by Todd Henry
Stimuli
The quality of the output of any process is dependent on the quality of its inputs, and this holds true for the creative process. I call creative inputs “stimuli” because they stimulate creative thought. Despite their importance, remarkably few people are intentional about the kinds of stimuli they absorb on a day-to-day basis. If you want to regularly generate brilliant ideas, you must be purposeful about what you are putting into your head. As the old saying goes, “Garbage in, garbage out.” In chapter 7 you will learn how to ensure that you are getting good creative nutrition.
Hours
Time is the currency of productivity, and how you handle it will ultimately determine your success or failure. But in order to really thrive, you need to shake yourself of our collective obsession with time efficiency and learn instead to focus on effectiveness. You need to ensure that the practices that truly make you a more effective creator are making it onto your calendar. In chapter 8 you will learn how to ensure that your time is being spent effectively and to great result.
Practices in each of these five areas (F-R-E-S-H) provide the foundation for a life that is prolific, brilliant, and healthy. In later chapters, we will dive deeply into each of these. But there are obstacles we face on the road to everyday brilliance. Often these pitfalls are the result of organizational tensions that inevitably emerge whenever there is an attempt to organize the creative process or to instill systems around creative work.
POSSIBILITIES VERSUS PRAGMATICS
To create is to explore possibilities. There are a nearly infinite number of possible solutions to any given problem, and if you explore long enough you will almost always uncover another one. In many ways, the creative process is a never-ending chase after the possible. You have permission to think big about your projects, to dream and to innovate. You are told to really stretch yourself and to try to come up with something truly new. This creates a kind of “race to brilliance” with each new project.
But no matter what is said, the reality is that your work life is full of constraints. You have deadlines, budget limitations, and client requirements to deal with. The result is that you probably often feel pulled back and forth between possibilities and pragmatics. On the one hand, the lure of another conceptual break-through is seductive, but on the other, you must deal with the reality that your work is being both timed and judged.
“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.”
—Jack London
The pull between possibilities and pragmatics has us serving two masters at once. Even as we’re exploring some new idea and getting really excited about our direction, we hear the little voice in the back of our head asking us, “Are you sure you want to try this? This is risky!” So we don’t go quite as far as we might. Over time, as we deal with more and more of these practical compromises, we feel the effects on our creative drive. Our passion wanes, because it’s difficult to stay excited about the work when we feel that practical limitations will ultimately prevent us from really doing something we believe to be truly great.
Both creatives and organizations are constantly dealing with this tension. Organizations recognize the need to give creatives permission to innovate and explore, but they also realize that boundaries are necessary to ensure the sustainability of the organization. No one is to blame here—it’s just a reality—but it can feel very frustrating. Creatives are hired because of their capacity to create value for the organization, yet they frequently feel they must navigate a series of hurdles in order to do their best work.
How does this affect your creativity? You probably feel the pressure to be brilliant and—at the same time—to be practical. These are conflicting tensions, and they are the source of most of the burnout, frustration, and organizational strife I’ve seen within creative organizations. It’s such a significant factor that we’re going to tackle it in depth in the next chapter.
2.
THE DYNAMICS OF TEAM WORK
In 2005, military strategist Thomas Barnett took the stage at the TED Conference, a gathering of intellectuals, innovators, and artists, to share some bold thoughts about the current state of the U.S. military. According to Barnett, there are two fundamental roles played by any military force: advancing in order to take new ground and occupying the ground after it has been taken. The challenge that military strategists perpetually wrestle with is how to train and equip a force to do both effectively. Each role demands a unique set of skills, and there is an intricate balance between the two. Without a “leviathan” force (as Barnett calls the force that takes new ground), there is no need for an occupying force, and to require soldiers who are trained to aggressively take ground to do the largely administrative work of occupying that ground is challenging to both the soldiers and the overall mission.
As creatives, we are wired to take new ground. We love the thrill of the chase, pursuing objectives and tackling goals that seem just beyond our reach. We are fundamentally wired to be a part of the leviathan force, or we would never have chosen jobs that require so much self-definition. Much of our time as organizational creatives, however, is spent occupying the ground that we’ve already taken. We must deal with systems, processes, and protocol in executing our ideas. We have to deal with the everyday demands of communicating and creating interdependently. While we certainly gain new opportunities when we organize around the creative process, we must also deal with the inherent limitations and side effects of collaborative creative work.
THE PROS AND CONS OF TEAM CREATING
Organizations organize. It’s their reason for being. And organization is good, because it allows groups of people to leverage assets more efficiently and scale in ways that aren’t possible for individuals. Many people have brilliant ideas, but unless they are capable of organizing around those ideas, it will be impossible for them to get much of any significance done. As much as we may venerate the ideal of the lone innovator, slaving away in the garage or studio to bring a vision to life, the reality is that most of the time brilliant creations are the result of teams of people stumbling awkwardly into the unknown.
As creatives, we are wired to take new ground. We love the thrill of the chase, pursuing objectives and tackling goals that seem just beyond our reach.
Scott Belsky is CEO of Behance, a New York – based company dedicated to helping creatives execute their ideas, and author of Making Ideas Happen. Belsky believes that “the greatest breakthroughs across all industries are a result of creative people and teams that are especially productive.” A significant factor in their productivity, Belsky has discovered, is their ability to organize. In most work, a well-organized team of creatives—even if they are not highly skilled—will produce exponentially more and better results than a lone genius. Strong organization is critical for teams of people who want to accomplish great things in the world, and a critical element of that organization is the ability to lead by establishing a culture obsessed with execution. Belsky continues, “History is made by passionate, creative people and organizations with the rare ability to lead others—and themselves.”
While important, effective organization alone is not sufficient to ensure the success of a creative team. An environment must be established that offers sufficient resources, fosters the right organizational mind-set, and allows for the natural ebb and flow of the creative process—because creative productivity is naturally rhythmic, and there will be periods of incredible productivity followed by periods when it seems like we can’t think our way out of a paper bag. For those of us who work primarily on our own, this is not much of a challenge because we have the flexibility to adjust our work life as needed, but for those of us who work in a team context this can be a lot more challenging. We don’t have the luxury of having an “off day,” and when we do have one the entire team suffers. None of us are machines, and there will always be an element of unpredictability about our work.
There are a few creativity-draining tensions that result
from any attempt to organize creative work. Some of these tensions have become so engrained in our workplace experience that they just seem like the natural order of things, but once we learn to spot them, we can establish practices to counteract them. In this chapter we’re going to examine the dynamics of organizational creative work and how they affect our ability to be consistently brilliant and effective.
CONTRADICTORY EXPECTATIONS
Creative teams face two conflicting pressures: to produce timely and consistent work, and to produce unique and brilliant work. The pull between these two expectations creates a tension like that from two people pulling on a rope. When this pull—between possibilities and pragmatics—becomes too strong, the rope is taut, eliminating the peaks and troughs of productivity required do our best creative work.
We are constantly forced to choose between striving to improve the quality of our work and driving it to completion. This dynamic manifests itself in three tensions: the time-versus-value tension, the predictable-versus-rhythmic tension, and the product-versus-process tension.
The Time-Versus-Value Tension
The traditional model of compensation is based on time. A worker exchanges a certain number of hours per week for a fair wage. If you are a good worker, you work hard all day long for your paycheck, and then at quitting time you go home and forget about your job for the evening.
As a creative worker, you’re not really paid for your time, you’re paid for the value you create. Just showing up and doing a set of tasks every day doesn’t cut it. You are required to perpetually create new value in order to prove your worth to your employer, your peers, and even to yourself. And though many creatives have more flexibility than ever regarding how and where they do their work, this flexibility introduces a new kind of performance pressure: completion anxiety. Because we’re capable of working at all times—our mind goes with us everywhere, after all—we continue working on our projects for as long as we possibly can. We’re never really certain when we’ve done enough.
“An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.” —Edward de Bono, creativity expert and author of Lateral Thinking
In order to pacify this insecurity, many of us find that we’re working even when we’re supposed to be off the clock. Just a little more research. Just one more brainstorming session. Just a few more minutes tweaking the proposal. It is a never-ending pursuit of value creation.
In spite of the increasing flexibility that many workplaces are introducing and the growing number of freelancers, many of us are actually working more hours than ever because it’s so difficult to draw the line between work time and nonwork time. And because we are not just doing repeatable processes, each project we’re working on requires something new from us. The pressure to keep the momentum going on our projects can feel a bit like pushing a rock up a very steep hill. We might stop to sit and to catch our breath, but we still have to exert a small amount of effort at all times to keep the rock from rolling back down the hill.
There are a few questions that this time-versus-value tension forces us to wrestle with.
Am I proving my worth?
This question keeps performance-driven people up at night. We wonder if we could have done more, or if we will be recognized for what we did. We wonder if our career is on track, and we think that perhaps if we just do that one more thing it will push us over the top for our next promotion. And now that we have technology to keep us connected to our work and our peers at all times, there is always one more thing that we can do right now to move the ball forward. We have eliminated the off switch. We’re on all the time.
One creative director often found himself up at very early hours checking e-mail, sometimes even turning on his phone, which he kept next to his bed, in the middle of the night just to check if anything noteworthy was going on. Additionally, responding to e-mail was typically the last thing he did before going to bed each night, making it difficult to slow his mind and rest.
This perpetual inbox obsession wasn’t an organizational expectation; rather, it was fueled by a deep insecurity that something important was going to happen and that he wouldn’t respond in time to contribute meaningfully to the conversation. He admitted that it was rare that this behavior had actually increased his performance, but that it was really just a kind of pacifier to help him feel wired-in and needed. He was always concerned about whether he was adding enough value to the company. He implemented some of the techniques in the forthcoming chapters on focus and energy, including setting dedicated (but frequent) times for checking e-mail and buffers before bedtime to allow his mind to slow before sleep. Gradually he felt his energy level and creative performance rise as a result.
While there are certainly career-related factors that drive this insecurity, the drive to produce goes beyond the desire to be a good employee. We want to know that what we’re doing matters. We want to know that if we were to disappear tomorrow, someone would notice. In a sense, we feel like we define our space in the world as we create value. Unhealthy? Probably. But often true nonetheless.
What kind of value should I create?
As a creative, you probably have latitude in defining your course of action on your projects. You may have a general sense of direction or some objectives, but you continually face the question: What do I do next?
This introduces the pressure to get it right each time, because there is tremendous opportunity cost associated with getting it wrong. It’s possible to spend hours or even days heading down the wrong trail if you make one bad choice about where you should be spending your time and energy. This pressure can be paralyzing, especially when you’re working on critical and timely work.
I was once involved in an off-site team-building session designed to teach better methods for collaboration. For one exercise we went out into the woods for a little “orienteering.” We were broken into teams and tasked with finding an object hidden in the woods using only a compass and a set of instructions unique to our starting position. Pride was on the line as my teammates and I hurriedly worked our way through the first few instructions.
“Forty-five degrees northwest, twenty paces.”
“Due south, thirty-five paces.”
We practically ran through the first several steps before realizing that we were a significant distance from everyone else. Our initial thought was that perhaps we were the only geniuses in the bunch, but we quickly concluded that we were actually the ones who’d messed up—in a big way.
As we backed our way through the previous instructions, we realized that we’d been off by a few degrees in one of the first few steps. Now that we were several instructions down the list, the compounding effect of that one mistake had led us significantly off course.
In a similar way, one wrong decision early in a project can significantly affect the end value of your work. As a result, the pressure to determine the right kind of value to produce can become paralyzing to your creative process.
Who is responsible for what?
Collaboration gives you the opportunity to accomplish more than you could alone, but it also introduces new complexity into the work. You must deal with the distribution of responsibilities across the team and with minor (or major) disagreements about the kind of value that’s being created.
“Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence. The advantage of this method is that you end up with something for which you will not be personally blamed.”
—Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert
There’s a lot of overlap in highly conceptual, creative work, which can result in redundancy, confusion, and disagreement. Also, because the tasks for the team must continually be defined, a high level of communication must be employed just to stay on course.
If it’s difficult for you to answer questions about the value you’re creating as an individual, it becomes vastly more difficult for teams to do so. Each member is wrestl
ing with the same questions of how much value he should create and which tasks he should choose. Everyone is also rightly concerned with his own value to the company and whether he’s doing enough to justify his continued employment. In unhealthy teams, this can result in a lot of posturing or blame shifting throughout a project, depending on whether it’s going well or poorly. No one wants to be left without a chair when the music stops!
▶ THE EFFECTS OF THE TIME-VERSUS-VALUE TENSION
It can be very difficult to fully engage in your work when you aren’t certain how to know when you’re finished. When the main indicator of your performance is the amount of value you create, it’s easy to feel like the work is never done. The behavior for many creative teams is to work until they simply run out of time.
One team I encountered had become addicted to last-minute change. They would continue to tweak and change a project right up until it was delivered, often discarding weeks or even months of thought and preparation. While this sometimes had the short-term effect of an improved end product, the net long-term effect on the team was that people stopped thinking strategically at the beginning of the process, knowing that everything would likely change in the end anyway. Until it was pointed out, they didn’t realize that this behavior was significantly affecting the overall value they created as a team. They were allowing a few minor improvements at the last minute to affect their larger sense of engagement as a team, and their work was suffering.