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How confidently creative are you? At home? At work? 

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How confidently creative are you? At home? At work? 

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What do you do to help bring on creativity? Do you have a particular space or routine that gives you confidence when you are looking to improve something or solve a tricky challenge? How do you demonstrate or build creative confidence with students? How do you innovate?

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How to build your creative confidence (11.46) 

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How to build your creative confidence (11.46) 

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How to build your creative confidence | David Kelley

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Welcome to the Curriculum Conference Information and Registration Site for 2016.

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5 Reasons to like and use the Design Kit: 

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5 Reasons to like and use the Design Kit: 

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1. Free, no purchase necessary.
2. Immediate, pick a tool, use it, try another.
3. Recipe-style, easy to find, read and do.
4. No need to learn what design thinking is to start doing it (although learning to design think is also super-useful).
5. Compatible with other similar activities, and not exclusive. Mix and match depending on your context.

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Design Kit is IDEO.org’s platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world’s most difficult problems.

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Further Reading: Reclaim Your Creative Confidence

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Further Reading: Reclaim Your Creative Confidence

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Harvard Business Review Article

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Most people are born creative. As children, we revel in imaginary play, ask outlandish questions, draw blobs and call them dinosaurs. But over time, because of socialization and formal education, a lot of us start to stifle those impulses. We learn to be warier of judgment, more cautious, more analytical. The world seems to divide into "creatives" and "noncreatives," and too many people consciously or unconsciously resign themselves to the latter category.

And yet we know that creativity is essential to success in any discipline or industry. According to a recent IBM survey of chief executives around the world, it's the most sought-after trait in leaders today. No one can deny that creative thinking has enabled the rise and continued success of countless companies, from start-ups like Facebook and Google to stalwarts like Procter & Gamble and General Electric.

Students often come to Stanford University's "d.school" (which was founded by one of us-David Kelley-and is formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) to develop their creativity. Clients work with IDEO, our design and innovation consultancy, for the same reason. But along the way, we've learned that our job isn't to teach them creativity. It's to help them rediscover their creative confidence-the natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. We do this by giving them strategies to get past four fears that hold most of us back: fear of the messy unknown, fear of being judged, fear of the first step, and fear of losing control.

Easier said than done, you might argue. But we know it's possible for people to overcome even their most deep-seated fears. Consider the work of Albert Bandura, a world-renowned psychologist and Stanford professor. In one series of early experiments, he helped people conquer lifelong snake phobias by guiding them through a series of increasingly demanding interactions. They would start by watching a snake through a two-way mirror. Once comfortable with that, they'd progress to observing it through an open door, then to watching someone else touch the snake, then to touching it themselves through a heavy leather glove, and, finally, in a few hours, to touching it with their own bare hands. Bandura calls this process of experiencing one small success after another "guided mastery." The people who went through it weren't just cured of a crippling fear they had assumed was untreatable. They also had less anxiety and more success in other parts of their lives, taking up new and potentially frightening activities like horseback riding and public speaking. They tried harder, persevered longer, and had more resilience in the face of failure. They had gained a new confidence in their ability to attain what they set out to do.

We've used much the same approach over the past 30 years to help people transcend the fears that block their creativity. You break challenges down into small steps and then build confidence by succeeding on one after another. Creativity is something you practice, not just a talent you're born with. The process may feel a little uncomfortable at first, but-as the snake phobics learned-the discomfort quickly fades away and is replaced with new confidence and capabilities.

Fear of the Messy Unknown

Creative thinking in business begins with having empathy for your customers (whether they're internal or external), and you can't get that sitting behind a desk. Yes, we know it's cozy in your office. Everything is reassuringly familiar; information comes from predictable sources; contradictory data are weeded out and ignored. Out in the world, it's more chaotic. You have to deal with unexpected findings, with uncertainty, and with irrational people who say things you don't want to hear. But that is where you find insights-and creative breakthroughs. Venturing forth in pursuit of learning, even without a hypothesis, can open you up to new information and help you discover nonobvious needs. Otherwise, you risk simply reconfirming ideas you've already had or waiting for others-your customers, your boss, or even your competitors-to tell you what to do.

At the d.school, we routinely assign students to do this sort of anthropological fieldwork-to get out of their comfort zones and into the world-until, suddenly, they start doing it on their own. Consider a computer scientist, two engineers, and an MBA student, all of whom took the Extreme Affordability class taught by Stanford business school professor Jim Patell. They eventually realized that they couldn't complete their group project-to research and design a low-cost incubator for newborn babies in the developing world-while living in safe, suburban California. So they gathered their courage and visited rural Nepal. Talking with families and doctors firsthand, they learned that the babies in gravest danger were those born prematurely in areas far from hospitals. Nepalese villagers didn't need a cheaper incubator at the hospital-they needed a fail-safe way to keep babies warm when they were away from doctors who could do so effectively. Those insights led the team to design a miniature "sleeping bag" with a pouch containing a special heat-storing wax. The Embrace Infant Warmer costs 99% less than a traditional incubator and can maintain the right temperature for up to six hours without an external power source. The innovation has the potential to save millions of low-birth-weight and premature babies every year, and it came about only because the team members were willing to throw themselves into unfamiliar territory.

You can work up the confidence to tackle the big fears that hold most of us back by starting small. Here are a few ways to get comfortable with venturing into the messy unknown. The list gets increasingly challenging, but you can follow the first two suggestions without even leaving your desk.

1. Lurk in online forums. Listen in as potential customers share information, air grievances, and ask questions-it's the virtual equivalent of hanging around a popular café. You're not looking for evaluations of features or cost; you're searching for clues about their concerns and desires.

2. Pick up the phone and call your own company's customer service line. Walk through the experience as if you were a customer, noting how your problem is handled and how you're feeling along the way.

3. Seek out an unexpected expert. What does the receptionist in your building know about your firm's customer experience? If you use a car service for work travel, what insights do the drivers have about your firm? If you're in health care, talk to a medical assistant, not a doctor. If you make a physical product, ask a repair person to tell you about common failure areas.

4. Act like a spy. Take a magazine and a pair of headphones to a store or an industry conference (or, if your customers are internal, a break room or lunch area). Pretend to read while you observe. Watch as if you were a kid, trying to understand what is going on. How are people interacting with your offering? What can you glean from their body language?

5. Casually interview a customer or potential customer. After you've gotten more comfortable venturing out, try this: Write down a few open-ended questions about your product or service. Go to a place where your customers tend to gather, find someone you'd be comfortable approaching, and say you'd like to ask a few questions. If the person refuses? No problem, just try someone else. Eventually you'll find someone who's dying to talk to you. Press for more detail with every question. Even if you think you understand, ask "Why is that?" or "Can you tell me more about that?" Get people to dig into their own underlying assumptions.

Caroline O'Connor is a lecturer at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Sarah Stein Greenberg is its managing director.

Another example comes from two students, Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, who took the d.school's Launchpad course. The class required them to start a company from scratch by the end of the 10-week academic quarter. Both were self-described "geeks"-technically brilliant, deeply analytical, and definitely shy. But they opted to work on their project-an elegant news reader for the then-newly released iPad-off-campus in a Palo Alto café where they'd be surrounded by potential users. Getting over the awkwardness of approaching strangers, Akshay gathered feedback by asking café patrons to experiment with his prototypes. Ankit coded hundreds of small variations to be tested each day-changing everything from interaction patterns to the size of a button. In a matter of weeks they rapidly iterated their way to a successful product. "We went from people saying, 'This is crap,'" says Akshay, "to 'Is this app preloaded on every iPad?'" The result-Pulse News-received public praise from Steve Jobs at a worldwide developer's conference only a few months later, has been downloaded by 15 million people, and is one of the original 50 apps in Apple's App Store Hall of Fame.

It's not just entrepreneurs and product developers who should get into "the mess." Senior managers also must hear directly from anyone affected by their decisions. For instance, midway through a management off-site IDEO held for ConAgra Foods, the executives broke away from their upscale conference rooms to explore gritty Detroit neighborhoods, where you can go miles without seeing a grocery store. They personally observed how inner-city residents reacted to food products and spoke with an urban farmer who hopes to turn abandoned lots into community gardens. Now, according to Al Bolles, ConAgra's executive vice president of research, quality, and innovation, such behavior is common at the company. "A few years ago, it was hard to pry my executive team away from the office," he says, "but now we venture out and get onto our customers' home turf to get insights about what they really need."

Fear of Being Judged

If the scribbling, singing, dancing kindergartner symbolizes unfettered creative expression, the awkward teenager represents the opposite: someone who cares- deeply -about what other people think. It takes only a few years to develop that fear of judgment, but it stays with us throughout our adult lives, often constraining our careers. Most of us accept that when we are learning, say, to ski, others will see us fall down until practice pays off. But we can't risk our business-world ego in the same way. As a result, we self-edit, killing potentially creative ideas because we're afraid our bosses or peers will see us fail. We stick to "safe" solutions or suggestions. We hang back, allowing others to take risks. But you can't be creative if you are constantly censoring yourself.

Half the battle is to resist judging yourself. If you can listen to your own intuition and embrace more of your ideas (good and bad), you're already partway to overcoming this fear. So take baby steps, as Bandura's clients did. Instead of letting thoughts run through your head and down the drain, capture them systematically in some form of idea notebook. Keep a whiteboard and marker in the shower. Schedule daily "white space" in your calendar, where your only task is to think or take a walk and daydream. When you try to generate ideas, shoot for 100 instead of 10. Defer your own judgment and you'll be surprised at how many ideas you have-and like-by the end of the week.

Also, try using new language when you give feedback, and encourage your collaborators to do the same. At the d.school, our feedback typically starts with "I like..." and moves on to "I wish..." instead of just passing judgment with put-downs like "That will never work." Opening with the positives and then using the first person for suggestions signals that "This is just my opinion and I want to help," which makes listeners more receptive to your ideas.

We recently worked with Air New Zealand to reinvent the customer experience for its long-distance flights. As a highly regulated industry, airlines tend toward conservatism. To overcome the cultural norm of skepticism and caution, we started with a workshop aimed at generating crazy ideas. Executives brainstormed and prototyped a dozen unconventional (and some seemingly impractical) concepts, including harnesses that hold people standing up, groups of seats facing one another around a table, and even hammocks and bunk beds. Everyone was doing it, so no one was scared he or she would be judged. This willingness to consider wild notions and defer judgment eventually led the Air New Zealand team to a creative breakthrough: the Skycouch, a lie-flat seat for economy class. At first, it seemed impossible that such a seat could be made without enlarging its footprint (seats in business and first-class cabins take up much more space), but the new design does just that: A heavily padded section swings up like a footrest to transform an airline row into a futonlike platform that a couple can lie down on together. The Skycouch is now featured on a number of Air New Zealand's international flights, and the company has won several industry awards as a result.

Fear of the First Step

Even when we want to embrace our creative ideas, acting on them presents its own challenges. Creative efforts are hardest at the beginning. The writer faces the blank page; the teacher, the start of school; businesspeople, the first day of a new project. In a broader sense, we're also talking about fear of charting a new path or breaking out of your predictable workflow. To overcome this inertia, good ideas are not enough. You need to stop planning and just get started-and the best way to do that is to stop focusing on the huge overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away.

Best-selling writer Anne Lamott expertly captures this idea in a story from her childhood. Her brother had been assigned a school report about birds, but he waited to start on it until the night before it was due. He was near tears, overwhelmed by the task ahead, until his father gave him some wise advice: "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." In a business context, you can push yourself to take the first step by asking: What is the low-cost experiment? What's the quickest, cheapest way to make progress toward the larger goal?

Or give yourself a crazy deadline, as John Keefe, a d.school alum and a senior editor at radio station WNYC, did after a colleague complained that her mom had to wait at city bus stops never knowing when the next bus would come. If you worked for New York City Transit and your boss asked you to solve that problem, how soon would you promise to get a system up and running? Six weeks? Ten? John, who doesn't work for the transit authority, said, "Give me till the end of the day." He bought an 800 number, figured out how to access real-time bus data, and linked it to text-to-speech technology. Within 24 hours, he had set up a service that allowed bus riders to call in, input their bus stop number, and hear the location of the approaching bus. John applies the same fearless attitude to his work at WNYC. "The most effective way I've found to practice design thinking is by showing, not telling," he explains.

Another example of the "start simple" strategy comes from an IDEO project to develop a new dashboard feature for a European luxury car. To test their ideas, designers videotaped an existing car and then used digital effects to layer on proposed features. The rapid prototyping process took less than a week. When the team showed the video to our client, he laughed. "Last time we did something like this," he said, "we built a prototype car, which took almost a year and cost over a million dollars. Then we took a video of it. You skipped the car and went straight to the video."

Our mantra is "Don't get ready, get started!" The first step will seem much less daunting if you make it a tiny one and you force yourself to do it right now. Rather than stalling and allowing your anxiety to build, just start inching toward the snake.

Fear of Losing Control

Confidence doesn't simply mean believing your ideas are good. It means having the humility to let go of ideas that aren't working and to accept good ideas from other people. When you abandon the status quo and work collaboratively, you sacrifice control over your product, your team, and your business. But the creative gains can more than compensate. Again, you can start small. If you're facing a tough challenge, try calling a meeting with people fresh to the topic. Or break the routine of a weekly meeting by letting the most junior person in the room set the agenda and lead it. Look for opportunities to cede control and leverage different perspectives.

That's exactly what Bonny Simi, director of airport planning at JetBlue Airways, did after an ice storm closed JFK International Airport for a six-hour stretch in 2007-and disrupted the airline's flight service for the next six days. Everyone knew there were operational problems to be fixed, but no one knew exactly what to do. Fresh from a d.school course, Bonny suggested that JetBlue brainstorm solutions from the bottom up rather than the top down. First, she gathered a team of 120 frontline employees together for just one day-pilots, flight attendants, dispatchers, ramp workers, crew schedulers, and other staff members. Then she mapped out their disruption recovery actions (using yellow Post-it notes) and the challenges they faced (using pink ones). By the end of the day, Bonny's grassroots task force had reached new insights-and resolve. The distributed team then spent the next few months working through more than a thousand pink Post-its to creatively solve each problem. By admitting that the answers lay in the collective, Bonny did more than she could ever have done alone. And JetBlue now recovers from major disruptions significantly faster than it did before.

Our own experience with the open innovation platform OpenIDEO is another case in point. Its launch was scary in two ways: First, we were starting a public conversation that could quickly get out of hand; second, we were admitting that we don't have all the answers. But we were ready, like Bandura's phobics, to take a bigger leap-to touch the snake. And we soon discovered the benefits. Today, the OpenIDEO community includes about 30,000 people from 170 countries. They may never meet in person, but together they've already made a difference on dozens of initiatives-from helping revitalize cities in economic decline to prototyping ultrasound services for expectant mothers in Colombia. We've learned that no matter what group you're in or where you work, there are always more ideas outside than inside.For people with backgrounds as diverse as those of Akshay, Ankit, John, and Bonny, fear-of the messy unknown, of judgment, of taking the first step, or of letting go-could have blocked the path to innovation. But instead, they worked to overcome their fears, rediscovered their creative confidence, and made a difference. As Hungarian essayist György Konrád once said, "Courage is only the accumulation of small steps." So don't wait at the starting line. Let go of your fears and begin practicing creative confidence today.

A version of this article appeared in the December 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Reprint: R1212K Most people are born creative. But over time, a lot of us learn to stifle those impulses. We become warier of judgment, more cautious, more analytical. The world seems to divide into "creatives" and "noncreatives," and too many people resign themselves to the latter category.

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Further Reading: How to Gain Creative Confidence at Work

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Further Reading: How to Gain Creative Confidence at Work

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Forbes Article

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IDEO is a premiere innovation and design firm managed by both David and Tom Kelley. They are the authors of the new book, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (Crown Business, 2013), which will help all professionals unearth their creative side.

David is the founder of IDEO and created many icons of the digital generation including the first mouse for Apple and the first Treo. He is the Donald W. Whittier Professor at Stanford University, where he has taught for more than 25 years. He also won the Edison Achievement Award for Innovation and is a member of the National Academy of Engineers. Tom, a partner at IDEO, is the best-selling author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation. He is an Executive Fellow at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and holds a similar role at the University of Tokyo.

In this interview, they talk about what creative confidence is, why everyone is creative, how to be more creative at work, and how they figured out their creative sides.
How do you define creative confidence and where you do get yours from?
David: Creative confidence is the natural human ability to come up with breakthrough ideas and the courage to act on them. When people become confident in their own creative ability, it changes everything. Think about how much more positive your life is when you see yourself as a creative person. When you have creative confidence, you can change things. You can do what you set out to do.

My personal creative confidence came from the product design program at Stanford. I was frustrated in regular engineering roles, but then I went to Stanford and met this guy Bob McKim, who was teaching creative methodologies like need-finding and visual thinking. Until then, I wasn't mindful of whether I was creative or not. Once I got to Stanford and could be mindful of a process-something tangible and repeatable-I started getting positive feedback on my creative abilities. That had never happened before.

Tom: You know how some people insist on dividing the world into creative types and non-creative types? I was absolutely, positively, the non-creative type. I got an MBA. I worked in an accounting firm. I worked in management consulting, where most of the work was done with spreadsheets. No one back in that era would have put me in the creative category, for sure.

Then I came to IDEO, and suddenly I was immersed in a culture in which you're encouraged to bring your whole self to work, in which people don't want to suppress the creative side of you.
Do you find that a lot of people lack creativity or they are just not in a creative environment to begin with? Explain.
David: We constantly find that everybody's wildly creative, whether they know it or not. Where there are blocks in the way, our job is to remove those blocks through guided mastery. The design thinking methodology offers one way to do that, because it enables people from different backgrounds to work together in a way that allows people to surprise themselves with how creative they really are. So we put people through design thinking workshops. We work with them on design projects. And as they do more projects, they gain more and more confidence. The end result is that they become confident in their creative ability. We lead them through a series of small successes until finally they come to the conclusion, 'oh my god, I am a creative person.'

Tom: When people say 'I'm not creative,' in many cases it comes from the misperception that "real creativity" just comes naturally-without any effort. Yet no one, including Mozart, sat down at the piano the first day and wrote sonatas. Right? Even to be in the medium range of expressing your piano abilities takes work. There's technique to it.

There's process. There's a methodology that you have to practice. Or take drawing. We're not talking about being Picasso, we're talking about the ability to go to the whiteboard in your next meeting and draw your idea. A quick visual sketch can be way more powerful than text and bullet points.

David: The problem is, people tend to equate creative with artistic. Like if you can't draw a picture of a horse, you're not creative. That's really wrong. I mean, you could be a wildly creative leader, you could be a creative teacher. Right? We're looking at undeveloped artists and saying 'that's not creative.' Instead we'd all be much better off saying, 'everybody's creative. Let's find your thing.'

Tom: Right. People can be creative at how they assemble a team or how they run a meeting or how they lead people to do great work. But until you experiment a little, it's impossible for you to know what your creative skill is. So a good portion of our message is to do more exploring.
Can you share a story from your work at IDEO of someone who was able to harness their own creativity to make a major impact?
Tom: IDEO client PNC Financial Services is one example. When PNC decided to appeal to younger customers in 2007, it could have just followed the competition, hiked up interest rates on its checking accounts by half a percent, and promoted them with a marketing campaign. Instead they had the creative confidence to depart from business as usual and introduced a helpful digital tool called Virtual Wallet, aimed at building long-term customer relationships. They gained 14,000+ customers in the first two months of going live. A good example of how a prototype can help you harness creativity is the Walgreens "health and daily living" store format. By building a full scale in-store pharmacy concept constructed entirely out of inexpensive foam core, IDEO designers were able to get fast feedback at a fraction of the cost. The walk-through prototype also gathered consensus for an idea that might otherwise have met resistance, winning crucial executive support. Three years after that prototype, the store concept has been incorporated into 200 Walgreens stores.
Is it possible to be successful without creativity? Why or why not?
David: Sure. It's not the only way to succeed. I mean, you can stumble upon something. You can be the world's expert at something, if you're empathetic enough to see how you might turn that into something that other people want. You can be successful through complete diligence and hard work. If you're making something and you can see how to reduce its cost by ten percent, that can make you wildly successful.

Tom: It's just that when confronted with a really challenging business environment, creativity is a pretty reliable tool to raise your game from where you currently are. Even if you got to where you currently are by accident or by some sort of brute force method.

David: A lot of people have talked about creativity as though at the right moment a vision appears to you and while you're sleeping, you come up with an idea. For us creativity involves repeatable process. There's a methodology you can rely on. It's about mindfulness of a framework you can improve upon, rather than waiting for divine inspiration.
What are your top three pieces of advice for unleashing your creativity at work?
David: Make a social contract with your boss or your team to do more experiments. Just constantly try stuff in a low-risk way, or prototype three options instead of one. Some of the stuff you try isn't going to work-like trial and error. But be in the mode of 'I'm the kind of person-or we're the kind of place-that tries stuff. And we keep trying stuff. In doing so, we discover ideas that work and succeed and blossom and grow.' That's how evolution works. That's how every software company in history has worked.

Tom: Gather a personal advisory board to tap into collective intelligence. Basically, whenever there's a particularly important meeting coming up in your life, first get a diverse group of peers together, people with different life experiences, for pizza and beer-and have those brains work on your problem for you. Then when you show up at your important meeting, you're going to be a lot smarter than you would have been otherwise. You can pay them back by offering to go to their personal advisory board meeting before an important thing to them.

David: Get more firsthand data from the field so you can take it back to support your point of view. If your boss is going head-to-head with you, he or she will have more power and more experience. Right? But if you've spent more time in the field, you know exactly what's happening. And when you've seen it and they haven't, that can give you more confidence in your idea. But you better have evidentiary proof. You better show up with a video, because they're not going to just take your word for it.

Here's one example. This seems absurd now, but in the old days, we were working with these companies that were making cellular phones. And we were saying to them, 'look, you know not everybody is pushing with their index finger. We've watched people using their thumbs.' And no kidding, they were skeptical about that. Fortunately we brought proof.

The moral is: Never underestimate the power of user feedback. Breakthrough ideas happen when you use your natural creativity to empathize with and solve for people's unmet needs. But creative ideas aren't enough-you also need the courage to act on them. So, be brave. Be persistent. The world needs your creative confidence.
Dan Schawbel is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Promote Yourself: The New Rules For Career Success (St. Martin's Press).

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David And Tom Kelley: How To Gain Creative Confidence At Work

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David and Tom Kelley IDEO is a premiere innovation and design firm managed by both David and Tom Kelley. They are the authors of the new book, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (Crown Business, 2013), which will help all professionals unearth their creative side.

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If you watch any of the biggest movers and shakers in an industry today what you'll undoubtedly notice is their ability to exude confidence.

Whether it's Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Jeff Bezos on stage announcing a hot new service or product, or Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, or Ariana Huffington inspiring thousands to live a more successful life, each has a remarkable knack for appearing cool and collected no matter the circumstance--or size of the audience.

How each manages to be so calm and convey their ideas so effectively is an example of the role confidence plays not only for each as powerful executives, but also as innovative leaders and forward thinkers.

It's because of their confidence that creative leaders are able to take big risks to reap big rewards, challenge our status quo, and push the envelope when it comes to innovation.

And here's the thing: you don't have to be a high-powered executive to reap the benefits of creative confidence.

Creative confidence is something anyone can achieve, which helps explain why it's become a fundamental topic in creative circles. It's defined as the belief in your ability to create change in the world around you, and its impact cannot be overstated. Not only that, but creative confidence is something each of us can build and grow.

In their book aptly titled Creative Confidence IDEO founders slash brothers Tom and David Kelley write:

"Creative confidence is like a muscle--it can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience."

So how do the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos strengthen their creative confidence, and what can we learn from how they do it? Here are five ways experts have identified those at the top develop and strengthen their creative confidence in order to create change in the world around them.

1. They actively seek out new experiences.

Mark Zuckerberg taught himself to speak Mandarin. Elon Musk literally taught himself rocket science. Richard Branson didn't just start a record company, he learned how to start an airline too.

These leaders know that to build confidence they must constantly embrace uncertainty and the uncomfortable feeling that comes with it; to do that there's no better strategy than seeking to learn new things from new experiences. As Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design Bruce Nussbaum writes in his book Creative Intelligence:

"If creativity is your goal, it may be a better strategy to spend less time practicing to become the best in a particular field and more time learning many kinds of knowledge."

2. They constantly ask investigative questions.

This constant questioning helps uncover gaps in knowledge, which enables these leaders to not only move quicker than competitors who are only focused on doing what they already know how to do, it also enables them to build confidence around the decisions they're making--knowing they've covered more ground than others.

If you want to make changes confidently, look at what questions you're asking.

3. They interact with experts.

It's not uncommon for innovation leaders to catch lunch or hop on a late night phone call with the best experts in any given field. These leaders know the value of being connected to tested experts.

But it's one thing to be Elon Musk and have chief scientists or investors in your address book, it's a whole other thing to be an aspiring innovator without easy access to industry experts or game changers.

Fortunately the world is a big place full of experts, and to connect with them no longer requires having their phone number--or even their email address--at hand. Instead, sites like Quora, Facebook, and Twitter allow anyone to connect with almost anyone at the tap of a button.

"It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network."

4. They role play.

In imagining different perspectives to problems at-hand, the most creative thinkers know that it's an easy way to think differently without putting much at risk.

When you're working on a problem as yourself, your story and ego play a part in what's possible, but if you imagine yourself as someone else, anything goes.

This helps explain why improv has become a phenomenon in creative workplaces: it helps teach the value of not thinking as yourself momentarily and builds confidence around how to act when you find yourself in a moment of surprise.

5. They fail often, but keep tinkering.

You might shy away from failure, fearing the cost of making a mistake. But those at the top understand failure is an inevitable cost of success. From Creative Confidence the Kelley brothers write:

"According to Professor Dean Kieth Simonton of the University of California, Davis...creative geniuses, from artists like Mozart to scientists like Darwin, are quiet prolific when it comes to failure--they just don't let that stop them."

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5 Ways the Most Successful CEOs Build Creative Confidence

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If you watch any of the biggest movers and shakers in an industry today what you'll undoubtedly notice is their ability to exude confidence. Whether it's Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Jeff Bezos on stage announcing a hot new service or product, or Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, or Ariana Huffington inspiring thousands to live a more successful life, each has a remarkable knack for appearing cool and collected no matter the circumstance--or size of the audience.