Resources
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Find & Empower Your Simplifiers
According to entrepreneurial strategist Dan Sullivan, there are three kinds of people who shape how things move forward. He calls them Simplifiers, Multipliers, and Complicators. Simplifiers cut through the noise. They see the most direct, effective path and focus on...
The Noise Outside. The Silence Within.
Imagine standing in a busy city behind a heavy glass door with a sound-proof seal. Through the glass, it’s a beautiful spring day. People move with purpose. A man walks his dog. A couple leans into conversation. Traffic builds and releases at the intersection. From...
When Adjusting Can Be Dangerous
By Carlo Cuesta When I studied to become a theater director, one textbook described human drama in the following equation featuring Person A and Person B: A does to B. B reacts and B adjusts. Then… B does to A. A reacts and A adjusts. As the process between A and B...
How to Avoid Screaming into the Abyss
By Carlo Cuesta Life in Minneapolis/St. Paul has been turbulent in this dawn of a new year. But we have been deeply inspired by our community’s response to recent traumatic events. At a time when things are so terribly wrong, when you’d expect people to feel paralyzed...
When Fear Hijacks Creativity… Blow a Whistle!
When fear has unfettered access to our community, the first thing to go is our creative capacity. The ability to imagine and take action toward a just and equitable future is displaced by an obsession to get back to normal, to shelter and protect what we have, or get...
The Four Levers of New Capability
Building a new capability doesn’t mean learning a new skill. It means changing how we see, organize, and show up for the work. At Creation In Common, we’ve learned that four levers must be engaged to create lasting, liberating change. Whether we’re working with a...
The Freedom to Be and to Do
In the social sector, we often talk about capacity—do we have enough staff, funding, or time to deliver on our goals? But there’s a deeper question worth asking: Do we have the capability that this moment requires? At Creation In Common, we embrace...
Disruption Is Not the End—It’s the Invitation
There’s a moment we’ve seen over and over again: An organization’s budget collapses. A key partner disappears. A political shift makes everything suddenly fragile. You look around the table—your team is dazed, scrambling, or just flat-out tired. You know something has...
Creative Tension: The Only Way Forward
We define creative tension as the space between our greatest opportunity and our greatest challenge. It’s not just a stretch or a gap—it’s the living edge of change. The zone where possibility hasn’t yet hardened into certainty, and where the work of transformation is...
From Power to Strength: The Leadership Pivot That Changes Everything
Power is seductive. It feels like control, like certainty. And in nonprofit leadership, it’s easy to believe that if only we had more of it—more money, more connections, more influence—we could finally do the work we were meant to do. But here's the paradox: When...
Kindergarten Voices
In 2025, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) engaged Creation in Common to lead a groundbreaking effort to learn directly from the voices and experiences of the state’s youngest K-12 learners—kindergarteners. Centering child engagement across Minnesota, this...
Four Practices That Move Us Toward Abundance
Shared creativity can move us from scarcity to abundance. Here’s how: 1. Seeing Together: Oxygen Over Urgency When organizations face pressure, the reflex is to act quickly. But fast decisions made in narrow frames often reinforce the very problems we’re trying to...