When we think about leadership, we usually think about answers. About someone who knows the way, who provides direction, who decides. And yes, that is needed. Yet the longer we work with organisations, the more often we encounter a different picture – one that quietly contradicts that notion and, precisely for that reason, carries so much power.
Heinz Janisch, who in 2024 received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the most important prize in children’s literature, tells of a girl who said to him at a reading: “I know why you write so little – because then I have more room to think. One word, one adventure. On one page I write fireball, on the next waterfall … and then I ask the children: what else could happen?”
This short story moves us, because it touches something we often lose in adult life: trust in thinking onwards together, in the unfinished, and in the power of curiosity and imagination. Children don’t need perfect answers; they need space. And anyone who has watched a single open word set a whole flock of stories in motion will sense what we mean when we call creating space one of the most neglected leadership tasks.
What if organisations had more spaces like that again?
Spaces in which people don’t just search for solutions but explore possibilities. In which a customer complaint prompts not only “How do we fix this?” but also “What does this teach us about a need we’re not yet serving?”. In which a casual remark by the coffee machine is allowed to become the seed of an improvement no one had on the agenda. This is not a soft concession to individual needs; it is the ground on which anything new can grow in the first place.
Most organisations, however, are trained for the opposite. They are built to spot risks, report deviations and solve problems. That is important and necessary – and at the same time it creates a blind spot. Whoever is constantly looking for what isn’t working easily overlooks what might. Creating space therefore means, first of all, widening that gaze on purpose.
The temptation to fill the space straight away
This is where the real demand on leadership lies. Because a space that is only just emerging is uncomfortable. It is quiet before it becomes lively. People who have worked within tight constraints for years need time to understand freedom as an invitation rather than as uncertainty. Some wait to see whether the offer is meant seriously. Others test the boundaries, and all of them are learning how to handle it. And it is in exactly that moment that the temptation is greatest to close the space again – with a quick answer, an extra rule, a well-meant nudge.
Organisations that create space and then grow impatient when it isn’t filled at once undermine the very trust they are trying to build – often with an undertone suggesting that people don’t want to, or can’t, take responsibility. Space needs time to be experienced as safe. And it needs first positive experiences, showing that acting independently is genuinely valued and not withdrawn at the next setback. Holding the space, even when it still feels empty, is harder than filling it – and more effective.
Where space appears where you least expect it
Sometimes space emerges where no one planned it. A team working directly with customers experienced just that. The atmosphere was tense, mutual reproaches had spread, towards colleagues and towards superiors alike. The team was drifting apart, even though everyone actually liked one another.
The change they introduced was remarkably simple: every morning they met for five minutes. Everyone could briefly say what was on their mind, what was driving them or bothering them – and how they were feeling. Five minutes in which everyone knew where they stood, both on the work and emotionally. The workload stayed the same, yet everything felt lighter. Not because the external conditions had changed, but because the inner tightness had eased.
The quiet leadership task
Perhaps that is the heart of it. Creating space is so easy to neglect because it makes little show on the outside. There is no slide on which it looks good, no metric that rises straight away – on the contrary, it is perceived as inefficient time. It reveals itself only later – in the ideas that suddenly surface in everyday work, in the energy with which people get involved, in the connections that form because someone talked to someone else, not because a process required it.
The girl in Janisch’s story understood it long ago: more room to think comes not from more words, but from the right omissions. What if we understood leadership a little more like that again – as the art of offering an impulse and then asking: what else could happen?
Stay curious.
