In August of 1932, the Australian government declared war.
Not on a foreign nation. Not on a political rival. On emus.
Twenty thousand of them… enormous, six-foot-tall birds… had descended on the wheat fields of Western Australia and were absolutely wrecking the place. Farmers were desperate. So the government did what governments do when faced with a hard problem: sent in the military.
Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery showed up with two Lewis guns and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. Ten thousand. Against birds. This was, everyone agreed, a problem that could be solved with superior firepower.
Friends, it could not.
The guns jammed. The emus scattered into small, fast-moving groups the moment the shooting started — impossible to target, impossible to pin down. When soldiers chased them, the birds outran them. An ornithologist on the scene observed (and I love that there was an ornithologist on the scene) that the emus had “divided themselves into small groups, each with its own leader.”
The commanding major eventually threw in the towel with this remarkable quote:
“If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world.”
The campaign was abandoned within a month. The emus stayed. The wheat fields stayed destroyed. And Australia had to live with the historical record showing that it had officially lost a war to birds.
This is one of my favorite true stories. And I think about it constantly when I’m talking to creative leaders.
From Emu To… You
Here’s what the Australian military was doing: they saw a big, messy, overwhelming problem and assumed it could be solved with enough concentrated force. One strategy. One command. Overwhelming resources aimed at a single target. It’s a completely logical approach.
It just didn’t work, because the problem wasn’t that kind of problem.
The emus weren’t a target. They were a system. They were distributed, adaptive, capable of reorganizing faster than any centralized strategy could respond. The more force was applied, the more they scattered. The more they scattered, the more useless the force became. You can’t overwhelm a living system into submission. You have to learn to work with how it actually behaves.
And here’s the thing: creative work is often exactly like that.
You cannot force it. You can’t schedule a breakthrough. You cannot mandate originality or put enough pressure on a team to make genuine insight appear. I’ve watched leaders try, and I’ve even tried it myself (guilty!), and what you get is output, not ideas. Activity, not creativity. The appearance of progress without the thing you actually needed.
The harder you push, the more the real work scatters.
The Lesson To Consider
If the Great Emu War teaches creative leaders anything, it’s this:
Your job is to build conditions, not apply force.
The leaders who consistently get great creative work from their teams aren’t the ones who push hardest. They’re the ones who have figured out how to create the environment where creativity can actually happen. Where people feel safe enough to propose the half-formed idea, where there’s enough slack in the system to let something develop, where the question matters as much as the answer.
That’s not soft. That’s not easy. Honestly, building conditions is harder than applying pressure, because pressure at least feels like you’re doing something. Creating the right environment requires patience, trust, and a willingness to look like you’re not “driving” hard enough, even when you know exactly what you’re doing.
Major Meredith had ten thousand rounds of ammunition. What he needed was a completely different theory of the problem.
Meanwhile, a lot of us are walking around with ten thousand rounds.
What would change in your team or organization if you spent less energy pushing for output and more energy building the conditions for real creative work to happen?
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