kevin donaldson

Music an amazing form of art and creativity.  I have always been told I have a good ear for tones.  When I was young, I used to help tell a friend of mine who played guitar replicate music from our favorite band.  I could always tell if he was hitting the right note to match the song.  The funny thing though is that I have never really played an instrument myself (beyond classes in high school).  Its one of those things on my life to-do list.  I feel called to play some type of instrument, and listening to this wonderful piece of art today on a 4 string Hawaiian ukulele makes you realize how creative humans can be with instruments.

Another great RSA clip overlaying a discussion by Sir Ken Robinson on Changing the Educational Paradigm.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. Written in 2002 by Steven Pressfield.  A friend recently gave it a glowing recommendation so I picked it up and wasn't disappointed.  This book is filled with timeless advice on the battles we all wage on finding and using the creative gifts we were given.  While following a similar vein as Seth Godin's Linchpin ,  Pressfield takes a more spiritual look at being an artist.  There are 3 ‘books’ between the covers – Book one talks about identifying resistance, book two focuses on combating resistance and book three talks about moving beyond.

Pressfield’s basic premise is that we are not born with unlimited choices and we cannot be anything we want to be.  We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become.  Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.  A large portion of the book focuses on how to be a 'professional', however his definition extends and modifies what you probably think of as a definition for this term..  At its core a professional takes money for work done, but does the work out of love.  He then augments with a lot more detail including my top 12 picks below:

1. The professional tackles projects that will make him/her stretch.  He takes on assignments that will bear him into uncharted waters compel him to explore unconscious parts of himself
2. If you don’t love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything.  The opposite of love isn’t hate – its indifference
3. The professional arms himself with patients, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work
4. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.  He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread free artist.
5. The professional knows that if he caves today he’ll be twice as likely to cave tomorrow
6. The professional conducts his business in the real world.  Adversity, injustice, bad hops and rotten calls, even good breaks and lucky bounces all comprise the ground over which the campaign must be waged.  The field is level the professional understands only in heaven, and it alters every day
7. The professional is prepared each day to confront his own self sabotage
8. The professional is sly.  He knows that by toiling beside the front door of technique he leaves room for genius to enter by the back.
9. The professional is always a student of the game and knows that the level of revelation that can unfold in any art form is inexhaustible.
10. The professional endures adversity.  He lets the bird shit splash down on his slicker, remembering that it comes clean with a heavy duty hosing
11. The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality
12. The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and take it for what it is: a supreme compliment

This is just a small sampling of the insights put forth in this quick read.  Swap the word ‘professional’ with Entrepreneur, business leader, artist, or your own name and it will still work.  I will end this post with the last paragraph from the book: Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor.  It is a gift to the world and every being in it.  Don’t cheat us of your contribution.  Give us what you got!

Florida says that this isn't like normal economic cycling, but a major reset in our economy and culture that could take as much as a generation to fully unfold... and this isn't the first in American history.  Of course most people are aware of the second reset in the 1930's, also referred to as the great depression; however the first great reset actually occurred in the 1870's.  The book has a fascinating set of chapters detailing these historic resets.  For instance, the first great reset accompanied our shift from agriculture to an industrial society and our move into cities as well as the creation of such innovations as the steam engine and the telephone.  The second reset in the 30's signaled of shift into mass production, the automobile and subsequent suburbanization.  What's interesting is that no one actually knows how things will shift as part of the current reset.  Florida has his theories, which also provide for thought provoking reading, but mainly what this book will help you do is understand the bigger picture of what has happened, what is happening now and allow you to start thinking about it for yourself.  One thing is for sure; the nature of work is changing and will continue to change.  Read the book - be prepared, engage and figure out how you will be part of this historic ride. 

Creativity isn't constant.  It ebs and flows based on current conditions - external and internal.  Work and stress levels (see the creativity inflection point), your surroundings, general state of mind, etc.  Its important to keep note of times when you are more or less creative.  For instance, a friend of mine once said that he got more creative ideas in spring time.  One example for me - I find I get more creative ideas while flying.  Its also good to be self aware of how to recharge your creative batteries... Sitting on my front porch in the summer work for me, as well as time in the mountains.  This past week I had a full recharge of my creative batteries on a family in the sawtooth mountains of Idaho.  High mountain lakes have extreme regenerative properties for me.  Take a peak at some we visited.  How do you recharge?

Youngme Moon's recent book Different is on my 'read list' for this year.  Came across this slide video she put together on how to not be creative.  Take 5 minutes and check yourself.

In the industrial economy, you came home at the end of the day physically exhausted.  In the creative economy you come home mentally exhausted.  Just like any other muscle your brain gets tired and loses its ability to perform.  What you want to find it the point of optimal performance and not just output but that point where mental stimulation creates optimal creativity.

The first thing you need to do is find work that you find mentally stimulating.  This isn't as hard as you might think.  If it is hard for you I suggest you read Linchpin.  Then, supported by intrinsic motivational factors (autonomy mastery and purpose) you will be able to push the curve up.  Of course it's hard to know where the top of the curve is, and it changes based on other outside factors, but being conscious about your objective of moving the curve up is the first step to making it happen.  Also, remember that not all of the stimulation needs to come from work activities. 

A second factor to consider is a dimension that is not really shown on this graph: time.  Be aware of how time factors into this equation for you.  Although everyone is different, you will likely find that the creativity/stimulation peak will likely occur at less than a standard 40 hour work week.  This inflection point will likely be quick and steep on the opposite side.  While many people will push themselves well beyond the peak, most will admit that creativity is the first to fall, followed by productivity.  It's not unlike other complex systems.  Core functions will continue but higher level functions shut down when the batteries run low.

There are however, ways to play with this equation.  Hours of sleep, increasing or decreasing the diversity of mental stimulation, exercise etc, but as with most theoretical curves, the most important part is the mental model and how it helps guide your behavior.

It seems that as we move away from the constraints of a 30 second spot and away from the primary objective of selling towards creating lasting impressions and building movement, advertising is getting better.  Take this spot from Nike for the world cup that was posted May 17th.  Even calling it an 'ad', actually takes away from its beauty. You may have seen the shorter version on TV, but the long version is worth watching if you aren't one of the 14 million people who have already viewed it:)  Cynically you can call it an ad, or you could call it an elegant video helping build a world-wide community of football/soccer fans.

Often in large companies when there is a problem the 'solution' is to throw more bodies at the problem.  Need new ideas? - add more people.  Need to get work done faster? - add more people. Need to increase the product offering? - add more people.  The problem is that the 'add more people' solution rarely if ever solves the problem (often it makes it worse), but it does require the least amount of creative thinking to execute.  However, to add bodies, requires capital.  In startups capital is precious and often times 'add more people' isn't an option, but the problem still needs to be solved.  A capital constraint alone can drive some very creative thinking.  At first you may come up with ideas such as outsourcing, and possibly short term consultants but if you drive further, you would be amazed at what you can come up with.  For instance here are a few that we have found, thought about, experimented with and/or executed:

• internships that are sponsored by the school
• code competitions with the price a shot at working for your company
• open-sourced initiatives that is a win with for both the community and the company
• hackathons
• get your VC/board members to help
• friends and family home-sourcing
• Web based services (eg Mechanical Turk, various testing services etc)
• cloud computing

One of the best articles I have ever read on constraint driven thinking is a 2006 Booz&Co article entitled The Innovation Sandbox by C.K. Prahalad.  I reference the examples in this article often in discussions about constraints and creativity in business models.  Called the sandbox approach because it involves fairly complex, free-form exploration and even playful experimentation (the sand, with its flowing, shifting boundaries) within extremely fixed specified constraints (the walls, straight and rigid, that box in the sandbox

In this article Prahalad talks about serving the bottom on the economic pyramid and using this as a constraint in developing products that are good enough in the Indian health care market.  This leads me to a second article from Wired that I often reference: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just fine by Robert Capps.  However the difference in this article is that while the products may support the bottom of the pyramid from the economic buying power viewpoint, other levels of the pyramid who could afford more, often choose not to.  This shift in behaviour is allowing constraint based thinking to actually accelerate product and business innovation through feature constraints in the digital marketplace.  This is being adopted strongly in the web space, with early adopters of this model like 37Signals and their SaaS based applications (Basecamp, highrise etc).

Finally, there is the current thinking around the concept of Minimum Viable Product defined in The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development as 'A product with the fewest number of features needed to achieve a specific objective, and users are willing to 'pay' in some form of scarce resource''... which is essentially constraint based thinking around your business and your product to drive rapid feedback loops.  What's really interesting is the shift in consumer behavior towards greater acceptance of less than perfect, which will lead to more and more creative innovations available to us.

Process management leads to business commoditization.  When I say this I am not suggesting the process engineering and process control systems are not important, but where I do have concern is when people feel like their entire organization needs to be mapped and documented with process maps.  Certain things lend themselves well to mapping.  Month-end close for instance is a perfect example of something that you want perfected with the highest level of efficiency possible.  However while month end close is very important overall it isn’t likely part of your core value proposition.   If you do map and control your core value proposition, you are moving yourself down the path to commoditization.  If you can map it, someone will replicate it.  Maybe not right away, but once a path has been perfected and documented, it can be copied.
 

Two thoughts to consider:

1.    A recent post by Tom Fishburne entitled ‘Quality out of Control’.  In it he talks about a great quote from the book Rework:

One of the brilliant riffs in the book is titled, “Nobody likes plastic flowers”. Jason and David lobby for the beauty of imperfection and advocate the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi. They illustrate wabi-sabi with a wonderful quote by Leonard Koren: “Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize.” This flexible philosophy often conflicts with Quality Control, which prizes consistency over “poetry”. The Six Sigma Quality Control movement in particular clamps down on variability….

2.    David Snowden wrote a post that compared Efficiency and Effectiveness: 

Efficiency is about stripping away superfluous functionality so that you only have what you really need left. This is great if the context does not shift and has dominated re-engineering and six-stigma approaches. Effectiveness involves introducing a requisite degree of inefficiency so that the system as a whole can be more resilient and adaptive. Focusing on effectiveness is appropriate where the context is, or may shift before you can re-engineer your system.

More and more what makes a company valuable is not its process’s but the frameworks that allow creativity and innovation to flourish and yet still be productive.  As Seth Godin says in Linchpin – all artists ship… but artists do not use roadmaps and they aren’t always efficient.

Companies that tend to take leadership positions in the market, do not use roadmaps.  I doubt that Apple has a process map for new product development.  One might argue that without process, the quality of the iPhones coming off the assembly line would be horrible, but here’s the thing: it’s not the device that is Apples core value proposition.  It’s their ability to design great products, and create an army of passionate consumers.  Quality is no longer the pinnacle of success as it was in the previous century.  The quality of the products is just assumed – a price of entry just to be in/stay in the market.

Take another completely different example.  Recipes are a process of how to create a great dish in a repeatable fashion, but recipes alone do not make a restaurant great.  What make a restaurant great is the chef, the interior decorators etc. (the artists).  It is the creators ability to use a framework – for instance how the chef knows what herbs are currently in season, and how these will react differently with say the local fresh fish available to make a great dish.  Again – process control/quality is the price of entry (eg – food doesn’t make you sick).  People don’t pay a premium for a nice restaurant for a repeatable hyper-efficient process.  They can get that at any franchise restaurant for commodity prices.