Accidental Creative

Everyone in their place, and a place for everyone…

So one of the things we’re struggling with right now in the organization I lead is role and responsibility.

We’ve discovered that we’re expecting people to be who they aren’t. What a great way to cause stress and dissonance, huh?

Are you letting your artists be artists, your strategists be strategists, your execution people be execution people? What does your creative workflow look like? Do the artists have the information they need to MAKE, or are they constantly in “feel out my boundaries” mode?

A river with banks runs deep. A river without banks dries on the plain. Boundaries are critical to effective organizations.

Reality is that people will have to fill more than one role. However, we can make choiceful decisions about what we are requiring of people in terms of their time. A few of us on the team have been struggling with how to allocate time. Time is the key determinant of productivity - where we spend our time determines how productive we will be as an organization. If we can get a good handle on who needs to be doing what, when and how well, then productivity will soar.

Be vicious about meetings. Slash and burn. Make people FIGHT to keep them. Then rebuild them being very cautious about who is invited to what. Make sure that artists are not sitting in a meeting when they could be making. Make sure that the right people are engaged in strategy early enough to get buy-in so that direction is not shifting too far down the pipeline.

This is a dissonance eliminator.

What are you thinking?

Have you thought about your….umm….thoughts?

Have you ever taken the time to plot what’s on your mind?

Try this experiment:
Carry a small notebook with you. (I use my Treo, and sometimes a small Moleskine.) Put the date at the top of the page, and then track your thoughts for that day. Whenever you have a conscious thought, write it down (or type it in…) Try to be as diligent as possible with this. It will amaze you how circular your thinking is. This means that your brain is trying to tell you something. It’s trying to communicate something to you about a problem you’re encountering - maybe something at work, maybe how to open the pickle jar at home. Whatever. There’s something on your brain that it’s trying to solve. Plot your thoughts and see if you can find a pattern, then apply them to the projects you have in front of you. Solutions? I think so.

This technique depends heavily on diligence. If you don’t have the stamina to consciously focus on your thoughts for a day, then you may not see the results. Even a few hours can be tremendously helpful. As I’ve said before, your brain wants to solve your problems. You simply need to listen to it.

It can be your best ally, or your most ardent detractor.

What makes good?

For those who lead organizations, do the artists on your team understand what makes something good? Really. Do they know the process you go through when you are evaluating work?

I’ve written and spoken a few times about dissonance and the “black box” phenomenon. This applies not only to corporate decision making, but also to small-scale evaluations. Are there guiding principles for evaluation that are clearly communicated to your team?

Try giving three words, single words, that communicate the value you are trying to achieve for the client with the project.

Expansive, digging, relentless

Leader, immersive, equipped

Energetic, risk-taker, rock climbing

Whatever they might be for each project. This gives verb-language to noun-projects. What are the aspirational words for this work?

This begins to frame up for everyone on the team how decisions are being made and gives some kind of common language with which to discuss what’s being produced.

What think you?

Here’s a Fast Company blog post about how to act like a designer. What do you think about it?

How to act like a designer