You’ve dished it out before, and you’ve taken it.

“Well, good morning. Nice of you to finally join us!” “He’s always taking long lunches.” “Wish I could leave at 4:30 every day...must be nice!” “Is he ever at his desk?” “Sure must be great to work from home every Friday.” “Seems like she uses all her sick days to go shopping.” “Oh, she’s home with a sick kid... again. I need to get myself a kid.”

Do any of these phrases sound familiar? We call this “Sludge.”

Sludge is the workplace chatter that reinforces the idea that people can’t be trusted with complete autonomy. We identified Sludge as one of the most powerful and persistent barriers to a productive, creative, and fulfilling workplace when we were developing the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). Sludge can be mean-spirited gossip or even friendly banter. We Sludge (it’s a noun and a verb!) for many reasons, but it’s ultimately meant to either directly or indirectly shame a coworker for not approaching work the way it’s “supposed” to be approached.

Sludge is a powerful force in maintaining the status quo and implies that work only happens at...

WATCH: Gary Hamel introduces the SAP Unlimited Human Potential Challenge

So much of the conversation in business is about power: what you control (“I run a $200 million piece of the business”), who you control (“My 350 direct reports”), and how you control (org charts, pay grades, policy manuals). Of course, power and control are spectacularly subpar strategies for unleashing human imagination, initiative, and passion—all those qualities every organization needs in abundance in order to thrive in the Creative Economy.

Is everyone creative? Sure they are but in very different ways and to varying degrees. There is a big difference between the folksong you wrote for your college sweetheart and a symphony composed by Beethoven. Our democratic longing to make everyone and everything equal has lead us to make creative greatness indistinguishable from an act of personal expression. What is lacking is meaningful appreciation of the different levels of creativity and how we can use them as steps for increasing our own potential.

Borrowing from everyone from Aristotle to Zappa, let’s examine the five levels and types of creativity, from the easiest to the most difficult to master, and some of the creative methodologies associated with each.

Mimetic Creativity

Mimesis is a term passed down to us from the Ancient Greeks meaning to imitate or mimic. This is the most rudimentary form of creativity. Animals from Caledonian crows to orangutans have the ability to create tools simply by observing other creatures. Watch a mother and child together and it becomes clear that we do the same. It is the foundation of the learning process.

An often overlooked form of creativity is simply taking...

Over the last decade, digital, social, and mobile technologies have greatly expanded the scope of personal freedom—the freedom to connect with anyone anywhere in the world; the freedom to contribute and to make a real impact on the basis of merit rather than position; the freedom to create and express oneself; the freedom to choose what to buy, what to join, what to work on; and the freedom to challenge , to speak up, to push back, to rise up.

Thanks to digital technologies and social media, we have more choice than ever in our personal lives; but at work, not so much. To be sure, many companies have adopted “Enterprise 2.0” technology and tools to drive internal collaboration and engagement with external communities, but there’s little evidence that these new tools have significantly enlarged the scope of employee autonomy.

Get up and running with the Digital Freedom Cheatsheet

That’s no surprise. The broad majority of organizations operate according to bureaucratic practices and principles designed to maximize standardization, specialization, predictability, and efficiency. In other words, most of our organizations are designed for control—controlling people, controlling information...

In 1973, Peter Drucker stated in his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices , "Management is not culture-free, that is, part of the world of nature. It is a social function. It is, therefore, both socially accountable and culturally embedded."

Tom Peters some thirteen years later in an article, Managing As Symbolic Action, remarked: "It requires us, as managers, to get people to share our sense of urgency in new priorities; to develop personal, soul-deep animus toward things as they are; to get up the nerve and energy to take on the forces of inertia that bog down any significant change program."

Yet, here we are in 2013 with organizational leadership models that continue to deny the social nature of organizations and wallow in inertia.

Our leadership practices remain authoritative. People are disengaged, distrusting and perhaps even disenfranchised.

According to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, less than 20 percent of respondents believe leaders are actually telling the truth when confronted with a difficult issue in their organizations. Furthermore, a study conducted by the Human Capital Institute and Interaction Associates in 2013 found only 34 percent of organizations had high levels of trust in the places they...

Big Data is big business. Sensors, GPS tracking, math modeling, and artificial intelligence offer companies real-time market insights at massive scale and open the door to unprecedented ways of monitoring, targeting, and measuring employees and customers. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that enterprises adopting Big Data technologies will “outperform competitors by 20 percent in every available financial metric.”

Big Data might well be “the new oil,” but I would caution us not to worship it as the new religion. I’m afraid that amidst all the data frenzy we are not only losing a more holistic view of business but also an important part of our humanity. How do we appreciate quality if we capture it only in quants? How much (or little) space do we leave for creativity and human expression if we equate better living with better algorithms?

I am not a dataphobe, but I am concerned about relying only on data. I am not against quantitative metrics, but I question their authority as the main indicators of business performance, prosperous societies, and meaningful lives.

Big Data comes with many benefits, but let’s complement it with Big Intuition . Here are six...