What if the biggest risk to your organization isn’t competition, a market shift or an economic downturn? What if it’s something quieter – and entirely within your control? Stagnation.

Not the obvious kind, the kind that slips in unnoticed. It shows up when ideas stop evolving, when capable people do exactly what’s expected and nothing more and when progress looks steady on the surface, but nothing truly moves forward underneath. It’s the kind you don’t recognize right away until one day you realize nothing is actually improving.

This isn’t speculation. National data now confirms it. In a 2025 study of 1,000 working Americans conducted by Curiosity 2 Create in collaboration with the Center for Generational Kinetics, 62 percent of employees reported that while their organization claims to value creativity, it actually rewards conformity in daily practice. Even more telling, 74 percent said employees are more likely to be rewarded for being efficient than for being thoughtful.

We say we want innovation, but what we often reward is compliance, speed and execution. Over time, that disconnect doesn’t just limit our thinking – it erodes the momentum organizations depend on to grow.

When it feels safer to stay silent

Every educator has experienced a moment like this. You ask a question and the room goes quiet. Not because people don’t have ideas, but because they’re trying to figure out which answer is safest. Over time, they learn it’s safer to comply than to contribute. From the outside, everything looks like it’s working. The work is done. The room is calm. But the thinking is shallow.

The same dynamic plays out in organizations. Employees don’t hold back because they lack ideas. They hold back because they’ve learned which ideas are welcomed and which are quietly ignored. In fact, 76 percent of employees say most workplace learning today is driven more by compliance than curiosity.

Once that pattern sets in, it compounds. Thinking becomes smaller, safer and more predictable. Organizations get exactly what they signal they want but lose what they actually need.

When tasks replace thinking

Leadership today operates under constant pressure to deliver faster results with less margin for error. The natural response is to focus on what can be seen, tracked and measured. Tasks are prioritized, timelines are tightened and deliverables define success. None of this is wrong. The problem is what gets crowded out.

Without ever saying it directly, organizations are sending a clear message: what matters most is what you produce, not how you think. People respond rationally. They complete the task rather than question it, meet expectations rather than stretch them and keep things moving rather than push ideas forward.

What fades isn’t effort or capability. It’s the willingness to think beyond what is required, and that willingness is what separates organizations that execute from those that evolve.

The hidden cost of stagnation

The consequences show up in two ways: people leave or they stay and disengage. In our national study, 44 percent of employees said they had left a job because they didn’t feel their thinking was valued. Even more striking, 59 percent of executives said the same.

Think about what that means. The people with the greatest ability to shape thinking cultures have themselves walked away from environments that couldn’t sustain them.

For those who stay, the cost is just as real. Gallup’s 2023 ‘State of the Global Workplace’ report found that at least 50 percent of employees in the United States are disengaged, doing only what’s required. They complete the tasks but withhold the thinking, energy and initiative that drive real progress.

When thinking is limited, innovation doesn’t disappear altogether, it slows. Ideas shrink. Conversations become safer. Energy fades. Over time, engagement drops, progress flattens and organizations plateau. Stagnation rarely announces itself. It builds quietly, disguised as stability.

The 2x effect: What changes when thinking is encouraged

Here is what makes this problem and its solution so significant. When organizations fully encourage deeper thinking, employees are more than twice as likely to apply it in their daily work. Our research found that in environments that support critical thinking, 60 percent of employees consistently use it, compared to just 27 percent where it isn’t supported. Similar gaps exist for curiosity and creative thinking.

This is not a marginal improvement. It is a fundamentally different way of showing up at work. The capability was never the constraint. The environment was.

Walk into a place where thinking is encouraged and you can feel it. People lean in. They question, build on each other’s ideas and contribute without waiting to be asked. That kind of environment doesn’t happen by accident. It is designed and it starts with what leaders consistently value and model.

The shifts that break stagnation

Stagnation isn’t a workload problem. It’s an attention problem. The moment you shift what you pay attention to, you begin to shift how people think. Most organizations are wired to notice completion: tasks finished, deadlines met and outputs delivered. If you want to shift that, you have to start noticing something different.

Start with your meetings. Most are structured for reporting, not thinking. Shift five minutes. Pause and ask: What are we missing? What would we do differently if we started over? Where might we be wrong? Then stay there long enough for people to actually think.

Our research found that only 61 percent of working Americans say their company’s meetings encourage new thinking rather than repeating old patterns. That is a solvable problem and it starts with the next meeting you lead.

Change how you respond to ideas. When someone suggests an alternative to your solution, resist the urge to evaluate it immediately. Instead of “That won’t work”, ask, “What would need to be true for this to work?” That single reframe keeps thinking alive instead of shutting it down before it has a chance to develop.

Make thinking visible by naming it when you see it. Begin by recognizing the question that challenged the room, not just the task that got completed as result. What leaders celebrate becomes what people repeat, and right now, most organizations are celebrating execution while quietly penalizing the kind of exploratory thinking that execution eventually depends on for innovation.

Seek feedback at all levels. Our study found that seeking feedback from employees across all levels of the organization is the single most valued example of leadership in action (39%). It isn’t complicated. It’s a signal, and signals compound over time.

Generational urgency: The next decade of leadership

Our data surfaces a generational dimension to this challenge that leaders cannot afford to ignore. Gen Z workers – those currently entering and establishing themselves in the workforce – are significantly more likely than older generations to be hindered by fear of making mistakes and a lack of psychological safety. They are also significantly more likely to feel unsupported in taking risks and asking questions.

At the same time, 74 percent of all working Americans believe young adults today have a harder time with curiosity, critical thinking and connection in the workplace than previous generations did. We are, in other words, inducting the next generation of workers into thinking-suppressive environments at precisely the moment they are forming their professional habits and expectations.

The leaders who address this now are not merely solving a current performance problem. They are shaping the thinking culture their organizations will operate within for the next decade.

The stakes for leaders who wait

Here is what the data ultimately tells us and what leaders should sit with – the organizations that fail to create thinking cultures will not collapse dramatically. They will plateau quietly. Their most thoughtful people will leave, and we now know that this includes, disproportionately, their executives.

The people who remain will complete the tasks and withhold the thinking. And the gap between those organizations and the ones that invest in deeper thinking will widen steadily, compounding in ways that are very difficult to reverse.

The 2x effect documented in our research is not a ceiling, it is a floor. It represents what happens when leaders make even a basic shift from tolerating thinking to genuinely encouraging it. Organizations that build cultures where curiosity is structural, where mistakes are treated as learning and where employee voice drives decision-making will operate in a fundamentally different category.

The good news is that this is within reach for any leader who chooses to pursue it. Every meeting you lead, every question you ask and every idea you respond to is either creating space for thinking or quietly closing it down. The research is clear on what needs to change. The question now is whether leadership will be up to the challenge.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.