It isn’t just fear of failure that stifles creativity and innovation – it’s the pursuit of the ‘sure thing’ that closes us off to the possibilities. If we always knew exactly where we’d land we would never discover how high or how far we might have gone.*
(Bernadette Jiwa)

Walking changes activity in the parts of the brain that are concerned with seeing, and it changes then in a variety of positive ways, designed to make responding to what is happening in the real world quicker and more effective.**
(Shane O’Mara.)

It may seem obvious, but when we’re stuck, we need to move.

I don’t mean find the thing we need to do. There’s nothing worse than looking at a screen, fingers hanging motionless over a keyboard, or with pen in hand staring at a notebook.

Get up, walk around.

Moving can also mean opening a book and reading a little. Better still, read some pages from a few books.

Drawing is also moving:

When I’m stuck, I find a picture to copy. […] Drawing changes the way I think and see. […] Copying lets my hand “see” new things.^

One thing for sure is that as complexity increases, so will stuck-ness and we will need to find playful ways forward:

We cannot analyse our way through this level of complexity, but we can play with it.^^

(*From Bernadette Jiwa’s The story of Telling blog: The Advantage of Not Knowing For Sure.)
(**From Shane O’Mara’s In Praise of Walking.)
(^From Lynda Barry’s Making Comics.)
(^^From Graham Leicester’s Transformative Innovation.)