“Today’s choices yield tomorrow’s results.” I repeat this message so often and in so many contexts – at companies, conferences, in interactions with taxi drivers and checkout clerks – that I sometimes feel like a broken record (or a scratched CD…umm…corrupted mp3 file.)

But it’s a message that can’t be emphasized enough in today’s “results-now” world. The choices we make today about where we spend focus, time and energy directly impact our ability to pounce on opportunities tomorrow.

It all comes down to building the right platforms. The main definition of a platform is a raised surface that provides an elevated view for you and/or your audience. Building a platform gives you an increased ability to see opportunities and take advantage of them. In other words, platforms give you pounce-ability.

• When you establish practices in your life in the areas of Focus, Relationships, Energy, Stimuli and Hours, you are building a platform that is designed to produce results tomorrow. You may experience some immediate lift from your efforts, but the main aim is to set yourself up for sustainability and long-term effectiveness. You’re increasing your ability to take advantage of opportunities by ensuring you’ll have the needed focus, time ideas and energy to do so. How can you improve the platform that supports your creative work?
• When you build a platform that allows others to express their ideas and insights, you are investing in your future ability to connect with a meaningful tribe. By helping others accomplish their goals, you may find that it helps you accomplish yours as well. How can you build a platform for others to express themselves?
• When you give away aspects of your work that others are better equipped to do effectively, you are building a platform that increases the overall effectiveness of the organization. (That’s a big reason why we are diversifying the number of voices in the mix on the AC site and why I’ve invited the brilliant Matt Gartland to be our new Editorial Director. We’re also bringing more people into the mix very soon.) Sometimes platforms crumble when you try to build them by yourself. Are there others who can help you build your platform?

Platforms not only give you an elevated view of opportunity, they also become an attractor for other likeminded change-makers. As we give lift to others’ thoughts and insights, we may find that it increases the size of the platform beyond what we could do alone.

A few questions:

1. How can you build (or better reinforce) the platforms in your work so that you’ll be more effective?

2. Can you think of some examples of especially effective platforms you’ve seen or been a part of?

Here are the five principles that I believe every (EVERY!) leader of creative teams must live by if they want thriving teams.

1. Be a laser, not a lighthouse.

Many leaders are so concerned about safety that they spend much of their time talking about what not to do versus what to do. They operate more like a lighthouse than a laser. A lighthouse can only tell you where not to go, but can’t provide any kind of precise direction or alternative. Creative teams need precise, focused direction. Like a laser. A laser is an offensive tool, not a defensive one. (Unless you’re Han Solo in the cantina. Apparently, Greedo shot first.)

Your team needs you to tell them what to do, not what not to do. Be a laser, not a lighthouse.

2. Encourage dissent, foster discontent.

Healthy teams have a level of dissent in their strategic conversations. You know your team is in trouble when there is no disagreement. It means one of a few things is probably happening:

• People are too comfortable to risk speaking up. Things are cushy.
• No one is really thinking. There is a lack of true ownership of the vision. People are just doing their jobs.
• There’s a general lack of accountability for the work. It’s spread too thin.

You encourage dissent on the team by rewarding strong, focused opinions. If you want something to happen, reward it. Encourage people when they speak a contrary opinion. Change your mind and admit that you were wrong, publicly. Foster strong conversations about direction and fuel the passion of your team members.

At the same time, you must foster discontent with the current level of the work. You do this by re-framing the conversation. Instead of comparing your work with other, similar work by other companies or teams, re-frame expectations by expanding the team’s view of what’s possible. Instead of being the best brand design firm on the block, re-frame the goal as being the best at creating customer experiences or capturing marketplace attention. Instead of being the best copywriter, re-frame the goal as being the best at framing marketplace narrative. Always (ALWAYS!) be pushing your team to new heights. Don’t allow them to settle.

3. Defend your team to the death.

What’s the fastest way to permanent failure as a creative leader? Sell out your team. No amount of subsequent action matters. Once you’ve lost their trust, you will never regain it.

Here’s a principle worth writing on your hand: the leader gets to take the most arrows. If you’re going to lead the team, you are responsible and accountable for the final work, including the creative choices made and the execution thereof. Everyone wants to be the leader, but few really want to lead. Your team must see you defending them when it counts most. If they do, then they will be there to defend you when you make a risky choice that fails or when you over-extend on your interpersonal bank account.

The leader goes first. Defend your team to the death.

4. Remember the spilled blood.

Closely related to principle #3, we must remember that we are not the only ones expending ourselves to make things happen. People on your team have poured their blood, sweat and tears into their work. They die many deaths in the pursuit of brilliance. But as leaders, the only thing that often matters is “what have you done for me lately?”

Do NOT cheapen the sacrifice of your team. Many of them have poured themselves intensely into their work in order to help the team succeed. Don’t forget that in a moment of weakness, whether yours or theirs.

5. Clarity trumps certainty.

Here’s a dirty little secret for leaders: you don’t have to have all of the answers. (In fact, if you think you do, you’re probably not as good of a leader as you think.) But even when you don’t know the answer, you MUST be clear about your expectations of the team. When you aren’t your team is likely to spin out into misery-land. You must be clear about your expectations even when you’re not certain.

Vision diffuses, meaning that it disperses through the air and gets less precise as the project proceeds. You must, therefore, begin with incredible precision. You need to make sure that the 5 W’s of project strategy (Who, What, When, Where, Why?) are answered before moving on to creative strategy (how?). Then you must communicate these objectives clearly and precisely, even when you’re not certain. Many leaders leave room for ambiguity because they’re insecure about their own abilities. This lack of clarity trickles down and makes things unnecessarily complex.

We had a great conversation around these principles with the group in St. Louis, but I know that there are also many leaders in the AC community with extensive experience in leading creative teams. What principles would you add to this list?

Photo credit:  Randy Le’Moine

Are you smoking what you’re selling? In other words, are you actually living out what you’re saying to others? Are you walking your talk? Or – said more bluntly – are you being a person of integrity?

As a leader, there is very little room for hypocrisy or laziness around lining up objectives with day-to-day activity. When you fail to line up your actions or your team systems with your words, it will significantly affect your team’s ability to do great work. Here are a few signs of this:

What you say you are about is not what your systems are designed to do. Strategic thinking is irrelevant, so the team stops thinking strategically. When systems are out of alignment, strategy just takes too much effort.

What you say is important isn’t what you really reward. People will do what they are ultimately rewarded for. You need to have rewards systems that line up with what you say the organization values.

You don’t deliver on commitments. Every compromise – whether you are late on a delivery date or to a meeting – is a crack in the dam of trust. Over time the results can be catastrophic.

Doing great creative work is challenging enough without having to deal with the complexities of misalignment. Do an audit of your team systems and your commitments and see if there are any inconsistencies. The result of bringing these into alignment will be better work for you and your team.

(Photo credit: spacepleb)

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, because I know that there are a lot of AC’ers who are involved in direct or ancillary ways in web development/design and web-based businesses. Last night I spoke as a gathering of Cincinnati-based web entrepreneurs headed-up by Mindbox Studios and shared the top seven lessons I’ve learned about how to (not) find traction on the web. These are all attached to painful experiences I’ve had over the past several years of pushing AC onto the web and working to find a way to connect creatives in conversation about their process.

I don’t think these ideas are limited to the web by any means. They also apply to creative teams and organizations who are trying to do something meaningful. It’s hard work turning an idea into something beneficial to others and it takes discipline, focus and a willingness to learn. Here are my learnings:

1. Leverage enthusiasm early. When people get very excited about what you’re doing, have a simple, direct next action for them. Equip them to spread the word about your venture, then get out of the way. Six months later, the fire will be gone.

2. Taking ground is 90% grunt work, 10% air coverage. We were given a serious gift of major news coverage very early in the life of AC. There was a feature article in a magazine boasting a circulation of 10+ million (yeah…it was a big one) and we’ve received other major coverage since. And truthfully, I’ve seen significantly higher returns on my everyday, plug-away work ethic than I did from any of the big news coverage. There is no getting around hard work, and there are no “magic bullets” for instant recognition and success.

3. Consistency breeds loyalty. In the first four years of AC on the web, we changed platforms 4 1/2 times and switched up our product offering 3 times. Confusion leads to apathy leads to disinterest. Be consistent and clear in setting expectations for your customers.

4. Relationship (not content) is king. Broadcasting should be left to big media. If you don’t like people, don’t start a web-business. Period. You need to be prepared to build customers and loyal enthusiasts one interaction at a time. And you have to care about the results. If you’re not ready for that, don’t even think about it. Go get a corporate job.

5. Simpify. Simplify your platform, simplify your systems (and automate them as much as possible), simplify your product offering. You need to focus your efforts on high-impact tasks and projects, not on maintenance. That’s the sure path to getting stuck in the muck.

6. Understand your platform(s). You don’t have to know how to build a website, but you need to understand how they work. And you need to know how to have an intelligent conversation with developers about what you expect. Many developers are not visionaries. You will get what you ask for, and if you don’t know how to explain it to them, you will wind up with something less than what you want.

7. Find sounding boards and resonant voices. You need (a) sounding boards, or people you can bound ideas off of and “ping” to stay aligned, and you need (b) resonant voices in your life, or people who stretch you and challenge you to think in new ways about your business. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely world and it’s easy to get lost. You need both a compass (resonant voices) and a map (sounding boards to identify landmarks in the terrain.)

I would love it if you would share any additions to this list based upon your experiences. Some of the most powerful insights into my own work over time have come from simple conversations about what others have experienced. Failure is only failure if you learn nothing, right?

And the worst part of all of this is that it creates a significant amount of dissonance within the organization. Not only does it silence dissension and free thought, it causes all of those involved to live in a constant state of tension between “what IS” and “what we SAY is.” No matter how hard we try to ignore this dissonance, it will eat away at our creative energy. And over time it will cause the artists in our midst to shut down, generally disengage or “play along”, but the organization will NOT get the best work and thinking out of them. 

This is not just an organizational thing. Creative people can be tempted to present the best parts of themselves and ignore the rest. (By the way, “the rest” is usually what makes us interesting.) When people connect with and approve of the part we present, we can begin to feel a sense of disdain for the other parts of us (the part we hide.) So the approval of others (the echo-chamber) becomes a kind of “judgment” on the parts of us we hide. So by pretending to be something we’re not, we’re setting ourselves up for judgment and extreme self-criticism.

Leaders: are there echo-chambers in your organization? Are you being brutally honest? Are you setting good rails? Do you have good metrics? How do you know you’re succeeding (other than “gut feel”)? Are you cultivating a culture of truth-telling and trust?

Artists: Are you pursuing self-awareness? Do you have people in your life who will tell you the truth? Are you “positioning” and wearing masks so as to hide certain parts of you? Do you find yourself being extremely critical of your work, your life, your decisions? 

Good dissonance is what leads to great creative. It’s the tension between what IS and what COULD BE that propels us forward. Bad dissonance zaps our creative and mental bandwidth. Let’s destroy the echo chambers and commit to being a culture of radical honesty and self-awareness.

When was the last time you admitted a mistake?
When was the last time you took the fall for a team decision?
When was the last time you submitted to someone else’s intuition?
When was the last time you asked for advice? I mean REALLY asked for advice?

Pride builds walls around us and isolates. When pride becomes our mode of operation it will inevitably leak into the organization and will eventually create little self-defensive “silos.” When the leader is always right, everyone feels like they must always be right as well. 

The need to be “right” creates an culture of backward-justification. We’re always looking for ways to prove that we were right even when the evidence doesn’t add up. And in the end, it creates a sense of helplessness in the organization because it has lost all sense of objectivity about metrics. And it also justifies mediocrity. 

If you need your ego stroked, great…go for it. Somewhere else. But don’t look to your team for it. It will – in the end – destroy any hope of making something meaningful. And in the end, if you refuse to be humbled, someone else will probably do it for you.

Seriously? Am I going to look at a placard like this and think, “Hey…what a wonderful solution to my child-care problem!” 

Now, I’m certain that the people behind this ad are wonderful, child-loving people, etc., but c’mon…any parent (barring those in a desperate situation) is going to think twice before picking up the phone.

Why? I think it’s a matter of trust. When it comes to the care of my children, I need more assurance of the quality of the provider. A method that might convince me to fork over $2.99 for a twelve-pack of Pepsi will fall short on getting me to hand over my kids.

I need something that is trust-worthy.

So how does this relate to creating? I think it’s important for each of us to think about the level of trust-worthiness we convey to our collaborators and clients. And to our peers. While most of us have the big stuff buttoned up, (we realize that we can’t drop the important things), we neglect the small details and relational nuances in which trust is earned.

Back to the sign. There’s nothing in the wording or the proposition that seems untrustworthy. It’s the context. It’s the communication medium. It just seems to…in some way…devalue my children.

It is in the nuances that we earn trust. It’s in the small commitments, the details, the “context” of the relationship. We can get the message right, but we must also ensure that we’re not devaluing or violating trust because of familiarity or laziness. It’s in how we value the ideas of others and operate according to an ethic of generosity.

Be trust-worthy. This is a commitment of mine for the forsee-able future, and I hope you’ll join me.

There’s an interesting post on FastCompany.com about what happens when we choose to fight reality and a bit of advice about how to escape the temptation to fight, argue or pout:

Learn to be a lover of reality, greeting each new piece of information with a welcoming attitude of, “Good to know.” Conserve your precious energy used in the past to argue with reality and use it instead to innovate and to problem-solve.

We each need to embrace our role is keeping the workplace “dissonance-free.” We all reap the benefits of a reality-embracing mindset.

LINK: Fighting The Facts: How’s That Working For Ya? [FastCompany.com]

I’ve often felt that one of the difficult things for creatives to combat is the organizational temptation to “roll to the middle of the bed.” In other words, we tend to eventually end up in the most familiar places because that’s where the ruts and grooves are, and it takes a lot of intentionality and effort to create new ones. One of the ways this happens is when we fall in love with executions rather than results.

Because organizations have a vested interest in producing predictable results, (as they should), the tendency is to try to replicate success by reproducing the executions that led to those results rather than the process that led to the executions. Because of this, it can be a constant uphill battle to innovate even in small ways. This can leave creatives within the organization languishing in imposed ruts. Over time, this leads to a victim mindset, bitterness and even active subversion within the organization. At best it causes group-think.

As we’ve discussed before, the biggest part of the creative effort is process and only the tiniest little bit is the actual product. By focusing our efforts on replicating “product”, we can prevent duplicated effort but we can also unintentionally limit our thinking and reproduce the “form” of something without the all-too-necessary “heart” of it. This is often what happens when companies “reverse-engineer” a brand or product and end up producing something that lacks the authenticity of the original. (iPhone knockoffs, anyone?)

This is another reason why it’s important to establish the discipline of valuing process and product together in our organizations. By entering into “process” rather than fixating on “product” we can see all of the available forks in the road of the design process rather than seeing it as simply a way to get to the next place. Asking “why” questions about the process itself can be a valuable way of unearthing new innovative solutions.

For leaders, it’s important that we be asking the “why” and “how” questions of the creatives on our teams. For creatives, it’s important that we understand the pressures and constraints that come with leading organizations. No one is out to “get you” (I don’t think.) Your ability to create and engage rests squarely in your hands.

Sean explained to me that, in spite of the fact that he doesn’t really need everything that’s in his wallet everyday, he can’t remove any items from it or they will all fall out. The wallet has now stretched to accommodate the number of credit and membership cards currently contained within. If one goes, they all go.

As we discussed this, the subject turned to organizations. I think that we’ve all probably experienced this phenomenon within our teams at one time or another. Objectives lead to systems, systems lead to derivations of systems, we hire around those derivations, and eventually we have a giant, complex, clunky organization set-up to accomplish various derivations of the “main thing.” This is necessary, of course, but at some point the focus can shift from being organized around an objective to being organized for the sake of organization. This is when “why” and “what” cease to line up and when dissonance can creep into our teams. The organization has stretched to accommodate the systems – if we remove even one, they all fall down. The goal, it seems, has become to perpetuate the system.

The same dynamic can emerge in our personal creating. We can obligate ourselves to the point that there is no joy in our creating. We are simply doing it to fulfill some mandate we’ve placed on ourselves, but there is no longer an inherent intrinsic motivation. It’s all flat. We’re doing it simply to remind ourselves that we can – to make sure the pipes aren’t frozen.

Leaders need to be constantly scanning the horizon for the emergence of this kind of dissonance. We need to make certain that the “why” and the “what” line up and that our systems are in-line with both. (Of course, the “why” is often the sticking point, no?) Artists need to ensure that we are not creating complex and unnecessary systems that are “stretching the wallet.” Beginning with simplicity (“what are we really trying to do now?“) facilitates complexity, but beginning with complexity all but ensures confusion. There are more places for the system to break down.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this… feel free to add pics of your wallet or purse…

(** Cruelty free assurance: No friendships were harmed in the writing of this post. In fact, it was Sean’s idea…)

I was reading in this month’s Fast Company magazine about NBC’s 2008 Summer Olympic coverage. There is an interesting article about the strategy behind the use of sound and music during the “highlight” and story narratives that bring the games to life on the small screen. (NBC will be broadcasting over 3,600 hours of Olympic programming via its various channels during the 17 day Olympics…that’s over 8 days worth of programming for every day of the games.) What I found most interesting is that they describe what they’re doing as creating “cinematic moments.” They’re not just scoring video reels, they’re not just creating background music, they’re creating Cannes-worthy mini-films about life and struggle, ambition and glory and the oh-so-familiar agony of defeat.

While reading this I was reflecting on how important this kind of “re-framing” has been for my work and the work of many people I know. We’ve always thought of Accidental Creative as “freedom fighters for the creative class.” We are engaged in a battle to free-up creative people and organizations to be unleashed in their work. This little phrase has given us clarity in what we’re doing and helped the handful of us who make AC happen to stay focused on what’s really important.

The same principle can be applied to any work. Writers, coders (“code is poetry?” I LOVE WordPress.org’s ethic…), designers, etc., can all apply this ethic to what they do.

Q: So…if you were to re-frame what you do, how would you do it?

In organizations this often occurs when there’s a break between client strategy and creative strategy. (In other words, when what we’re doing doesn’t line up with what we say we’re trying to do.) It can also play out systemically in our organizations when the “why” (what we say we’re about, our stated organizational values, the “main thing”) doesn’t line up with the “what” (our systems, our day-to-day work, the product we produce.) When this break begins to creep into our teams, we often experience the emergence of the “black box” phenomenon.

The “black box” is the (unknown, unseen) place where the “why” formula resides. Because we aren’t able to see the connection between cause and effect (the over-arching “why” and the practical “what” of our work) we assume that there must be some mystical, unknowable force (let’s call them our manager) who holds the key to understanding the universe. The problem in this situation is that it can be incredibly demotivating to live within a system where there’s a cause/effect disconnect. Ultimately it leads to disconnectedness and apathy about results, a lack of ability to generate ideas and see connections, and a culture of self-protection. (There’s often an unwillingness to take risks when cause/effect connections are tenuous.)

There are tons of ways that this can creep into our lives and orgs, but for now here are a few things to keep our eyes this week on as we go about our work:

Leaders: We must eliminate any dissonance that exists within the org. We must focus on making the “why” (the existence questions of the org) and the “what” (our systems, processes, work) line up. Drive clarity. Have effective feedback loops (both ways – I’ve often really stunk at this in my leading.) Make it safe to ask the “why” questions. Eliminate the myth of the black box. Stand in the gap for your team.

Creatives: Seek clarity. Stop playing the victim. (If we give a self-pitying mindset any ground, it will grow like kudzu.) Ground yourself in the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, why) before moving to the “how.” If you can’t answer the 5 W’s, then stop work until you can. Have the equivalent of a “client strategy” in your personal creating. Be your own creative director.

Seriously, people. If we don’t get a grip on dissonance it will take us down. As my friend Brian always says, “small weed now, big problem later.” Over time, weeds in a sidewalk will allow room for water to get in. Over the seasons, water freezes and thaws, expands and contracts, and destroys the sidewalk. Do the little bit of work now to uproot the weeds now. It’s a lot easier in the long run.

Link: Top 10 Ways To Nurture A Thriving Creative Culture [Design Sojourn]

We’ve often discussed the need to "close doors" as we move through an organizational creative process, and the same principle applies to our own creating. To some extent, we have to be willing to let go of options in order to move forward. The longer we hold on to fading choices, the more difficult it is for us to embrace new stimulus and opportunities.  

LINK:  The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors [NY Times online]

"Paranoia undoes greatness." 

It’s been there for about a year and is a constant reminder that anytime we spend a significant amount of time worrying about losing what we’ve got, it’s quite likely that it’s already slipping through our fingers anyway.

I can name many instances of "backward-looking" behavior killing momentum and thwarting progress. This can be especially rampant in the "up or out" world of organizations. (Pay, prestige or process – we’re all motivated by one or a combination of these.) Organizational paranoia discourages the risk-taking required for innovative behavior. A "group-think" mentality sets in, along with a sense of invincibility, and where there was once promise there is now dissonance.

This plays out in our personal creating as well, no? My paranoia about the response to a piece of work will inhibit risk-taking and new-form-making behavior.  

These are all, of course, self-fulfilling prophecies. When we think we’re "losing it" and behave accordingly (reactively) we’re bound to live out the consequences of our fears. (This isn’t psychobabble, it’s simple cause-and-effect.) 

I’m working hard to rid myself of paranoia. I’m also working to rid it from anyone I interact with.

(Maybe then all of those men in black helicopters will stop following me…) 

A few years ago I had little oval stickers made up for my team with the initials "BIW" in them. (I realized shortly thereafter  that they had been distibuted, but never explained. It let to some interesting theories about what "BIW" meant…"Baked Indigo Wafers?" "Blogging Infernal Widgets?") 

I don’t want people I work with wasting time doing anything less that what they could be best in the world at. Maybe it doesn’t encompass all of their daily activities, but there should be some strategic plan to get to a place where natural gifts and skills line up with daily activities.

I shudder to think about how many cures for diseases were never discovered because someone decided accountancy was more stable than bio-medicine.

What could you be "Best In World" at and – if you dare – what are you doing to align your life with it? 

But fear not, my cubicle-dwelling friends. Pam over at Escape From Cubicle Nation  has offered some tips on how to shake up "soul numbing" as a result of long-term cube exposure.

The first step to creative brilliance is to simply wake-up. The alarm’s ringing, folks.

A few thoughts about this:
1. We had a precise image of where we were headed.
2. We had many capable people available to do the job.
3. We had step-by-step instructions for finishing the project.
4. We had a very limited time-frame for completion.

As we were building the playset, we were constantly in the situation of trusting the instructions, (“the rails”), even when they didn’t seem to make sense. We were constantly re-evaluating roles and responsibilities and shifting tasks as we each gained experience. We even developed certain areas of expertise, (I was the “hardware” guy…), and had to trust the others in the group to get their job done so we could complete our task.

As we baked in the ninety degree heat, I took pause on several occasions to reflect on how similar this playset-building process was to many creative projects I’ve been involved in. We needed a strong creative strategy (call that the picture on the front – the compelling image of where we’re headed), we needed the right talent (or at least enough strong guys), we needed process and roles (the manual and specialization/collaboration) and we needed to know what success would look like (time frame for our create-on-demand project.)

 Strategy + Talent + Process/Roles + Success Criteria

All too often we are lacking one or more of these in the project brief. If we don’t have a Creative Strategy (the translation of the Client Strategy into workable “rails”), the project will lack momentum. If we don’t have the right talent in the room, everyone will be forced to absorb more than their share of the workload. If we don’t have the right process and roles, fear, paranoia and self-preservation will creep into the organization. If we don’t understand Success Criteria, we cannot expect the best of our people.

These four components must be a part of any leader’s evaluation at the beginning of a project. Having them in place ensures that adequate space will be created for creatives to do their best work in a healthy way.

10 Things Creatives Wish Their Managers Knew:
1. You cannot separate PROCESS and PRODUCT.

2.  It’s not about the money. (most creatives are in the biz for more than the money…otherwise we’d all be lawyers, no?)

3. It IS about the money. (organizations need to develop ways of rewarding people within their bandwidth of competancy rather than promoting them beyond their level of competancy.)

4. Design is an ethic, not an afterthought.

5. Fear is not a motivator. Neither is scarcity.

6. We want the organization to succeed.

7. We want to follow you, we just need to know where you’re going.

8. We need stable ground. (client strategy must be nailed down and guarded by leadership so that the landscape isn’t shifting in mid-project.)

9. We need rhythm.

10. We need conversation. And a translator, perhaps.
 
What’s missing from this list?

Alan Harrington, "Life In The Crystal Palace" (1959) - an account of his experience within a large American corporation 

A: Yes.

Depending on our perspective, organizations can either be the life-sucking entities that bring us eternal woe or the life and resource giving entities that facilitate our creative growth. Organizations are about the BOTTOM LINE, whether it’s financial (usually), humanitarian (rarely) or spiritual (hardly ever). And guess what – they SHOULD be. That’s why they exist. Organizations exist to serve themselves. They are set up for maximum efficiency and profitability, not for creative brilliance or health. (Of course, one could argue, as we often do, that better creative equals a bigger bottom line, but that’s a topic for another rant.)

In his excellent book, “Orbiting the Giant Hairball ”, Gordon MacKenzie suggests that creatives should treat the organization as…well…a giant hairball. Each time a new rule or procedure is implemented, it adds another hair to the hairball until it’s simply a big messy bunch of rules and bureaucracy. When this happens, creatives get stuck in the hairball and find it difficult to innovate.

What MacKenzie recommends is that creatives “orbit” the hairball drawing resources from it when necessary, but not getting stuck by its limitations. This enables the creative to have the best of both worlds – the resources of the organization without its limiting short-sidedness.

Orbiting is mostly a mindset. Few of us have the freedom of time and place to avoid organizational chaos, but we can implement some mental disciplines to help us find freedom within the organization.

Here are a few AC principles we teach to help creatives find freedom from the organization:

1. Be certain that you are defining your work, not being defined by it. See your work as a subset of your greater purpose in the world, not the sum total of it.
2. Resist the victim mindset. It opposes the creative process. It will suck you dry and spit you out. Victimhood is inward-focused whereas creativity is inherently outward-seeking. If you become all about yourself, you are limited to your small subset of experience rather than drawing from everything.
3. Cut your organization some slack. Organizations are made up of people. People are {GASP!} not perfect. We screw up. We inflict pain. But at the end of the day, we all wrestle with the same concerns. (Did I do right today? Could I have done something better?) Whether you’re on the giving end or receiving end within an org, cut some slack to others. Yes, your boss might be incompetent. So what? You can still choose to engage.
4. Beware of competition. Competition makes us do weird things like going after jobs we don’t really want just because they’re perceived as “important”. Know what you’re about in the world and go after it. Celebrate others’ success. There’s more than enough to go around.

Seth was recounting the story of a colleague who was trying to secure a deal. She was rebuffed, so she wrote up a contract that esentially said that the company was saying "no" to her offer and that she was free to take her offer to another company.

They refused to sign it.

Seth hypothesized that this was because ANY decision at that point was a risk. The only "non-risk" was to do nothing. Forcing their hand was forcing risk.

And here’s the killer line: they were willing to get the big things wrong in order to avoid making small mistakes now. 

Wow. How often do we live in "NTG" mode (nose-to-grindstone) and spend more energy protecting our rear than in trying to take big swipes? How many decisions are made everyday in the effort to survive another round rather than in the attempt to re-define the playing field? How many people go to their grave having NEVER attempted ANYTHING of significant consequence out of fear of the loss of reputation? 

I want to have the courage to make little mistakes and have people think that I’m off-kilter because I’m working toward something of consequence. I want to focus more on changing the game rather than fitting in.

Cover bands don’t change the world.

Once this formula is set, "hits are born", and the entire industry re-orients itself against producing that result. In other words, the same producers, musicians, writers, etc. are hired to manufacture more of the same stuff. The new standard becomes mediocrity. Everyone is "shooting for the 3." This becomes the new standard of excellence. Innovation is out the window.

Think this phenomenon is limited to the music industry? Think again. I’m sure if you examine your industry hard enough you’ll find plenty of examples of the same thing. If you’re a REAL glutton for punishment, examine your own life and work and find the places where this is playing out. We can’t ALWAYS shoot for the "5", but we need a good mix of risky, challenging projects in our portfolio of work.

{mos_ri}

The "Game Player" is someone who finds new ways of playing the game. They play the game better than most others, and they stretch each rule to its max in order to find their competitive advantage. This kind of innovation is also called "incrementalism." They are often fighting to gain the top spot in a highly competitive space.

Then there are the "Game Changers." They create the game. They redefine the conversation and shift the marketplace. They invent new categories and create room for others to converse in their newly created space. 

At some point, we all must decide what we want to be about. Do we want to devote our life, our energy, our creativity to playing the game in a highly competitive space, or do we want to be a part of changing the conversation?  

Do we want to be a cover band (pretty safe), or do we want to make our own music and face all of the risks, ridicule and speculative criticism that comes with speaking about things that don’t yet exist? 

The most common criticism of this type of talk is that it’s "pie-in-the-sky" or "impractical" or "philisophical BS." I won’t bore you with all of the ridiculous quotes from critics past about innovative ideas that have long sinced become a part of everyday conversation, but I will say that going your own way requires thick skin. At some point, however, the compulsion to be about something remarkable is impossible to suppress and becomes more unbearable than any criticism.  In the (paraphrased) words of Rilke, staring into yourself at night you realize that you cannot keep from getting what’s inside of you out. 

So…are you playing the game or changing it? Your call.