Markus Dietrich, Group Lead Engineering & Technical Development at Siemens Digital Industries, completed Leading for Creativity and a Discovery X. What followed has fundamentally changed his team and his approach to leadership.
We sat down with Markus Dietrich, Group Lead Engineering & Technical Development at Siemens Digital Industries, after he completed both the Leading for Creativity training and, together with his team, a Discovery X with us. Markus is someone who is deeply passionate about his work, thinks with precision and holds himself and his team to high standards. Not an obvious candidate for creativity training for engineers, one might think. That is exactly why we wanted to hear how he experienced it.
In our conversation, he spoke openly about what made him skeptical at first, where the process surprised him and at what point he realized that something in his thinking had genuinely shifted. He walked us through a concrete development project that had kept his team stuck for months and explained how the Discovery X helped them achieve a breakthrough they never would have reached on their own. He has kindly made his account available for this success story.
What nobody had ever explained to me about creative thinking.
Honestly, I was skeptical. When my manager told me to take part in a Leading for Creativity program, I had a very clear picture in my head: sticky notes, flipcharts, colorful markers, group exercises that feel like a team event nobody actually booked. And then back to the desk as if nothing had happened. No impact, no connection to my actual work. I was completely wrong.
“I never would have thought that creativity training for engineers could get to me like this.”
– Markus Dietrich, Group Lead Engineering & Technical Development, Siemens Digital Industries
What surprised me from the very first session was the scientific foundation. This was structured, methodical training on how creativity actually works in the brain, how I as a leader can create psychological safety and how to deliberately use divergent and convergent thinking within my team. Creativity knowledge made understandable for an engineer. That fundamentally changed my understanding of creativity.
The concept of divergent and convergent thinking in particular hit home. As an engineer, I am used to structuring problems, narrowing them down and solving them. Convergent thinking comes naturally to me. I move toward a goal, I filter, I decide. That feels productive and right.
Divergent thinking, however, does not feel that way at first. Not at all.
When you work in divergent mode, you open up the space. You allow ideas that seem absurd at first glance. You do not evaluate, you do not sort things out, and you sit with the fact that most of it will never work. For someone like me, who is used to moving efficiently toward solutions, that was genuinely uncomfortable. It felt chaotic. At times even pointless. But that was precisely the point.
Through Leading for Creativity, the Creativity Lab taught me that this tension is not a flaw in the process. It is the process. Divergence creates the space where truly new ideas can emerge. Whoever converges too early, whoever evaluates and filters too soon, will keep arriving at the same solutions. And that, as it turned out, had been our problem all along, even though we had never named it that way.
As a result, I came to understand that creativity is not a personality trait you either have or you do not. It is a trainable skill. And as a leader, I am the one who determines whether my team even has the conditions to develop that skill.
Consequently, I started structuring meetings differently. I deliberately built in phases where we only collect ideas and do not yet evaluate them. I stopped immediately saying “that won’t work” and instead started asking: “What would we need for this to work?” My team noticed the shift. The atmosphere in our working sessions changed noticeably. People who had previously been quiet suddenly started contributing ideas that genuinely moved us forward.
A real problem and a solution we never thought possible.
The real turning point, however, came during the Discovery X. We had a concrete technical problem in one of our development projects, a challenge we had been going around in circles on for months. The same approaches, the same constraints, the same frustration. The Creativity Lab then offered us a Discovery X, a structured project engagement where the team works together with the Lab’s facilitators and consultants on a real, self-selected problem. With a clear goal: to develop a creative, innovative and ideally patentable solution.
I was curious, but also a little doubtful. We are engineers. We know our problem better than anyone else. That, as it turned out, was exactly our blind spot.
The Discovery X pulled us out of our own perspective. And this is where everything I had learned in Leading for Creativity came together. We worked divergently, consistently and deliberately. Longer than it felt comfortable, broader than we were used to and more openly than we thought necessary. Only then, once the space was genuinely full of ideas we never would have generated on our own, did we converge. Structured, methodical, with clear criteria and priorities.
The outcome surprised even us. A solution we never would have arrived at through our normal way of working. Technically sound, feasible and with real patent potential. Our first tests showed surprisingly good results, even better than expected. But now it is up to us to turn the concept into physical reality through industry-specific test procedures.
In Conclusion
I would wholeheartedly recommend both Leading for Creativity and the Discovery X to my Siemens colleagues. Especially if you feel like your projects keep running into the same walls, or if you sense as a leader that your team has more potential than it is currently able to express. The Creativity Lab gives you the processes, tools and the understanding to arrive at something truly new and valuable. And the best part is that it works because it is grounded in real science, in structure and in a deep understanding of how people arrive at truly good ideas together.
I wish I had known about this sooner.
