Resources
We are advisors to superheroes.
Learn more about our clients, projects, and insights. Discover tools, case studies, news, and information.
Mapping Your Passion
Passion is one of the most misunderstood forces in social impact work. We often treat it as fuel, something to burn through in service of urgency. Or as identity, “This is who I am, therefore I must keep going.” Or as motivation, “If I care enough, I’ll find the...
Expand Your Tolerance for Ambiguity
At the end of a long strategic planning retreat, there’s a moment our team at Creation in Common has come to recognize well. The room is tired—deeply, honestly tired—from a day spent in creative collaboration. People have stretched beyond their usual roles, listened...
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...