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I was in Boston yesterday to deliver a keynote at Front End of Innovation. I flew in a few days early so that I could spend time getting to know some of the conference participants, explore the scene, and get a general sense of the kinds of innovation-related issues they are dealing with. Many conversations inevitably turned to the topic of the forces that inhibit personal and organizational innovation. I noticed a recurring theme.

There are two kinds of innovators: bucket makers, and bucket fillers. Bucket makers are people who love to develop new concepts, categories, and products. They’re happiest when they are exploring the fringes of their category, and prototyping innovative new solutions to problems. There is a high failure rate for bucket makers, but the excitement of creating something brand new is what drives them. They are product innovators, and can’t stand to do the same thing over and over.

Bucket fillers, on the other hand, are process innovators. They love filling the buckets that others have made in new and creative ways. They are happiest when they have firm boundaries within which to do their work. They can take something that already exists and continuously make it fresh, exciting, and valuable.

Here’s the challenge: many people who are bucket makers eventually find themselves in the role of bucket filler. They develop an elegant new solution, but then they find that they are responsible for maintaining it, keeping it fresh, and continuously filling it. They get bored and frustrated, because deep down they crave the opportunity to go create something completely new.

Similarly, many bucket fillers are pushed out to the fringes where they are less effective and forced to deal with excess uncertainty and ill-defined boundaries. They may find that they are less effective until given specific edges within which to do their work. The innovate best with defined boundaries.

It’s important to understand which kind of innovator you are, and to try to align your role and activities (or those of your team) accordingly. It might be worth a conversation with your peers to determine who is most comfortable pushing boundaries and who is most comfortable making the territory that’s already been defined tremendously valuable.

While there are never perfectly neat boundaries for these innovator types, and no perfect roles, understanding them can help you better align your focus, time, and energy with the activities that will help you provide the most value.

So which type of innovator are you: bucket maker, or bucket filler?

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This podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental.

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This podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental.

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This podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental.

She looked at me for a few seconds, unsure of what I meant. I tried again.

“How have you adapted your sales pitch so that others can better see the merits of your ideas?”

Certain she understood me this time, she started in again about how the politics of the organization are stacked, and how it’s not about how great the ideas are but who introduces them, and…

I stopped her. “Of course it’s not about how great the ideas are. Great ideas never make it to the top without a champion. You have to champion your idea, fight for it, and – if you really believe in it – aggressively stand your ground.”

It turns out that she wasn’t doing much fighting at all. She believed that the work would stand on its own merits, but she was wrong.

I encounter many people who do amazing work, but they are reluctant to share it with others, fight for it, and hold their ground regardless of the consequences. They believe that if they only craft something well enough, others will be swayed and have no choice but to acknowledge its brilliance.

Except…everyone else is doing work they also believe to be brilliant. They might nod in your direction, but they’re not going to stop what they’re doing to pay attention to your idea until you make them. If you believe in your work, you must be willing to share it frequently and aggressively fight for it.

You must be your own champion.

Don’t wait, because no one is going to beat a path to your door. Share your ideas, fight for them, adapt your pitch if necessary, and do whatever you need to in order to ensure that your work gets a fair audience. Even if you don’t win in the end, at least you don’t have to wonder “what if…?”

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This podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental.

In case you missed it, Facebook launched a new product for the Android platform last week called Facebook Home. In the ads, it seems Facebook is tipping its hand for what they think a digitally connected life should look like.

The ads feature people moving through their life – boarding an airplane, in a meeting, and at a family dinner – but with a Facebook-infused twist. Rather than having to deal with the boring stuff happening right in front of them, they are instead able to easily swipe through tiles depicting what their friends are doing, like photos and status updates, and generally distract themselves from the annoying and mind-numbing nature of their present circumstances.

Listen: I am fully in favor of a more connected world. I love the freedom of expression and collaboration that are granted us through these new and emerging platforms. At the same time, I am concerned that our biology hasn’t yet evolved the capacity to handle our technology.

I came across a fascinating term this morning during my study time: compassion fatigue. It describes a condition in which someone has experienced so much trauma (nurses, caregivers, first-responders, soldiers) or has heard so many desperate messages via the news, etc., that they experience a diminished capacity to feel empathy for those who are suffering.

(1) I slightly fear that we are experiencing something similar to compassion fatigue due to the constant stream of news, updates, and other stimuli flowing from our social networks. My concern is that my understanding of relationship is morphing in an unhealthy way. If I know some things about someone, am I really connected to them? Is my cursory knowledge of their life circumstances replacing my desire to really know them?

(2) I’m more concerned that we are training ourselves that momentary boredom is a travesty, and must be remedied by digital entertainment. In following the Ping are we losing our capacity to be here, now, in the moment? We often skim across the surface of our life experiences like a skipping stone rather than being present and mining those experiences for wisdom and insight. Everything is familiar, but we know less. We have the illusion that we’re getting smarter, but we’re losing our capacity to think systemically.

Creative brilliance emerges from synthesis, which results from being present and mindful. (click to tweet)

I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon, even though I realize I probably do. People can, of course, use technology however and whenever they want. For my part, I just want to ensure that I am not using it as an escape from what’s in front of me. Depth of insight and creative brilliance emerge from synthesis, which results from being present and mindful. I hope that we can learn to use these technologies to help us be more in the moment rather than less so.

Your thoughts: what do you think about these ads and how/whether they encourage following of the Ping?

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This podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental.

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Today’s podcast sponsored by Audible. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental. 

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Today’s podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental.

Today’s podcast brought to you by Audible.com. Get a free audiobook for trying it at audiblepodcast.com/accidental.

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Today’s podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental.

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Today’s episode sponsored by Audible.com.
Visit Audiblepodcast.com/accidental and get a free audiobook just for trying it out.

Workloads and expectations are increasing. It’s not a cliché, it’s a fact. It’s the single biggest (confidential) complaint that I hear when spending time with companies. I was recently speaking at a conference in Florida, and in the short Q&A at the end of my talk a man stood and said “We are doing more with less. We have fewer people than ever, but our project load continues to increase. However, the quality of our work is not allowed to suffer. What should I do?”

Great question. Tough question. The first thing to realize is that if this is how you feel, you’re not alone. At all. In fact, you’re the norm. Many recent studies have explored the increasing workload and simultaneously decreasing engagement of employees, and the trend is frightening. Creative pros have never been more busy, and simultaneously less engaged with their work. One study found that 75% of creatives believe they are not living up to their full creative potential. Some say the fastest growing contingency in the workplace is a group being dubbed “malicious cooperatives”. They do what they need to in order to keep their job, but they secretly harbor hope that their company will fail.

Huh?

So what are some practical ways to deal with the increasing workload expectations and decreasing resources?

Know when to celebrate. It’s hard to be thrilled at the completion of a project when the very next instant your manager unloads a new pile of expectations on you. When super busy, celebration is often the first thing to go because it seems so… unnecessary. But it’s not! It’s crucial to have milestones that you can point to both for your own sense of accomplishment and for the sake of your team’s sense of progress. It also helps keep your work and your days from blending together into one long, run-on sentence.

Tip: Establish when you will celebrate the work that you’ve accomplished, and stick to your plan.

Know where you’ll begin. When dealing with creative work – turning your thoughts into value – it’s sometimes difficult to find the edges. It’s hard to know exactly when something is good enough, because there’s always room for improvement. Similarly, it’s challenging to get started on your work, because you’re often making it up as you go along. Thus, I’d encourage you (and your team) to always end your work each day with a clear understanding of where you’ll pick it up the next. That way you have a natural point of traction to help you get started.

Tip: Choose at the end of each work day where and how you’ll begin the work tomorrow.

Don’t be afraid to talk about the pressure. No one likes to be seen as a whiner, so sometimes these unseen (but strongly felt) pressures can stay locked up inside because we don’t want to burden others. However, simply creating an environment of permission to talk about the pressure can help mitigate it. No, the work isn’t going to go away, but if everyone (including your manager) is looped in on the team dynamic then it can sometimes help provide context for how to overcome it.

Tip: Have frequent conversations about how you feel about the work and the pressure, and be brutally honest.

The workload isn’t going away. This isn’t just a temporary artifact of a struggling economy, it’s mass-scale experimentation with a new way to do business in the connected economy. To thrive moving forward, you and I need to develop some tools to deal with the pressure.

Good luck.

If you survey the virtual landscape of the lives of many creative professionals (and organizations), you’ll find it littered with fragments of ideas, half-finished projects, and abandoned inspiration. In truth, there is rarely enough time to do all of the things we want to do, and some of these castaway projects were casualties of the law of limited focus and time. However, there is also something else at work that causes people to lose their steam and give up before they can reap the rewards of their effort.

I call it the lag.

The lag is the gap between cause and effect. It’s the season between planting a seed, and reaping a harvest. It’s the time when all of the work you’ve done seems to have returned little to no visible reward, and there is little on the horizon to indicate that things are going to get better.

When you are in the lag, the only thing that keeps you moving forward are (1) confidence in your vision and ability to bring it to fruition, (2) a willingness to say “no” to other things that tempt you to divert from your course, and (3) daily, diligent, urgent progress.

Urgency and diligence are the foundation of “hustle”, and hustle is the best antidote to lifelong regret. If you hustle, you never have to wonder “what if?” It’s difficult to hustle when you’re in the lag, because you experience all of the pain with little return, but without the effort you won’t get to experience the rewards.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with quitting. In fact, there are times when it makes more sense to quit than to continue. However, quitting should be a strategic choice, not one made out of fear or discomfort. You should be moving toward something, not running away from something.

Often, people give up during the lag and they subsequently fail to reap the reward for all of their hard work. They forget that there is always (ALWAYS) a delay between planting and harvesting.

If you need to quit something, do it. However, consider that you should quit because it makes sense, not because it’s just hard.

Cal Newport

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Leadership is hard. It’s a lonely role, you face crushing uncertainty with elevated stakes, and you’re expected to deliver not only on your own work, but also to corral the creative minds of others and parade them into the promised land. (Oh, and did I mention that it’s often thankless?)

However, leadership is also a tremendous opportunity. You get the privilege of helping others unleash their best work, and you get to have a level of influence on decisions that will often determine the success or failure of the organization.

When the pressure is on, and uncertainty is rearing its ugly head, there are traps that even the most experienced leaders fall into. When you fall into one (or more) of these traps, you put an impediment in your team’s path, and introduce dissonance into the organization.

Here are a few that I’ve seen leaders succumb to in a moment of weakness:

Deferring

This means that you’re pushing important decisions into the future until you are more certain about the right direction. While this initially seems wise, it has a ripple effect through the organization as others wait for you to act so that they can determine their own course of action. You will never be certain about any decision you make as a leader, but you must be crystal clear about what you expect from your team. Is there a decision that you need to make, but you’re deferring?

“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.” — Gretchen Rubin

Blaming

When things go awry and your team comes to you for answers, it’s easy to shoot arrows at the people above you. After all, if it’s really not your fault it’s a natural instinct, and it feels like a way to maintain the trust of your team. However, while temporarily maintaining your team’s trust in you as a leader, this tactic erodes their trust for the organization. Therefore, when the organization makes promises to your team in the future, the promises will be met with skepticism.

You must hold the line as a leader and do your best to build trust on both sides. Fight actively and fiercely for the needs of your team, but also fight the urge to protect yourself by disparaging the people above you, even in their incompetence. It’s unfair, but leadership isn’t about fairness. In the end, you will earn the trust of both sides, and you will be better positioned to accomplish your objectives.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.  – George MacDonald

Bending

Creative work is highly qualitative. It’s difficult sometimes to determine whether the product fits the original objectives, and it’s often a matter of opinion. As such, metrics for creative work can be tricky to establish and even trickier to implement and track. However, when and where there are metrics in place, you cannot bend on them. You have to make your expectations clear to the team, and you must be diligent in demanding they hit the metrics.

Why is this important? Because there’s enough uncertainty in the work itself without your team having to constantly deal with shifting objectives and metrics. Help your team by defining objectives and standing by your metrics.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.  – Steve Jobs

Hovering

You’ve hired great people, yes? Then don’t smother them by constantly hovering over their work. It communicates a lack of trust, and it may ultimately lead to a dependence on your feedback, or worse to under-performance or under-thinking. If you enjoy being a part of the process, that’s fantastic, but you need to establish some parameters so that your team feels permission to experiment and take small risks in between their check-ins. You will never get the best work out of the people on your team if they feel like you are constantly looking over their shoulder.

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be. —Rosalynn Carter

These are just a few of the (many) traps that I’ve seen creative leaders fall into. Leadership is about establishing the playing field, setting the rules, defining success, and unleashing your team to do what they’re wired to do. Avoid these common traps so that you don’t stand in the way of your team’s brilliance!

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What other mistakes have you seen creative leaders make? Comment below.

Chris Brogan

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This podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. Get a free audiobook for trying it out at AudiblePodcast.com/accidental.

Resources mentioned:

• The Icarus Sessions
• Printable bookmark to share your art

 Today’s podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. Visit Audiblepodcast.com/accidental to get a free audiobook just for trying it out.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by Audible.com. Get a free audiobook by trying audible at Audiblepodcast.com/accidental.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by Audible.com. Get a free audiobook by trying audible at Audiblepodcast.com/accidental.

One force that’s ever-present in any form of creative work is uncertainty. The reality is that you will never know – really know – what’s right.

Is this good enough?
Is it finished?
Is it the right strategy?
How should I spend my time/focus/energy today?
Which idea should I run with?
How can I sell this to my manager?

Uncertainty is an uncooperative dance partner. You have to move with it – in concert, drawing from it, following its lead at times, but always with an eye on your next move – in order to do your best work. The worst thing you can do is allow uncertainty to paralyze you into inaction. (I had a good conversation with Jonathan Fields about this.)

In the face of uncertainty, pursue clarity. Do you know what you’re really trying to do? Have you firmed up your objectives? Do you really understand the problem? When dealing with uncertainty about some things, seek clarity in the things you can know. Additionally, if you lead a team, your job is to pursue increasing levels of clarity in the face of increasing levels of uncertainty. Your team needs to know what you expect of them, even if you’re not certain it’s the right thing.

Get real about the stakes. When facing uncertainty, you might start fearing “monsters in the closet”. Your fear of the unknown spirals out of control, creates artificial stakes, and causes you to freeze. Spend some time grounding yourself in the true stakes rather than allowing your imagination to go wild.

Stay attuned to your intuition. When things get messy, it’s tempting to ignore that small, quiet voice in your head out of fear that it might lead you into even more uncertainty. However, that’s the worst thing you can do. Pay attention to the places your mind naturally goes. It’s wired to resolve dissonance and identify patterns, and could be providing you with a path through the uncertainty.

You will never rid yourself of uncertainty. It’s a part of the game. When the sand is shifting beneath your feet, try to find some solid ground. Seek clarity. You’ll often find that simply getting clear relieves some of the pressure and illuminates your next steps.

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In the book The Accidental Creative you learn a dozen or so practices  designed to help you unleash your creative potential. One of the practices recommended is called “unnecessary creating”, and it’s changed everything for me.

What is unnecessary creating?

Unnecessary creating projects have two criteria:

1. No pay. You’re not being paid for the project.
2. No timeline. You’re not on a deadline.

That’s it. Go.

Some examples of my own unnecessary creating projects include:

• A letter I wrote to my five-year-old son that I will present to him on his thirteenth birthday
• A wooden spoon that I carved and gave to my mother-in-law
• A letter I wrote to connect with my 11-year-old nephew who lives in a different state
• My blog

My next unnecessary creating project is to perfect a pistachio pudding dessert a friend served my family a while ago. I’ve been dreaming about it ever since and can think of no place I’d rather be king than the land of pistachio pudding!

Why does it change everything? 

I can say with confidence that if it weren’t for Todd’s admonition to be working on an unnecessary creating project for at least an hour a week, I never would have done any of the above. Instead, I would have been doing something really productive like watching Bachelor Pad and eating Oreos. That’s not to say I don’t need to tune out sometimes, as we all do, but it’s so easy for me to get in the rut of spending all my leisure time in relatively useless activities.

Unnecessary creating changes everything because it redeems useless time into time spent doing genuinely meaningful things for yourself and others.

How Can You Get Started?

1. Brainstorm a list of possibilities. Start with the list I gave above. Do any of these possibilities spark an idea for you?
2. Choose one hour a week when you will do some unnecessary creating. (For me it tends to happen on Thursday nights at 8pm.) Get it on the calendar.
3. Follow through. Remember: you’re not getting paid, and there’s no deadline, so have fun!
4. Tell others about the experience, and spread the word. Why should you have all the fun?

This week, what will be your unnecessary creating project? It could be a poem, a piece of art, a letter, a sculpture, a blog post, a self-published book you plan to give away, a landscaping project, painting a room, cooking a dessert—whatever you want.

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Your turn – what is your unnecessary creating project going to be?

Charles Lee is the author of Good Idea, Now What? We first met last summer at a conference where we were both speaking, and a few weeks ago we connected by phone to discuss why ideas simply don’t get executed. (Hear the entire conversation below.)

A few of the highlights from the conversation:

- One of the biggest reasons why ideas don’t get executed is because we don’t take the time to write them down and commit to acting on them. Sometimes when we talk about ideas with peers and friends, we create the false impression in our mind that we’re actually doing something about them when we’re not.

- Several years ago our productivity was bound by the constraints of technology. Today, some of the very technologies that were invented to make us more productive are the same things point to as distractions and limiting factors in our work. Seems there is something deeper and internally-sourced at work, and it’s independent of the external forces we sometimes point to as the source of procrastination and poor execution.

- Companies need to create a culture that allows for conversation about innovation, and promotes transparency in order to avoid the pitfalls of procrastination, fear, and lack of execution.

Listen to the conversation below, and let us know in the comments your thoughts about why ideas don’t get executed. 
 

Conversation with Charles Lee: