Organizations trying to innovate often turn to trendy tools. But that focus can overlook a more important factor: how people interact and whether they feel safe doing so.
“Without that, people do not have creative confidence,” explains Ted Klein, an organizational development facilitator and senior instructor at Concordia Continuing Education. “Communication breaks down.”
As an innovation consultant, Klein has helped teams at Meta, Microsoft, and government agencies build creative cultures. He believes innovation flourishes when it’s rooted in safety, openness, and shared purpose — and that culture must be built intentionally.
“You’re my colleagues,” Klein tells his students at the start of every course. “We’re here to learn from each other.”
That first move — flattening the hierarchy — sets the tone for psychological safety, which Klein sees as vital to innovation.
Psychological safety, a concept introduced by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, describes the ability to speak openly at work without fear of ridicule or exclusion.
In Klein’s classroom, that safety allows adult learners to share what’s worked, what hasn’t, and why.
Ted Klein, organizational development facilitator
In the workplace, it allows teams to take smart risks, course-correct without hiding mistakes, and collaborate more honestly.
Klein points to hospitals as an example.
“When nurses are afraid to speak up, error rates increase,” he says. “Hospitals that create a culture of openness have fewer serious mistakes because teams could talk through what’s happening and fix it.”
Safety is the groundwork, he says, but creativity still needs to be learned. Many of Klein’s students initially believe they’re not “creative types.”
Klein works to reframe that belief by introducing the idea of “creative confidence,” a term coined by IDEO co-founder and Stanford University professor David Kelley, which suggests that anyone can contribute creatively under the right conditions.
“We can relearn how to be creative and how to accept the ideas that are coming and work with them,” Klein says.
That relearning requires separating two processes: generating ideas and evaluating them. In many workplaces, these instincts collide — someone offers a suggestion, someone else shoots it down, and the conversation dies.
To counter this, Klein introduces two complementary philosophies. The first is divergent thinking, or the practice of accepting and expanding any idea brought to the table. Then comes convergent thinking, which evaluates and prioritizes ideas.
The shift sounds simple but requires practice. Klein’s students use creative constraints, explore prioritization models, and role-play tough conversations so they can bring these habits back into the workplace.
“There are a lot of bad ideas in the world,” Klein says. “But here’s how you work with the bad ideas while maintaining psychological safety so that people really are excited to get up and come to work.”
One technique Klein teaches is balanced appraisal, or learning to recognize what’s promising in an idea, surfacing its gaps, and challenging the originator to improve it. The process prevents meetings from becoming idea graveyards and gives quieter team members the space to be heard.
This blend of safety, structure, and shared process lays the groundwork for what Klein calls “a learning organization.” Without these elements, he believes true innovation is impossible.
“For a company to really compete, they have to be a learning organization,” Klein notes. “It has to encourage individuals to take good risks and then learn from what happens.”
He draws again from Edmondson, who in her 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, distinguishes between harmful mistakes and the productive kind that drive insight. In innovative cultures, good failures are acknowledged and shared. In rigid ones, they’re hidden.
Not all learners feel empowered to change their whole organization. But Klein gives them language, tools, and strategies to shift the space around them.
While many of his students are at the management, others are new to leadership. No matter their stage, the goal is to create cultures where people want to contribute, not just comply.
This doesn’t mean abandoning structure. Klein also covers traditional tools: project management timelines, performance indicators, and frameworks for feedback and delegation.
“We’re not throwing out what works,” he says. “We’re giving people the self-awareness and the systems to lead more human, more effective teams.”
© Concordia University
