DANCE to Resilience: Improve Creativity in the Workplace as an Antidote for Employee Burnout

Is Everyday Creativity the Antidote to Employee Burnout?

Stop getting distracted with side quests like wellness apps to reduce burnout.
Start looking at foundational changes to finally face the Boss Fight.To improve creativity in the workplace, leaders need to move beyond foosball tables and scented markers and work on repeatable, easy habits for every employee. 

Instead of an “innovation working group,”  imagine if everyone, at every level, felt empowered to make positive changes, improve processes, and become invested in the outcomes of their work.

I’ve condensed the research on creativity in the workplace with my experience as a stand-up comedian, keynote speaker, and creative veterinarian (imagine treating a grizzly bear with an eye infection?) into the DANCE framework: Daydream, Ambiguity, Novelty, Curiosity, and Edit Later. 

These effortless habits move every person (yes, even Doug in Accounting) from “not my problem” to “how can we make things better.” Because creativity is really just problem-solving, and these measurable performance habits are accessible to everyone.  

Why “Wellness” Isn’t Saving Your Team 

As a DVM who has spent almost thirty years navigating the high-stakes chaos of veterinary medicine, I’ve learned that creativity fuels positive outcomes with constraints, but it also drives resilience.  Ample evidence shows that creativity builds wellbeing and resilience, helping buffer against burnout.  

I know – a veterinarian who talks about creativity!? I get that question all the time. But creativity is not only an essential skill to navigate a rapidly changing world, by increasing tolerance of ambiguity and mediated through problem solving, but it is also a critical tool for building wellbeing. 

In the veterinary world, if you can’t think on your feet when the manual doesn’t cover a specific complication? Or when you are limited by finances, available equipment or knowledge, consequences are dire. Like that time I had to pin a pelican’s broken legs, with bones like wet cardboard. I’d never pinned a pelican’s legs before, and I could only find one short blog post from another veterinarian who described the challenges. With ingenuity and some plumber’s putty to externally hold the pins in place, we found a solution. That’s creativity.

Or the time I used my screen recorder on my phone to make a video of the cameras on Facebook Marketplace, then uploaded the video to AI for it to make a list of them and the pros and cons of each.

Maybe for you it’s a pivot table that shaved 5 minutes off your reporting time, or the timer on your coffee maker that gives you 3 minutes more sleep.

Creativity is an essential human trait. But at work, we often treat creativity as a luxury. A garnish next to the meat and potatoes of “real work”. 

Or sometimes even a negative thing. Do we want creativity in health and safety? Yes and no.

No, we don’t want people using their creativity to adapt tried-and-true safety procedures like this video of a creative electrician’s work (language warning) or the pop-off valve we use in veterinary medicine.

Yes, we want creativity when a front-line worker sees that something is not working with current procedures and brings it forward in a meeting to discuss and resolve. 

Yes, we want creativity in the way people manage their time, communication, and leadership. 

And Yes, we want creativity in the way people go home to refresh, so they can come back to work with more energy. 

When we trap people in rigid protocols and SOPs, their resilience erodes. We don’t need better snacks in the breakroom, we need a creative interventions.

Enter: the DANCE Framework

What is Creativity? Big “C” vs. “Little c” 

One of the biggest hurdles to workplace innovation is a misunderstanding of what creativity is. 

• Big “C” Creativity is what many people think of: the iPhone, a Picasso, an “Artiste.” 
• Little “c” creativity (aka Everyday Creativity) is the feeling when you design a pivot table that just works, finding a perfect analogy to explain a complex process to your team, or figuring out how to run a team meeting when the Wi-Fi goes down and your presentation is locked in the cloud. 

Research indicates that employees who feel like they are using their creativity are half as likely to be looking for another job. Which is a better way for them to use their creativity than mapping out their escape on job boards while on the clock. 

This isn’t just theory. In my recent keynotes on Creative Courage, I’ve seen audiences who don’t believe they are creative (those who self-rate themselves a 4/10 or lower) shift to just 3% in an hour. 

The DANCE Framework: 5 Easy Habits to Improve Creativity at Work 

Daydream: Insight Fuel

Mind wandering – useless, right? Slackers. In reality, that’s when your Default Mode Network (DMN) kicks in. 

Science shows that the “Default Mode Network” (DMN) in the brain is most active when our minds are gathering wool, building castles, in la-la land. It’s your brain’s way of making non-linear connections, linking ideas, experiences, data points in your brain. 

If you’ve ever had an idea while taking a shower, or woken up with an “a-ha” that’s your DMN doing it’s job. But if you fill your schedule with meetings and busy work, never putting down your phone to watch the birds on the fence? You deprive your brain of these incredible insightful moments.

Workplace Intervention:  Schedule a 10-minute “White Space” break on the team calendar. No phones, no Slack, just intentional mind-wandering.

Even just 10 minutes of intentional daydreaming can break a loop that’s stalled a project for days. 

(*caveat: mind wandering can increase anxiety, if you dwell on that email or your co-worker’s tone of voice in that meeting. Daydream about a problem you are trying to solve, or put it in the context of a fantastical situation – what if you were ants? What if people had 5 arms, how would it change the problem?)

Ambiguity: Innovation Portal

Change exhaustion comes from chronic uncertainty in many different dimensions, like how workplace conditions will shift after a leadership change, how Stacey will react to your next big idea, or whether you’ll make it to work after a snowstorm. Effective leadership requires leaning into the “messy middle” of the unknown. Ambiguity is something in the world that can be interpreted by us in a few different ways. A video online, a dog who is growling but also wagging his tail (Sharpeis do this!), or unclear role expectations at work.

Everything creative is leaning into ambiguity, and with that skill, innovation explodes. Imagine painting a picture – you don’t know what it will look like until it’s done. Or making a meal – how would it taste with a dash of hot sauce? You’ll find out when it’s done.

With confidence in ambiguity, we manage the stress of uncertainty, which opens up new possibilities, instead of reacting in a panic, trying to escape the feeling like a cat avoiding their medication.

Workplace Intervention: In your next meeting, sit with a bad idea for three minutes before dismissing it. Explore the discomfort.

Focus on the moment, in the discomfort of not having all the answers, to allow new ideas to surface and to build psychological safety and a culture of engagement.

Want to learn more about ambiguity? Check out my 3C Framework for Navigating Uncertainty with Confidence 

Novelty: Perspectives Spark 

It’s so easy to get stuck in our daily lives. We know what we like, so why try something new?

It’s comfortable, but not effective for building creativity. With novelty, we add new data points to our brain, so that the Default Mode Network can share an amazing A-HA.

Workplace Intervention: Team Swap. Move your meeting to a hallway, a park, another department’s boardroom, or simply have everyone sit in a different spot. New views create new thoughts

Research shows that if a person attends a meeting from outside the inner circle, the quality of ideas are better. Not because the person shares a good idea necessarily, just their presence alone sparks ingenuity. Novelty pushes us outside of our comfort zone to build new ingredients for our DMN to solve a problem.

Curiosity: Stagnation Antidote

When faced with ambiguity, uncertainty, and danger, we revert to the status quo. Curiosity is foundational to creativity and the antidote to rigidity. If you never wonder how things could be different, innovation fails before it begins. 

Curiosity can be kind of annoying, and can feel like an obstacle to progress. But a lack of curiosity leads to missed opportunities for something better. Curiosity predicts engagement. 

Have you ever seen a disengaged employee wonder how things could be improved, adapted, or changed? Hold on to curiosity in your teams; it’s a sign of people who care.

Workplace Intervention: Ask “Why” 5 times at your next meeting. This creative problem-solving technique helps get to the root of the problem or better understand your colleagues’ perspectives. 

Edit Later: Psychological Safety Catalyst

The Inner Critic (mine’s called Todd is the #1 killer of creativity. He whispers, “don’t say that, you’ll look stupid!”) 

Leaders have an inherent leadership bias that makes them reject ideas too quickly in favour of certainty, usually in the form of what we’ve done before. Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying, “Write drunk, edit sober”. Always separate idea generation from idea evaluation to identify great ideas and build psychological safety in teams.

Workplace Intervention: Explicitly label your meetings. Are we in “Generation Mode” (Green Light) or “Evaluation Mode” (Red Light)? Never do both at the same time.

Get creative! Use a soundtrack for generation time, a tinted light, or some other cue.

Want practice? My Creative Breakthrough Workbook contains 18 exercises from my keynotes and workshops to help you separate the idea generation and evaluation processes and build psychological safety in your team. Scared employees are not creative. It’s a barometer for what you need to build effective teams, now. 

Creativity is a Resilience Habit, Not a Gift

Your team is capable of great creativity. Maybe not a painting or a Broadway play, but everyday creativity is buried under the weight of productivity and the fear of being wrong. 

By embracing the DANCE framework, you equip people with the tools to build a creative mindset. Then, if you provide the psychological safety needed for innovation to thrive, you are better poised to achieve your organization’s innovation goals. Teams using these habits see a 130% increase in creative confidence.

And when 83% of companies say that innovation is a top priority, yet only 3% are ready to deliver? Or when burnout rates are at all-time highs but your turnover is well below average? Your smug smile says it all. 

Ready to Bring the DANCE Framework to Your Organization?

Transform your next event or team meeting to a high-performance experience.

Whether you need a high-energy keynote to get audiences off their feet, or an interactive workshop to build these habits into your routine, let’s work together. 

Not quite ready for a whole event? My Creative Breakthrough Workbook is a collection of 18 exercises – use one or many to boost innovation, unsilence your teams, and start embedding a creative mindset in your culture. Because creative employees are engaged employees.

Executive Summary:
The DANCE Framework for Resilience