If you ask leaders whether they want originality inside their companies, they’ll almost always say yes. Who doesn’t want innovative thinking? Fresh ideas? Creative solutions? But watch what actually happens inside most organizations and you’ll see the opposite. Original thought isn’t cultivated - it’s starved.
Why? Because originality is uncomfortable.
Organizations are designed to reduce uncertainty. The larger they get, the more they crave predictability: quarterly forecasts, standardized processes, consistent messaging. But the same forces that protect predictability also suffocate originality. An idea that is too new, too strange, or too untested looks like risk. And risk is what organizations are built to minimize.
The irony is that the founders who created these organizations usually started with an original thought. Airbnb was born from renting air mattresses in a living room. SpaceX from questioning why rockets couldn’t be reused. Nearly every great company started with an idea that seemed eccentric, impractical, or even impossible. But once success arrives, the organization that idea created often turns against new ones.
This shift happens quietly. A manager asks for more data before green-lighting an experiment. A committee insists a new idea should “align with our strategy.” A peer group dismisses something different as “not how we do things here.” No one sets out to kill originality. But little by little, it dies of a thousand paper cuts.
The result is sameness. Companies start to sound the same, market the same, build the same. Their job postings could be swapped with a competitor’s and no one would notice. Inside, employees learn that blending in is safer than sticking out. Better to repeat what’s already been said than risk being wrong.
The scarcity of original thought isn’t caused by a lack of creative people. It’s caused by the systems around them. Put the most original thinker in a culture that punishes risk, and they’ll adapt to survive. Eventually, even they’ll stop bothering to voice the ideas that first made them valuable.
So what can leaders do? First, acknowledge the tradeoff. You can’t have both total predictability and total originality. If you want genuine creativity, you have to tolerate risk, waste, and sometimes failure. Second, create small pockets where originality can thrive without being crushed by bureaucracy. A “safe zone” for new ideas. Third, reward originality even when it doesn’t immediately work. Nothing starves creativity faster than seeing someone punished for trying something different.
The companies that stay alive the longest are the ones that manage this paradox: embracing enough structure to scale, but leaving enough oxygen for originality to survive. It’s not easy, because organizations naturally drift toward sameness. But the cost of not fighting that drift is high. If you don’t protect original thought, eventually you’ll wake up to find you’ve built something safe, predictable — and utterly forgettable.