The Creative Mornings theme for May was Create, and the local speaker was Giovannie Dixon – LA-born Jamaican-American artist, muralist, and about as self-taught as it gets. The early morning chat took place at Ignite Sparked by BBB in downtown Phoenix – comfortable, bright, built for entrepreneurs and the people who think like them. It’s the kind of place that makes you want to get busy immediately. Maybe start a podcast. Enter the co-working vs cubicle debate. Question business “truths” more this week than you did last week.
That last one turned out to be more relevant than I expected.
If you caught April’s Back Burner blog piece focused on Creative Mornings Phoenix, you already know the drill. Creative Mornings is a free, monthly breakfast event where a local creative speaks on a globally shared theme. No pitch, no agenda – just bagels, coffee, ideas, and a room full of people who chose showing up with curiosity over sleeping in. I’ve been attending the local events since my family and I relocated to The Valley, and I haven’t regretted the monthly early-morning-drive-through-the-desert even once.
Giovannie opened with something that kept rattling around in my head all weekend: “To create is everything. Everything is creative.”
He said it plainly, with no particular flair or performance behind it. Not as a rallying cry, not as a tagline – more like a statement of fact, the way you’d say water is wet or Phoenix sunsets are the most gorgeous end-of-day art installation on the planet. That kind of certainty only comes from somewhere real.
Here’s what’s real about Giovannie Dixon: no formal art training. None. His creative origin story starts with a desire to chase a dream of professional sports that parlayed into picking up some skills in Adobe Illustrator for a family business project. It is, honestly, one of the most relatable creative origin stories I’ve ever heard. There was no grand awakening, no art school epiphany, no gallery debut. Just a project, a tool, and a family t-shirt business that needed some fresh designs. It became the beginning of a very particular philosophy about process versus output. Followed by an intentional move from the cotton canvas to spray paint street-art – which eventually became large-scale murals showing up across Phoenix (and beyond).
By his own account, he still thought of himself as a football player long after the creative work had clearly taken over. The athlete identity had its grip on him. He was doing something that looked unmistakably like art and insisting that he wasn’t really an artist. His resume started to read like someone who discovered a passion and refused to stop following it. Still, he told everyone who asked: “if I can do it, so can you – you are creative.” At least for a while. It took time for Giovannie to accept his new-found passion was actually a talent, a skill, a gift.
I’ve seen that same dynamic play out in conference rooms more times than I can count. The person doing the most creative thinking in the room – reframing the problem, finding the angle nobody else saw – is often the one who wouldn’t call themselves a creative; who wouldn’t accept the title of innovator. They’re an analyst. A marketer. A project manager. The label they’ve been handed doesn’t match the work they’re actually doing, and nobody’s thought to question that – least of all them.
That gap – between the process of thinking creatively and the output people are credited for – is worth paying attention to.
But the idea that hit hardest – the one that earns the long-weekend brain rattle – was Giovannie’s thinking on process versus output.
The way he described it: the creative energy lives in the making, not the made. Finishing a piece ends something. The process is over. The creativity has moved on – dissolved into the air, or transferred into the hands of whoever’s standing in front of the product now. The control has shifted. The viewer takes that freedom – manifesting whatever story or creative process they want to associate with the finished product. The person who made it loses something in the completion – a quiet loss of ownership that nobody talks about enough.
Now sit with that for a second and think about how most organizations are actually run.
We are relentlessly, almost pathologically, output-focused. Deliverables. Deadlines. KPIs. The finished deck, the launched campaign, the closed deal. We celebrate completion. We reward the made. In the process versus output equation, most organizations have already picked a side — and it isn’t the process.
Leaders treat the making – the messy, uncertain, iterative part where the actual thinking happens – as a cost center at best, an obstacle at worst. We optimize it, compress it, systematize it until it resembles a production line more than a creative act. And then we wonder why the output feels hollow, or why the team that produced it looks vaguely depleted.
What if the process isn’t just the path to the output? What if it’s the thing itself?
This isn’t an argument against accountability or measurable results – those do matter, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. But there’s a meaningful difference between holding people accountable for outcomes and managing them as though the outcome is the only thing worth caring about. One of those approaches produces work. The other produces work and creates the conditions for better work to follow.
The leaders I’ve watched build genuinely strong teams tend to understand this intuitively. They create space for the process. These leaders ask about the thinking, not just the result. They recognize that a team grinding toward a deadline without room to explore is a team that will eventually stop surprising you – and not in a good way.
Giovannie talked about two things he holds simultaneously. First: the thrill of being a rookie – the uncertainty, the figuring-it-out, the lack of a settled answer. The excitement we hold before the muscle-memory sets in. Second: the pursuit of what he called Operational Excellence. The craft. The refinement. The deliberate getting-better.
Most management thinking treats these as sequential. You’re a rookie, then you develop, then you reach mastery, then you optimize. The rookie phase is something to move through efficiently on the way to somewhere more useful.
Giovannie is suggesting something different: that the rookie orientation isn’t a phase. It’s a discipline. And the leaders and teams that maintain it – authentic curiosity running alongside genuine competence – are the ones doing the most interesting work.
At FlexTal, I have the benefit of working alongside talented people across a wide range of disciplines, and the ones who consistently stand out aren’t just the most technically accomplished. They’re the ones who haven’t stopped being genuinely curious. Who bring mastery to the table and still ask questions like they don’t have all the answers – because they know they don’t. That combination – people who respect the process as much as the output – is rarer than it should be, and it’s usually what separates good work from memorable work.
I left May’s Creative Mornings the way I usually do: slightly late for the next thing on my calendar. But I had something I didn’t arrive with at 8:30 that morning – a creative challenge. The assignment to revisit some of the management assumptions I’d stopped questioning.
We talk a lot about creative problem solving as a leadership skill – but we tend to frame it as a tool you pick up when the standard playbook isn’t working. Giovannie’s version of it is more fundamental than that. It’s a posture. It isn’t precious or romantic. It’s practical and a little defiant. A willingness to stay in the process, resist the pull toward premature completion, and keep asking what you don’t know yet – even when you’re supposed to have the answers.
The energy is in the making, not the made. That’s true of a mural on a wall in Phoenix. It’s just as true of a team, a strategy, or an organization still in the process of becoming what it’s capable of being.
So regardless of the title you give yourself – leader, operator, analyst, accountant, football player – the question worth sitting with is whether you’re protecting the making, or just managing the made.
Giovannie started with Illustrator and a t-shirt project and ended up with murals across the country. Nobody handed him the credentials. He just stayed in the process long enough to find out what he was capable of.
As you go about your day-to-day routine, pause to consider if something needs to be revisited, recreated, rebuilt. Don’t wait for the right moment or the right credentials. Start. Stay in the process as long as you can. And when you’ve solved this old problem with a new perspective, find the next thing to create.
That seems like a reasonable model.
If you’ve never been to a Creative Mornings event, the city-specific chapters are worth your Friday morning. The themes change, the speakers change, the venues change — but the quality of the conversation doesn’t. Find your local chapter at creativemornings.com.
Chris is the President & COO of FlexTal. He brings 20+ years of experience in Customer Success, UI/UX, design, and marketing – including time within start-ups, agencies, and enterprise orgs. Chris has also served as a University adjunct professor in Advertising & Public Relations for several years.
