The Creativity Deficit: Why Reactivity Is Killing Our Ability to Think
How the “always-on” mindset drains our focus, creativity, and purpose
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being always on, where your day is a chain of reactions rather than choices.
You know the feeling. You arrive at work with intentions for your day, maybe even a plan, but within an hour you’re triaging.
An urgent client email. A request for an EOD turnaround. A meeting that spawned three more. By the time you surface for air, it’s 6 PM and you’ve answered 50 questions but asked few of your own.
This is the reactivity trap, and it’s killing creativity in organizations everywhere.
I know this tension intimately. I came up in startup businesses—first as an early hire, then as a cofounder—where hustle was currency and responsiveness meant survival. I could have gone pro at whack-a-mole.
That’s not a good thing, but for years I thought it was. Burnout was a badge of honor. In our startup years we worked around the clock, and later during the Great Recession we were fighting to survive, pivoting constantly, running on adrenaline for months. It felt like drinking cortisol from a fire hose. We made it, and kept creating great things for years. But that pace hardwired something in me early on in my professional life: a belief that constant motion equals value.
And it’s not just startups. Most industries now operate in that same cycle of urgency and overextension. Studies show the average professional checks communication tools every six minutes, and nearly half never get more than 30 minutes of uninterrupted focus. Reactivity has become the default setting for modern work.
For years, I thought the solution was better systems, prioritization, more discipline (which doesn’t come naturally to me—I rebel against routine). Eventually I realized the only way out was to create white space: protected time to think, to connect dots, to let ideas breathe. That’s when new ideas come, answers click into place, and innovation happens. Without that space, vision isn’t possible. And without vision, you can’t grow with intention or purpose.
Classical composer Claude Debussy defined music as “the space between the notes.” The pauses and rests in music are not just empty space, they shape the rhythm and make a composition more than just noise. It’s the same in design, where white space gives shape to a page, or in comedy, where a well-timed pause lands the punchline. In the same way, time spent not in reaction mode is what gives our own work—and lives—their shape.
Creativity and Reactivity Sit on Opposite Ends of a Spectrum
Creativity requires spaciousness. Mental room to wander, to connect disparate ideas. To sit with a problem long enough that novel solutions emerge. It needs what Cal Newport calls “deep work”: sustained, undistracted attention where your brain can do its best processing.
Reactivity is the opposite. It’s operating in constant response mode, where your attention is spread across too many inputs and your primary job is to just keep the conveyor belt moving. There’s no time to think deeply because you’re constantly managing something that’s already in motion.
To be clear, I’m not talking about being emotionally reactive by snapping at people or making panicked decisions. That’s a problem too, but it’s different. I’m talking about a mode of work where you’re constantly responding to what’s coming at you. You can be cool, calm, and composed while still spending your cognitive resources managing inbound rather than creating outbound. The opposite of reactivity in this sense, then, is having the space to create—to be generative.
The tricky part is that reactivity feels productive. You’re doing things. Checking boxes. Clearing notifications. Responding quickly makes you feel responsible and on top of things. But productivity and creativity are not the same thing. The more organizations optimize for output, the less space they leave for originality and innovation. That’s a problem, because those are the capacities most needed now, when the problems we face don’t have ready-made answers.
From Doing to Being
Not long ago, I worked with a coachee who had been promoted into a senior leadership role after years of success as a hands-on manager. She cared deeply about her team’s performance and wanted to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. But her team felt micromanaged and she was exhausted. She was also hearing feedback that she needed to strengthen her leadership presence, something she struggled to connect to how she led day to day.
What she couldn’t yet see was that her tactical approach (the very thing that had once made her effective) was now getting in the way. She was still equating involvement with value. But presence isn’t about doing more, it’s about being more grounded, intentional, and attuned to the bigger picture.
Don’t get me wrong. Leaders can’t check out. Presence doesn’t mean detachment or passivity. It means showing up with perspective, clarity, and calm rather than anxiety, control, and overextension.
It’s about balance, not of how we divide our time and energy between our various roles in life (aka “work-life balance”), but in how we inhabit that time. That’s the tension many leaders face, especially in transition. The instinct to prove value through doing, when the real work of leadership is about being. When we shift from focusing on doing to being, we can communicate with more intention, create space for others to contribute, and make more grounded choices. We align our energy and attention with purpose instead of urgency.
This dynamic between reactivity versus creativity leadership shows up throughout leadership research. Robert Anderson and William Adams, through their Leadership Circle framework, describe two distinct operating systems: reactive and creative. In the reactive mode, leaders establish their sense of worth and security from external sources: how they’re perceived by others, meeting expectations, demonstrating competence, and maintaining control. Creative leadership operates from an internal sense of worth and purpose. These leaders relate authentically, think systemically, and achieve results through empowerment rather than control.
It’s closely aligned with what authentic leadership scholar Bruce Avolio describes: leading from who you are, not just what you do. Leaders who ground themselves in internal purpose, self-awareness, and relational transparency (qualities of being) consistently drive better outcomes.
Anderson and Adams’ Leadership Circle Profile database, which includes data from more than 500,000 leaders, reinforces this: creative leadership correlates with higher profits, stronger performance, and better retention. Yet roughly 70–80% of leaders still operate from a reactive stance, driven by the demands of the moment rather than by intentional direction and purpose.
That’s a tension I keep circling back to: we crave creativity but design for reactivity.
👉Keep Reading: In Part 2, Reclaiming the Space to Think: How to Bring Creativity Back to Work, I look at how we can start redesigning our days, our teams, and our organizations to support deeper thinking and more meaningful results.
— Kelly
Creative Cross-Pollination
A few things feeding my curiosity (and creativity) this week.
✍️ Learning from Lynda Barry
I’m a huge fan of cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry. Like her, I believe we are all creative, and I find her way of re-connecting people to their innate creativity deeply inspiring. I’m excited to travel to Madison, WI in a couple weeks (!) for a comics workshop with her and fellow cartoonist John Porcellino at University of Wisconsin-Madison. In anticipation, I found myself re-reading this NYT profile on her.
🎥 The Power of Myth — Bill Moyers & Joseph Campbell
A friend and I were chatting this morning about Joseph Campbell, who’s long been one of my personal heroes for his work on The Hero’s Journey. His influence on storytellers—from George Lucas to countless writers, filmmakers, and psychologists—can’t be overstated. Campbell’s ideas were deeply rooted in Carl Jung’s work on archetypes and the collective unconscious, which has shaped so much of how I think about identity and transformation. I’m now feeling inspired to rewatch The Power of Myth interviews with Bill Moyers, which capture Campbell at his most wise and human. You can stream the full series here on the Internet Archive →.
💭 Maria Popova — The Art of Presence
I’ve been a longtime subscriber of Maria Popova’s newsletter, The Marginalian, where she weaves art, science, philosophy, and psychology into meditations on meaning. The art of presence is a theme she’s explored often, including in this one: John Ruskin on Drawing and the Art of Observation.
Try This
When I was in high school, I remember sitting in my room just staring at the ceiling. No scrolling (pre-cell phones), nothing to do but think (or not). I now suspect that was some of the best training my mind ever got.
Try it out this week: take 10 uninterrupted minutes to sit and just stare into space. No inputs, no outputs. See what your mind does when it has room to wander.