Nurse researcher details the effective ways to foster creativity

Christi Zuber, PhD, RN, a nurse leader and longtime practitioner of human-centered design in health care, urged attendees at the AONL 2026 to embrace creativity as a core leadership competency, arguing that it may be the profession's most underutilized asset. Zuber, who is a senior nursing consultant at Stanford Health Care in Palo Alto, Calif.,  and CEO of Aspen Labs Network noted health care leaders face significant barriers to building creative capacity in their organizations, adding that changing an organization's culture to support creativity takes an average of seven years. Rather than waiting for culture to shift, Zuber urged attendees to build microclimates or protected subcultures within their organizations, where creativity and intelligent risk-taking can take root and eventually influence the broader culture. Zuber distinguished between bad failure, or preventable breakdowns in systems, and intelligent failure, which she described as hypothesis-driven experimentation in new territory. "You've got to hold space for the dopey ideas," she said, "in order to have those delightful ideas."