Edge Environments

Novelty is a conduit for creativity.

My family is on a summer road trip right now, traveling from Florida up to the northeast. We’re driving through new places, sleeping in different locations, and turning our usual routine on its head. While driving through Virginia at night, we saw fireflies sparkling in the grass. This instantly transported me back to my childhood. That sort of connection wouldn’t happen in the normal routine. You have to step outside of your usual behaviors and actively engage with something different.

Don’t get me wrong—I love routines. The more you do something, the better you get at it. It’s predictable. You know what to expect, which makes it easier to plan for and consistently execute. Humans love patterns, so falling into routines feels safe. We don’t have to worry about the unknowns.

But novelty is a conduit for creativity.

New activities, new places, and new approaches unlock new insights. And you don’t have to take a road trip to do it. You can infuse novelty into your routines to stoke curiosity, creativity, and fresh energy that lights the fire of inspiration.

I call these Edge Environments, the space on the edge of your comfort zone. Unless intentionally provoked, we fall back to the same patterns of behavior. You have to push your edge in order to break the cycle.

Edge Activities

Every day, I go for a walk around the same park in my neighborhood. The timing of the walk fits perfect in my routine before work, or before spending time with the family on the weekend. It works. It’s predictable.

But the predictability is an opportunity to introduce novelty, to stoke the fires of creativity in my regular routine.

What if I walked a different route instead?

We have a large, walkable neighborhood. It’s likely I could go weeks without repeating the same path. I keep the same routine, but infuse novelty to stimulate creative thinking.

This is a type of activity. And you can extend this concept to your team, company, or any of the higher-order structures you work within.

If your team keeps the same meeting and agenda each week, try a brand new agenda once a month. Sometimes just doing the opposite of the norm resets the energy. Or you can take it further and build a system like monthly Hack Days to build value quickly.

Either way, you scale novelty to the team and the underlying systems you operate within. Doing so increases the productivity and impact of the collective.

Edge Spaces

When I get back from my morning walk, I get on the computer and begin work. I work from home in my home office. This is the space in which I practice my craft—my environment for creative work. Where you work has a lot of influence on your work. Environment matters.

The physical spaces we occupy, like the activities we perform, need a dose of novelty from time to time.

Go work in a coffee shop. Take a walk outside and use speech-to-text to dictate thoughts. Or use AI tools like ChatGPT’s Voice Mode to walk and talk. You get outside, stimulate thinking, and stay productive.

For your team, hold an offsite in a new location. If you’re a remote team, working in a physical location is an excellent way to generate new thinking and team bonding.

Edge Practices

One of the experiments I ran last year was to increase how much I work analog. Tactically, I focused on writing notes by hand instead of in a digital tool.

The results were positive.

I retained more information, listened more intently, and asked better questions while writing notes by hand. There’s science to back this up, but turning theory into practice is where knowledge is applied. Writing by hand became a core routine that pushed me out of my usual behavior.

Practices like this can generate the same novelty fuel we’re looking for.

Experiment with new methods in your work, and the work of your team. Pair with new team members to share knowledge and expose context. Have team members regularly switch roles to develop empathy and shared understanding. Even simple acts like changing up engineers on features can stoke the novelty.

Teams naturally get better the more they work together, but they also fall into the same routines. Mixing things up can inject much-needed energy, inspiration, and creativity. This is also why I pay special attention to new team members during onboarding. Their feedback is particularly valuable as they view everything with a fresh perspective.

Every strength has a corresponding weakness.

The strength of routines is in their ability to fortify behaviors. Their weakness is when the routines trigger automatic responses instead of creating room for creative thinking. It’s in this tension that innovation and efficiency thrive. Push yourself by finding the edge of your activities and what work you do; the environment and spaces where you do your work; and the ways you complete the work.

This applies to yourself, your team, and the systems you operate in—the self, the collective, and the structures. Use these levels to expand your thinking and unlock new insights to drive your work.