Accidental Creative

Getting LOST

Some friends and I were talking about the TV show “Lost” today. One of my friends said that a working theory of the show is that it’s simply a large-format Skinner model attempting to prove that the human brain ALWAYS tries to find patterns.

We were musing about what would happen if in the end a plane showed up, everyone is rescued, the “others” come out of the forest and say, “Hey, all…we’re really sorry about all of that stuff”, Walt comes running out of the forest with them and is doing great, everyone gets on a plane and goes home.

IMAGINE THE OUTRAGE BY THE VIEWING PUBLIC!

Why? Because we like to think that there’s a pattern to everything. We like to think that Polar Bears showing up randomly on an island, and smoke staring people in the face and numbers that seem cursed all have something to do with a larger pattern - it can’t all be random, for crying out loud.

Hmm.

New podcast

The new podcast on choice and clarity will be posted early Friday afternoon. I’m on the road doing some writing (in Oxford, OH - home of Miami University), and realized that I have no way to get the file up until I get back to the office.

This week’s podcast deals with the subject of clarity vs. certainty and how often this can become a tension within creative organizations and within our own personal creativity.

UPDATE: The new podcast is now on iTunes. Enjoy!

e-mail list-o-rama

Just in case your e-mail inbox is getting anemic, (um…yeah…), you can now sign up for the monthly Accidental Creative e-news. There are book reviews, thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc., and as always it’s FREE.

Sign up on the Accicental Creative homepage.

eddie…

A few of us on the team are developing a new project/team management platform called “eddie”. It’s a web-based project and time tracking system that in many ways functions just like other project tracking systems. The key difference is that at its heart is a rhythm/time evaluation tool called the “life-o-meter” that gives an individual/sub-team/organizational view of individual morale, productivity and time use. The goal of this is to be able to track and trace patterns of productivity and morale over seasons. It also enables the leaders of the organization to adjust the “thermostat” during certain seasons to allow for more or less freedom and to regulate rhythmic productivity.

I will write more as we get closer to rolling it out.

Here are a few pictures from my “wall-o-dry-erase-board.” (One wall of my office is completely covered with magnetic dry-erase…)

New podcast is on iTunes (”machines”)

Here’s a direct link: #7 - machines

Below is a graphical illustration of what I discuss in this episode. (See if you can decode it before you listen….it’ll be fun…:)

By the way…if you’re enjoying the podcasts, Id love to hear from you at interact@accidentalcreative.com

If you could, also write a positive review on iTunes. That’d help a lot. Thanks!

New podcasts…

So Fridays are the day. A new AC podcast will be released this Friday, and each Friday hereafter. I’ve been working on tons of material and will be releasing one each Friday for the next several weeks.

Thanks so much for all of the positive feedback, and for your patience.

On Design…

One of the best books I’ve read recently is a little book adapted from Tom Peters’ “Re-Inmagine” called “DESIGN”. Wow! There are so many great insights into a well-designed product, organization, system, whatever. It’s a quick read and I highly encourage it. We just finished a round of branding work at the org where I work, and this book largely shaped our journey. It has also awakened our org to the necessity of having design at the heart of every conversation - whether it’s a systems conversation or an aesthetic one - because in reality we all desire great design, whether in how we work or products we use or consume.

Cool tools for thinking…

If you are a mac person, you DEFINITELY want to continue reading. If not, then you might want to skip this post.

There are a few tools that I find totally indispensable for organizing and visualizing work. The first is CURIO. It’s a mac-based visual mapping program for designers or planners. It allows you to pull pictures into layouts and arrange them however you wish. It’s incredibly flexible and amazing for big projects that require a lot of visual mapping.

The second is DevonThink. You can throw everything into it, and it will take it, organize it, and find other files that are similar. It handles nearly any type of file - Quicktime, jpg, txt, doc, whatever. You can also tag your files for later reference, and if you want, it will auto-classify them into categories and folders. It’s an amazing program.

I have no stake in these programs - they have, however, changed the way I think and work. Enjoy!