The Risk of Playing It Too Safe
Description: Creativity and safety don’t always go hand in hand. While a secure environment is essential for collaboration, playing it too safe can stifle innovation. How can teams embrace just enough risk to keep ideas fresh and groundbreaking?
Reading time: 3-4 min
In creative teams, safety seems like a desirable goal. A conflict-free environment where everyone is comfortable sounds ideal. But what happens when safety becomes a brake on creativity?
Teams that avoid any kind of risk often fall into dynamics of mutual validation, where ideas are repeated, originality fades, and innovation becomes predictable. In these environments, the fear of criticism or failure can lead to self-censorship, blocking disruptive thinking.
A creative team needs a healthy level of tension. This isn’t about fostering chaos, but about allowing questioning, debate, and exploration without fear of failure. True creativity emerges when there is room for vulnerability and courage.
What Creative Risks Can Be Taken?
Taking risks doesn’t mean being reckless—it means daring to step away from the safe formula in search of better results. Some examples:
Proposing a radical idea in a meeting, even if it seems too different or unviable at first.
Changing the work process, exploring new methodologies or tools that could improve the team's dynamic.
Publishing an unfinished concept and opening it to external feedback instead of waiting for perfection.
Challenging client or audience expectations, offering something unexpected rather than what has always worked.
Experimenting with a format that has never been tried before, whether in design, storytelling, structure, or technology.
What’s interesting about these risks is that, even if some fail, each attempt provides valuable learnings that drive the team's evolution.
Exercise: The Creative Risk Map
List recent projects – Each team member writes down a project they’ve worked on in the past six months.
Risk evaluation – On a scale from 1 to 10, they rate how much risk they perceived in that project (1 = safe and predictable, 10 = highly challenging).
Impact analysis – They reflect on whether that level of risk influenced the quality of the result. Was the safest project the most innovative? Did the riskiest one bring unexpected results?
Exploring new risks – Based on the list of creative risks, each person selects at least one they commit to trying in their next project.
Action plan – In small groups, they discuss how they could implement these risks in their dynamics without losing focus or affecting project viability.
This exercise helps visualize how the relationship with risk affects team creativity and allows for designing strategies to step out of the comfort zone without losing control.
