Reflection-in-action goes a long way towards describing what we mean when we speak of a practioner’s artistry. It’s a capacity to combine thinking and doing in the middle of performing, often under stress, “while the train is running.” We find this type of performance on the athletic field, where coaches literally coach their players to higher levels of skill, or in the music conservatory where performers, conductors, and composers use deliberate practice to stretch their musical muscles. We also find it in the clinic, the office, the lab, the studio, the shop—any place in which mentoring and apprenticeship are modes of learning.
The way designers approach a problem is to feel their way towards a solution, akin to how an athlete decides her next move. The decision is made more with the body than the mind. Only after a direction begins to feel right does the designer try to imagine specific aesthetics to make it tangible, visible, and functional.
Growing up in Denmark, Anders Warming loved to wash and polish his parents cars. He’d trace their subtle curves with his hands, marveling at the seamless progression of forms, one flowing into another, each in perfect harmony with the whole. “I touched them so many times that I could close my eyes and draw them,” he later said. One of these cars was a mineral-blue Mini 850, a precursor of the new Minis he would end up designing for BMW in 2011.
Warming doesn’t start a new design by going straight to CAD software. He also steers clear of verbal descriptions and PowerPoint presentations. Instead, he draws. He may make hundreds of sketches before even looking at a screen. “You probably need 90 sketches just to get warm, and after that, you’re really in the flow. You’re transcending the paper.” He compares it to perfecting your serve so you can win at Wimbledon. “Maybe the 151st is the one.”
All too often, says Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, “we try to push, pull, outline, and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is one of surrender, not control.” By letting go our fears of looking foolish or wasting time, sketching or doodling can take us where we might not ordinarily go. Our experience with the subject we’re drawing, or the idea we’re pursuing, will be direct, undiluted, and free from the strictures imposed by our egos.
The concept of letting go is a theme running through all the creative disciplines. In design, sketching is the mother of invention. In science it’s the experiment; in business it’s the whiteboard diagram; in writing it’s the rough draft; in acting it’s the run-through; in inventing it’s the prototype; in jazz it’s jamming. Miles Davis once said: “Do not fear mistakes—there are none.” Every step or misstep is provisional or correctable, a mini-lesson in the practice room of mastery. You go in not knowing so you can come out knowing.
The no-process process
There’s a standard model that designers use to describe the creative process, usually with minor variations. Sometimes these are followed by a trademark notice, as if to say, “Hands off! This is my process, invented by me! By the way, did I mention it was mine?” Yet they all conform to the same progression that goes from a state of not knowing to a state of knowing, laid out in 4-10 logical steps.
The standard process looks something like this: 1) discovery, 2) definition, 3) design, 4) development, and 5) deployment. You could repeat some of these steps, or place them in a slightly different order, or add baby steps in between. You could also throw a step onto the front for getting the assignment, and another onto the back for launching the result. Most process diagrams are circular, suggesting that the end of the journey leads you right back to the beginning.
There’s only one hitch. A truly creative process bears little resemblance to these models. In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. If it had to be circular, the real process of making things would look more like this: 1) confusion, 2) clutter, 3) chaos, 4) crisis, and 5) catharsis. But if designers presented this process as a diagram, they’d scare the bejeesus out of their bosses and clients. So instead they present the calm, confident progressions of the so-called “rational model.”
The rational model of design is not exactly wrong. It’s just not helpful. When used slavishly, it can lead to a significant waste of resources and a debilitating sense of hopelessness as originality and excitement turn to mediocrity and disappointment. Why would this happen? Because creativity doesn’t respond to project management so much as passion management. Creative passion is the primary resource, so it needs to be nurtured and guarded. Designers may taxi to the runway with briefings, data, and deadlines, but they reach flying altitude with emotion, empathy, and intuition. By overemphasizing process, you can discourage greatness.
A better model for designing is the no-process process, an approach that recognizes the chaotic nature of creativity. In the no-process model, you start with a general understanding of the problem, the goals, the areas of concern, the milestones, and the criteria for success. But the steps for addressing these areas should grow from the particular nature of the challenge, the circumstances in which the work will be done, the skills and workstyles of the team members, and the insights revealed as the project unfolds. It shouldn’t be forced to fit a diagram.
Listen to author Annie Dillard: “Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Bohr and Gauguin, possessed powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules.” While few of us are Rembrandts or Shakespeares, the principle is the same. You chain creativity to a wheel at your peril.
But if there’s no process, where do you start? That’s easy. Anywhere. Everywhere. Whatever place releases the most energy. “It doesn’t matter where you start,” said composer John Cage, “as long as you start.” The important thing is that you cover all the bases by the time you’re done. By bouncing around from dreaming to research to model making to testing to walking to sketching to presenting to thinking to reading to arguing to sketching, you set off a chain reaction that a static process could never hope to match. The ideas virtually explode into being. The content determines the form, the form determines the content. Together they throw off clouds of surprising ideas.
The lifestyle stores known as Anthropologie have qualities of creativity and surprise baked into their business model. Each store has a large art room in the back where employees and contractors can experiment with new ways of displaying, merchandising, and creating products. As a result, no two stores are exactly alike, which allows them to keep their customers delightfully off-balance. The accepted notion that chain stores should aim for total consistency now seems hopelessly anachronistic.
As a believer in the magic of design, I have three fond wishes.
The first is that a greater number of creative people—designers, entrepreneurs, strategists, engineers, scientists—begin to embrace the true process of design, and abandon the comforting models that lead to mediocre outcomes.
The second is that educational institutions arrive at a similar understanding, making room for messy thinking and surprising ideas in the classroom. While I doubt I’ll see real paint splattered on the walls of Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, metaphorical splatters would be a start.
The third is that the leaders and managers of companies encourage the real process of design in all of its chaotic splendor, trusting, even insisting, that the results be more than efficient—that they be surprising, amazing, and occasionally even world changing.
Every day is Groundhog Day
Remember the movie with Bill Murray? The protagonist is forced to repeat the same day until he finally gets it right. He tries everything: manipulation, hedonism, theft, seduction, even suicide. Nothing works until he moves beyond his usual repertoire of cheap tricks and selfish tactics and realizes the only way out is up. He becomes more helpful to the townspeople—changing tires, saving children, helping old people. He even acquires new skills in jazz piano, ice scul
pture, and chiropractic medicine. When at last he achieves the perfect day, he wins the girl and breaks the endless loop of repetition.
The experience of Groundhog Day is not unlike the experience of creativity. There are two main stages in innovation: 1) getting the right idea (dreaming), and 2) getting the idea right (making). As in Groundhog Day, getting the idea right is an iterative process. It doesn’t happen overnight or in a sudden flash. It takes trial and error, aesthetic tinkering, and learning in action.
How many promising ideas have died after birth due to poor execution? I’d hazard a guess that the number is well over 50 percent. We’ll never know, since they tend to disappear so quickly from the scene. A few which have stuck around long enough to notice are the Ford Edsel (died 1959), the movie Ishtar (died 1987), the Excite online network (died 2004), and the Bush-era Vision for Space Exploration program (died 2010).
And beyond this, how many innovations have managed to succeed temporarily, only to fall by the wayside as competitors out-designed the original idea? The Betamax videotape format comes to mind (eclipsed by VHS), the Honda Insight (beat out by Toyota’s Prius), and the BlackBerry smartphone (outclassed by Apple’s iPhone). All of these are cases in which a first-mover advantage couldn’t save a half-hearted execution.
Finally, how many of today’s “successes” are vulnerable to more designful competitors? I’ll nominate Facebook, Ryanair, Radio Shack, HTC, Breville, Taco Bell, Oreck, Safeway, Hewlett-Packard, and Amtrak, just for starters. What seems to be missing in these organizations is a lack of sophistication about customer experience. You can see it more clearly when you compare them side by side with offerings from Pinterest, Southwest Airlines, Samsung, Nespresso, In-N-Out Burger, Dyson, Whole Foods, IBM, and TGV. The superior customer experience delivered by these brands is the direct result of design.
“The details aren’t the details,” said designer Charles Eames. “They make the product.” Eames’s every creative decision grew from “a tight and painful discipline” that brought him to grips with the most prosaic and minute problems. He obsessed about the way two different materials came together, and if they failed to provide a good aesthetic fit, he rejected them. “The connections, the connections, the connections.”
Composer Philip Glass has a similar concern for integrity in his music. During an interview with his cousin, Ira Glass, he explained that one of the problems that occupied his attention early on was how to “collapse form and content into one condition, rather than pouring the content into a chosen form.” In other words, instead of first selecting a musical genre and then “filling” it with his own music, he preferred to develop the format and the music together, creating a mutually supportive fit without regard to existing genres. It’s easy to imagine a musician sitting in on a blues or folk performance without having heard the song before. It’s harder to imagine a musician joining in on a quirky German Lied or a French mélodie. And it’s impossible to imagine anyone sitting in on a new Philip Glass composition. By focusing on the fit instead of the genre, Glass has been able to get outside these categories and create unique musical forms and experiences.
You could dismiss this kind of attention to detail by saying, “Well, Philip Glass is a genius.” But the same general process that makes Glass a genius is open to you, too, whether you’re a business person, engineer, entrepreneur, student, designer, teacher, or supply chain manager. It just takes a willingness to learn through successive layers of effort. Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and author of The Philosophical Baby, explains it this way: “You come to make better decisions by making not-so-good decisions and then correcting them. You get to be a good planner by making plans, implementing them and seeing the results again and again.” To improve, you have to constantly push yourself beyond your limits, then pay attention to what trips you up.
In design circles this is known as fast failing. The successive drawings, models, and prototypes that designers make are not designed to be perfect solutions. They’re designed to illuminate the problem, and in the process hone their intuition. In fact, the best designers are those who can keep the project liquid—allowing more iterations and more interaction among collaborators.
Undoubtedly, one of the world’s finest examples of creative collaboration was the making of the King James Bible, first published 400 years ago. It took the work of 54 scholars and clergymen, organized into six nine-man teams called “companies,” meeting over a period of seven years. Since they worked in successive iterations, sharing back and forth as they went, they were able to keep the project in a liquid state while they fashioned one of the purest masterpieces in the history of English prose.
When the project is physical, like a product or a movie or a building, sometimes the biggest challenge is to keep the gestural feeling of the original drawings alive as you work through the iterative process. One way to accomplish this feat is to work physically as long as possible, making mockups, acting out stories, or building models instead of heading straight to the computer.
The temptation in design is the same as in Groundhog Day. To look for the quick answer, skip the tedious effort, go right to the gratification of closure. But that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise. Making, if it’s to be meaningful, is a journey to your best self. If you want more, pay more. The effort to imbue objects with integrity is the reason some things are more valuable than others.
The discipline of uncluding
Many people can include. Even more people can exclude. But very few people know how to unclude. Uncluding is the art of subtracting every element that doesn’t pull its weight. Or, as artist Hans Hofmann said, “eliminating all but the necessary so the necessary may speak.”
We live in a time of unprecedented clutter: visual clutter, verbal clutter, product clutter, feature clutter, conceptual clutter. Clutter is any element that doesn’t contribute to meaning or usefulness—a form of pollution that makes life harder to navigate. If life were a garden, clutter would be the weeds that block our paths or obstruct our views. Yet a weed is simply a plant you don’t want in your garden, so one person’s weed might be another’s treasured specimen. And herein lies the wiggle room for many an abuse.
We seem to be addicted to addition. Adding, collecting, stacking, extending, building up, building out—these are activities that come naturally to us. Perhaps there was once a genetic advantage in acquisitiveness, which simply grew stronger over time. We have an urge to build shelters, store food for the winter, add to our knowledge, add to our wealth, and add to our personal power. In some people this addiction devolves into a pathology known as hoarding, causing them to fill their houses to the rafters with old newspapers, used pie tins, odd scraps of plastic, pieces of cardboard—always collecting, never discarding. We shake our heads at this behavior, but maybe we should simply view it as human, only more so.
Companies, also, have a tendency toward hoarding. They build up a tangle of products, services, brands, subbrands, features, departments, offices, and the bureaucratic rules to manage them. They only cut them back when the weeds begin to strangle their profits.
Suzanne Heywood, a consultant for McKinsey, divides business complexity into four types: 1) Dysfunctional complexity, in which irrelevant practices are perpetuated, or relevant activities are duplicated in the wake of mergers or reorgs; 2) designed complexity, created in the expectation that the benefits will outweigh the costs; 3) inherent complexity, part and parcel of the work itself; and 4) imposed complexity, shaped by industry regulators, NGOS, and trade unions. The first two are self-inflicted, while the second two come with the territory.
Heywood interviewed executives at 900 companies, and found that certain types of complexity were causing employees to experience high levels of stress and confusion, which in turn were affecting their performance. They cited things like merger pressures, collaboration challenges, and product proliferation as growing problems.
Of course, complexity isn’t always bad. There can be value in having
multiple business units, addressing multiple segments, and offering multiple product lines. But there’s a difference between complexity and clutter. Complexity, if well organized, is healthy. Clutter is a sign of dysfunction. Companies tend to forgive product proliferation, even embrace it, in the pursuit of growth. And they excuse overgrown product lines on the basis of giving customers more choice.
Customers do want choice, but they want optimum choice, not maximum choice. A technique called conjoint analysis—a way to study the trade-offs customers are willing to make in a purchase decision—has taught researchers that the most number of choices is rarely the best number of choices. The human brain resists “overchoice”—a word used by Yankelovich Partners to describe the baffling number of options in the marketplace today. They recommend instead that companies offer customers “one-think” shopping as a way to simplify the buying experience.
One-think shopping is actually the number-one goal of branding. It creates the shortest, most efficient path to potential satisfaction and tension release for stressed-out customers. In an age of extreme clutter, the strongest brands are simplifiers.
So why isn’t clutter going away? What are the forces arrayed against simplicity? Let me suggest the following:
A need for growth. Most businesses are driven by a desire to keep expanding, which can overshadow the desire to stay lean and profitable. When CEO Ken Constable took over Smith & Noble, an online window-covering company, the product team had been adding new styles of woven blinds at an alarming pace. They named every new product after an Asian city. “I knew we were in trouble,” said Constable, “when they told me they were running out of cities.” He quickly cut the number of products to the most popular destinations.
A search for synergy. As companies grow, they branch out in directions that sometimes aren’t profitable. Rather than accept this as a setback and retrace their steps, they add more elements to create “synergy” with the elements that weren’t working. In essence, they fight complexity with more complexity, usually making the problem worse. The same thing can happen when a company whose revenues are declining tries to create synergy by merging with another company in the same situation. It’s like tying two stones together to see if they’ll float. They usually sink to the bottom in a sorry tangle.
Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age Page 18