What a Quiet and Chill Shift Taught Me About Fear and Ideas

I work security at an office building, and most shifts are slow enough for reading. One shift I picked up a book by Dr. Edward de Bono, a thinker known for his work on creativity. He wrote about lateral thinking, the idea that people often solve problems in straight lines instead of looking at them from new angles.

Reading it made me think about the daytime staff I greet in the morning. Many seem hesitant to share ideas in meetings. I used to think it was shyness. De Bono helped me see it differently. He argued that fear of being wrong is one of the biggest blocks to creative thinking. When people expect harsh judgment for mistakes, they stop offering new ideas and retreat to safe, predictable answers.

I started noticing this pattern around the building. Teams that treated mistakes as normal seemed to come up with better solutions. Teams that punished wrong answers stayed stuck in routine.

I do not manage anyone. I mostly watch cameras and check doors. But de Bono taught me that creativity is not just for managers or designers. It depends on whether people feel safe enough to think out loud and safe enough to be wrong sometimes.

Now when I talk with coworkers, I try to make room for their half formed ideas, not just their polished ones. Great ideas rarely arrive complete. They usually start as a rough guess someone was brave enough to share.

That is the real lesson. Fear does not just stop mistakes. It stops thinking. And a workplace that punishes wrong answers will always run short on new ones.