Take Back Your Crayons: How Construction Can Unlock Their Creativity
For the first several years of my career, I was that guy that was tucked away in a corner crunching numbers.
Design calcs, takeoffs, unit pricing and production rates. You name it, I crunched it. They’d ask me to test new tech right out of the gate and I’d usually finish the tedious work faster than my peers. While they were poking away with digitizers, I was coloring on-screen and integrating tools to shave off steps.
And here’s the thing: everyone thought that meant I was “perfectly suited” for that role. Quiet. Analytical. Efficient.
But inside, I was bored. Bored out of my mind.
The Lie We’ve Been Told
Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod once stated in his book Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity:
“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty, they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.’”
You see, somewhere between finger paints and financial models, most of us in construction and engineering internalized a lie.
Being analytical and logical means we’re not creative.
That’s the lie, and I bought it.
So, we traded in our crayons for protractors, red pens to color on a growing stack of drawings that will never seems to be quite right. We got rewarded for precision and punished for risk, so we stopped coloring outside the lines.
But also, I knew I wasn’t wired to sit silently in the corner forever. I craved something more dynamic, something that stretched me. So, when Kiewit kicked off its digital transformation effort, I raised my hand to help. Most of my peers had to be voluntold. I volunteered.
It was that one decision that changed everything. Standing on the stage at the Kiewit Annual Meeting and leading training across the company helped me discover something that had long been buried.
I wasn’t just an engineer. I was creative.
It felt like a switch flipped on. I finally saw the truth: the same drive that pushed me to solve problems with spreadsheets and scripts could also fuel creative ideas, communication and innovation. In fact, everyone in the construction industry is creative. Engineers and builders are some of the most creative people on the planet. We just don’t call it creativity. We call it “problem-solving.”
That realization about creativity changed the trajectory of my entire career. Can it do the same for you?
Creativity Is the Root of Problem-Solving
Creativity isn’t just painting murals or composing symphonies. It’s seeing possibilities others miss. It’s seeing through constraints instead of just seeing problems. It’s looking at something that’s never been done before and saying, “We can figure it out.”
We do this every day in construction.
We build the bridge with half the budget.
We resequence the pour so the schedule holds.
We automate the RFI workflow so the field stops drowning in paperwork.
We turn chaos into clarity so people can do their best work.
Those aren’t feats of brute logic. They’re acts of creativity. And it’s what separates the teams who move the industry forward from those who just follow the script. The only difference is that we rarely stop to notice how inventive we really are.
The Real Block to Creativity
The biggest obstacle to creativity isn’t a lack of talent, opportunity or intelligence.
It’s disbelief.
Most engineers and builders don’t struggle to be creative. They struggle to believe they are.
We’ve spent so long building reputations as the “logical ones” that we’ve convinced ourselves there’s a wall between logic and creativity. There isn’t. In fact, they’re symbiotic. Logic gives creativity structure; creativity gives logic purpose.
When you stop believing you’re creative, you stop trying to innovate, you stop pitching new ideas, you stop taking calculated risks and you default to the status quo, because it’s safe. Well, in an industry as complex and fast-changing as construction, the status quo will eat you alive.
As John Maxwell says plainly in his book Leadershift, “the only real block to creativity is disbelief.”
And disbelief is a terrible career strategy.
How to Get Your Crayons Back
So how do you break out of the belief that you’re “not creative” and become the kind of problem-solver people can’t ignore?
Here’s a few things to consider to build back up the belief:
Redefine Creativity.
Stop thinking of it as “artsy.” Start thinking of it as building something that doesn’t exist yet. Creativity is construction at its core. If you’ve ever figured out how to deliver a project despite impossible constraints, congratulations, you’ve been creative all along.Revisit Play.
Creativity grows in low-stakes spaces where curiosity can roam. Tinker. Sketch. Build LEGO with your kids (my personal favorite). Find your thing that is pure therapy for the mind.Challenge Constraints.
Every time someone says, “We can’t,” ask “What if we could?” Most breakthroughs are born from constraints, not freedom. If you’re hitting a wall, the wall is probably the point where innovation can happen.Mix Perspectives.
Bring the estimator into the design meeting. Have the field engineer sketch solutions on the whiteboard. Put the software developer out on a jobsite for a day. Innovation almost always happens at the intersections.Ship Ideas.
Don’t just dream. Test. Refine. Share. Creativity builds confidence through action. Start small. Pilot a new workflow. Teach what you’ve learned. That’s how creative thinking becomes contagious.
Notice none of this requires you to abandon your logical, analytical brain. In fact, your analytical brain is your greatest creative advantage. It gives your wild ideas a runway to become real.
The Future Belongs to Creative Builders
Construction doesn’t need more rule-followers. It needs bold thinkers who can see around corners, imagine new systems and solve old problems in new ways.
It needs people who can do what engineers have always done: take a blank page and turn it into something that changes the world.
It needs more engineers and builders who’ve found their crayons again.
Because the future of this industry won’t be shaped by the people who can recite the rulebook.
It’ll be shaped by the people brave enough to rewrite it.
So go ahead. Pick your crayons back up, color outside the lines and build something incredible.
Construction is cool, tell your friends!