finalist.
4. Be the sponsor. Give your best tinkerers a little carve-out, and protect it.
5. Don’t ask “Who approved this?” first. Ask “What problem does this fix?”
6. Treat a failed experiment as information. Not a write-up.
7. If you’re the creative one, build first, pitch second. Tie it to a problem everyone already agrees exists.

We don’t need more innovation programs. We need more leaders who make a normal Tuesday a safe place to try something.