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Creativity on Demand

My name is Todd Henry. Um, my company is accidental, creative, and we help creative people. Creative teams. People have to come up with ideas every day to generate ideas. A two moments notice and we've already seen some questions, I believe Teoh the Internet audience. But I also wanna pose this to our students here Alive just is kind of a way to prime the pump today just to kind of get us going and start thinking about this topic of creativity. Because when we talk about creativity, it's kind of this sometimes mystical, ineffable thing, right? It's the mystical, ineffable part of what we have to do. So just the kind of prime the pump a little bit like to get some discussion, going about creativity, your thoughts about creativity and, um, and how you perceive creativity in the course of your day to day work. So the first question is, my definition of creativity is so you could take just a minute to kind of jot down your answer to that, and then we'll come back to it. My definition of cr...

eativity is, and that question next question is the one thing that most limits my ability to be creative in my work is the one thing that most limits my ability to be creative in. My work is. And finally, when someone mentions the word creativity I feel and that word feel is very intentional and purposeful. So when someone mentions the word creativity, I feel okay, so let's start. We'll start here with our, uh, studio students. Eso my definition of creativity is anyone wanted Give a go with that. Expressing your point of view. Okay, that's my interpretation of it. Okay. Expressing your point of view. Great. John, Um, that's a problem solving problem solving. Okay, you've read my book. Great. Okay, Brian, um, expressive emotion Expressing emotion. Interesting. Okay. All right. Do we have any responses from the Internet world? We're just waiting for a few, but I think based on my epic fail there at the beginning, when you are under pressure is a lot of things that you can learn about how to remain created. So I'm looking forward to getting a lot out of today. Wonderful. Great. I have my answer. You want it? My definition of creativity is the freedom to express for you to express Wonderful. Yeah, I think that's one of the things about creativity, Specifically is that it's really difficult to nail down exactly how to define it, because I think it takes form in different ways in different people in their work and different ways of people express themselves in the midst of their work, right? So it could be difficult to defying creative. It is one of the things we're gonna talk about today. That's one of the pressures that we face. I think as creative professionals is, how do we even define this thing that we're accountable for? All right. Okay. So what's the one thing that stands in the way of you being creative in your work? You had to drill it down. The one thing Brian you want take a crack at first time, Okay. And House Hill, how does that play out for you? Um, most of my work is logistical. And so I mean it, Z, um, it's not so creative in the sense of creating a kind of an artistic piece or something more. I think creatively that way. So, um, when I go home to be creative outside of work, it's hard because I feel so squished time. Sometimes I just want to relax as opposed to continually grind out some creative thoughts and creative exercises. Yeah, yeah, I think one of the challenges with time is that as you push things into the future, as you know, it's the weight of all that's not being done. And that weighs on you. As you're engaging in the work that you're actually doing, you realize I'm actually just pushing things into the future, and it's build the kind of pressure, and we'll talk about some ways to deal with that a little bit. Great, Sean, I have to, um, I'd say lack of energy. Like when I'm tired. I'm just tapped, um, and then also fear. Okay, great. Well, dress both of those as well. And fear is really sinister because fear can subversively sneak into our life and begin to erode our creative process from the inside out. So we have to learn to deal with it. It's great. Um, I originally wrote down lack of inspiration, but in thinking about it a little bit deeper, I want to say doubt is probably my biggest roadblock. Um, because a lot of times you can be inspired by things, and you edit yourself to a point where you get nothing done. So I would say doubt would be mine, right? Yeah. OK, thank you. Um, what about the third question? What? How this when you hear the word creativity, what does it make you feel? Inspired? Inspired opportunity. I mean, there's not a lot of things in life that you can have the creative license toe feel. Like you could do whatever you want. Yeah, so great. Yeah. Bryant feel I get excited. Somebody says, Let's figure out a creative solution or any time in your creative I'm like, Yeah, this is fun. And I get to think about something outside the box, okay? Yeah. Great. Yeah, I think, uh, police guy. Okay. Yeah, it's interesting, because when I asked that question with large groups of people interested to be very polarizing very few people when they When you ask them, how does the word creativity make you feel? Very few people say, Yeah, I don't know, right. It's usually either incredibly excited or incredibly fearful, because with those wide open plains in front of you can do anything you want. And some people feel intimidated. Paralyzed when there are so many options in front of them and other people think, Let's go take it. Let's take the land right So it can create sort of polarised response. And so especially inside organizations, when you're dealing with clients, you know, depending on how people respond when you give them that kind of freedom, you have to learn a different way of sort of interacting and dealing with people in managing expectations. So that's great. It's wonderful. All right, So as you probably picked up on you in the course of the first couple of minutes and we're gonna be talking about some of the ineffable, intangible aspects of our life, and I work any time we talk about creativity, it's really difficult to drill down exactly what it is we're talking about. What we all have. Different expectations, definitions of what creativity is. And I think sometimes when we that thus it makes it difficult for us to engage in conversation about it because you can't really do that. So for those of you who might be a little more analytical, those who might be a little more numbers oriented, I want to point you to the universally recognised mso w spectrum just to show you exactly how touchy feely we're gonna get today, which, of course, is the Mr Spock's Oprah Spectrum. And we're gonna be landing right about there on the touchy feely scale today. Okay, so now all the way. Touchy feely, but not all the way analytical either. And for this first section, we're gonna be doing a lot of things that were prescribed in my first book, the Accidental Created. We're gonna talk about the dynamics of the creative process, especially creating in organizations or in client types of situations under pressure, which is what many of us have to do. All of you have to do every day. And I have to do, um So we're gonna talk in part one about the dynamics, the dynamics of creating on demand, some of the pressures that come with that. So, a couple of years ago, my family and I made the trip toe Lake Erie on the Fourth of July. So we are. We're from Ohio, from Ohio, used to woops way, and we were making a trip with Lake Erie for the Fourth of July, and we're going to see the fireworks on the Fourth of July and we start getting the kids ready and we start getting ready to get out of the lake for the fireworks. And as we started doing that, our middle child Oh, in our six year old at the time, started pro testing. I mean screaming, bloody murder. I'm not going to go. You can't make me go right Like a good data said, Show up and get in the wagon. So we put them in the wagon. We start walking down to the lake. And as we get closer and closer to the lake, all of a sudden Owen starts protesting again. He's screaming, He's wailing. He jumps out of the wagon, he turns around. He starts running the opposite direction, right? So he's running back toward the house, and now I'm chasing my wailing six year old son as I'm running through the streets. This is looking really good, by the way. Chasing my wailing son is he's running the streets, so I finally catch up with him. I put my arms on their shoulders and say, Oh, and son, it's okay, It's OK. The fireworks are going to fall on you. They're perfectly safe. It's OK. And you looked at me with these bug eyes and he said, Dad, I'm not worried they're gonna fall on me. That's what's going on. I don't understand. Why are you so worried about the fireworks? He said, Dad, fireworks make my feet fuzzy. I turned my wife. So what have you been feeding my child? You have made your feet. But when you're talking about and he said, yeah, like a Disney world. Okay, so I solve creative problems for a living. This is what I do. So I've got three disparate bits of data. I've got fireworks, I've got whaling screaming feet Fuzzy son, right? And I've got Disney World like What in the world is going on? How do all these things fit together? So I start churning in my mind. I'm trying to figure out how do all these things fit together? And I remember that the last time own self fireworks was on a family trip to Disney World the previous year. So I'm like, OK, click. That makes sense. We've got wailing child fuzzy feet, Disney World. It makes sense with the fireworks thing, But what in the world is he talking about with a fuzzy feet. And so I'm replaying that scene in my mind. I'm thinking about what? Where would this be coming from? What was going on? And I remember that that day one spent most of the day riding around on my shoulders were walking around for a couple of hours at Disney World on my shoulders and replaying the scene in my mind. And at one point we walk in front of Cinderella's castle and there's a show going on and that the the height of the show, a plume of fireworks goes off proof over Cinderella's castle. What happens when you spend about two hours riding around on somebody's shoulders? What happens to your legs? They fall asleep, right? So in his fireworks induced startle, Owen suddenly realized that while riding on my shoulders all day, his legs had fallen asleep. Okay, so we had a little talk about causation and correlation. I don't think he quite got. My son spent a year with the assumption that fireworks make his legs immobile because of that one experience, right? So he was terrified, terrified to go to the fireworks. We'll talk about it. He was fine After that, my son can now enjoy fireworks without the fear of immobility. But I started thinking shortly thereafter about how often a similar thing happens in my life and in my work. I have an experience. Maybe it's a success. Maybe it's a failure, but I haven't experience. And because our brains are hardwired to form habits around behavior that rewards us in some way or around behavior that keeps us from some kind of pain. We form an assumption or a system to help us replicate that success or that failure. A problem is that those systems, over time, if left unchecked, could become fossilized assumptions. And those assumptions could become habits. And those habits could become systems. And the systems, once they become fossilized, can prevent us from engaging in the kind of behavior that allows us to truly be creative, to think outside of the confines of our normal creative process, and come up with really valuable ideas. And it's so easy when you're in a create on demand roll. When you have to go to work and generate ideas, every day is a function of your job to turn your thoughts in the value like so many of us do. It's so easy to get into a situation where you go back to the same wells over and over and over again, where you replicate the same processes that have led to past success. Or you avoid those processes that maybe lead to some kind of painful encounter, like an unsuccessful project or whatever. But in doing that, sometimes you're forming assumptions, your fossil izing around systems that are preventing you from looking in new places for ideas. So what I want to talk about today are some of the places maybe in our life, where that happens, where we make assumptions about creativity, about the creative process, when places where maybe we're fossil izing around processes that were once upon a time successful for us but aren't the kinds of processes we need. Toe face the new challenges that were encountering in our day to day work and the question that really has been obsessing me for the last several years is why do some creatives Some of the people I've worked with some of the company's I've worked with why did they continue on a course of productive growth, brilliant work and tremendous value that they're able to add to the marketplace. Why did they continue on that course for many, many years? And other people tend to slip into a place of mediocrity. Other people become stagnant. They become stuck. That word mediocrity is. Actually it's very interesting because the word mediocrity comes from two words. In the original language. The words are medias and focus media's meaning middle and oh Chris, meaning rugged mountain. So the beat mediocre literally means to stop halfway up a rugged mountains. You have an objective. You have something you're going for your trying to reach the peak, and at some point you get stuck, You stop. You're halfway up the rugged mountains. So why do some creatives continue thriving and pushing and moving up the mountain and taking the objective and other creatives slip into this place of media? So, Chris, of halfway up the rugged, mounting there, many forces we're gonna unlock throughout the course of the day today that tend to cause people to get stuck. So we're gonna be talking about that all day today. But the primary lens that I was using as I was describing success, what does reaching the peak look like And what does it take to get there is that we want to do three things. We wanna be prolific. Meaning we're doing a lot of work because we have to do how many of you have to do a lot of work on it. Good to see the hands going up, right. We have to do a lot of work. Brilliant meaning We're doing good work because we have to do that to keep our job, the please, their clients, right and healthy. And this is one of the key pieces here, Healthy meaning, doing it in a sustainable way during it in the way that we're gonna be able to continue producing over the long term and what I've discovered in the course of working with lots of creatives leading teams and working with creative teams from from organizations that it's really, really easy to get two of these three right? And it's really challenging. Sometimes you get all three right at the same time, for example, we could be prolific, meaning we're doing a lot of work because we have to do that. We could be brilliant. Meaning we're actually doing good work. Were actually producing good work, but we're missing the healthy piece. We're missing that sustainability peace, and when that happens, we're missing the sustainability piece. We eventually lose the other two as well. Because we're not able to produce consistently over the long term is a technical term that I coined for this, and I put it in the accident. Creative and it's fried. And this is where many people live their lives as creative pros. There, in a state of perpetual fried them, because they haven't is that even the word fried them. I don't think it is, but they haven't figured out how to sustain high quantities of great work over the long term, and so eventually they burn out. And we all probably have seen this at various points in our lives. In the organizations, we work with incline interactions where people produce great quantities of work for a season. It's really good work, and then they burn out. They crashing to go through this cycle every three or four years with a crash and burn, and they start thinking, Well, maybe it's the job that I'm in, right? Or maybe I'm not doing the thing. I'm wired to do. But a lot of times it's not that it's that they haven't figured out how to produce sustainably great work because they have a built rhythms into their life to help them sustained over the long term there. Media's focus. They're stuck halfway up. The rugged, melted second combination is, of course, we could be healthy. Meaning, Hey, pace of life is great, right? Hey, I got tons of time, tons of space to do what I need to dio We could be brilliant. I mean, we're actually doing really good work because we have to do that. But we're not prolific. We're not meeting client or marketplace demand, so we're not able to produce enough work. And, of course, there's a term for these people to, and it's unreliable. These were people who can't be counted on to deliver when it matters, and none of them are in this room. But we all know those people we don't really want on our project team, right, because they can't produce under pressure. They can't deliver on demand like we have to do. We have to be positioning ourselves to deliver value on demand. That's what creative pros do the pro being the emphasis. If we're just a creative, an artist and we just go out and we have all the time, we need to produce things. No big deal. But if we're a creative professional, that means we have to be able to deliver on demand. So we cannot be lacking prolific city making up words all day today. That's a creative, live, exclusive right there. And finally, the final combination, of course, is we could be prolific, meaning that we're doing a lot of work because we have to do that. We could be healthy meaning, Hey, pace of life is great, but our work is terrible. It's all whole right, And there's a technical term I coined for this, and it's fired because you're not going to keep your job for very long if you're not producing consistently great work. So the first question I would like you to consider to think about is, how are you doing on this equation? This major have prolific, brilliant and healthy. Are you firing on all cylinders? Are you missing one or more of these? And I would suspect, based on what I have seen in the marketplace, most people are doing a lot of work or else they wouldn't have a job because we're expectations are only going up. Very few organizations come to people and say, You know, over the next season, we want you to kick back a little bit. Why don't you take it easy? We're going to reduce your workload. We're gonna make it easier for you to get to get things that no, that's not happening, especially in these economic times, pressures air going up. People are being expected to doom or and more and more. And so the result is that many of us are not only juggling this stuff we've always done. But now we're taking on new responsibilities, new clients, new opportunities and it creates a tremendous amount of pressure. So the prolific part is typically not what people are missing again. The brilliant part is typically not what people are missing, because if they weren't doing good work, they probably wouldn't have a job. And we saw that right is usually the healthy piece. It's usually that we haven't figured out how to be creative consistently under pressure, and do it in a sustainable way. The pressure gets to us and is we're gonna talk about in a little bit. The only way to deal with that is to be intentional about how you structure your life, how you structure your system. So you're preparing yourself for those moments when you have to be brilliant at a moment's notice. Okay, Recent survey thinks a couple years old now sponsored by Adobe and conducted by Strategy. One found that 75% of creative professionals surveyed they, I think, surveyed 5000 people globally who were in create professional roles reported, 75% reported. They feel they're not living up to the creative potential. 75% 3 out of four that you This is the greatest case study on narcissism in the history of humanity early. I am not living up to my potential. I am much greater than I am currently expressing, or it signals something about the state of the world that we live in as creative pros. The fact that we feel we're not living up to our potential were not getting the value out of us that's in us, and I think we feel that pressure. I think there's this constant question that we have is created pros. Whether we're taking photographs, right, making photographs, if we're designing were riding were strategizing where an entrepreneur launching a company. I think all of us feel this nagging sense that maybe I'm not doing my best work. Maybe I'm not getting the value out that I'm truly equipped and wired to get out of me. And that's the kind of thing that will keep us up at night. It's the kind of thing that will create a tremendous amount of, ah, groundswell of pressure if we feel like we're not engaging fully the way that we're equipped to do. And I think there are a couple of reasons why this happens, and in order to, you know, I could just get up and say, Do this and do this and do this and everything's gonna be fine. But the problem is just like if you put a Band Aid over a gaping scar right, it's not going to do any good for you. If you have a gaping scar and you just put a Band Aid over, eventually it's gonna get infected. Something's going right. You have to identify the problem. You have to treat the problem, and then you can begin to build new systems. This is where the metaphor breaks down. But you get the break, the build new systems, right and and t build from them. You have to identify the problem for us. If the diagnosed before you can countermand. And so in this first part, for the rest of the time we're gonna talk about these dynamics that cause us to feel this pressure. And why is it so difficult to create on demand? What does that even look like? And this claimer there is no formula for creativity. Right there is. There is no equal input equals output formula. You just throw things and say, Oh, if I do this on the other side, I'm gonna have a brilliant idea. But there are tendencies, their tendencies. And so if we and their their their correlations, and so if we build certain practices and your life will be far more likely to come up with ideas when we need them, and that's what we're going to really talk about as we go throughout the course of the day today, one of the first reasons I think we feel this pressure and why three out of four people report they're not living a creative potential. Think one of the reasons that I think we don't really understand what is creativity, right? I think for many of us creativity is this mystical, elusive forces that somewhere between prayer and the U. S. Tax code on the ambiguity scale and we go through our day and as we're going through our day, we have a brilliant idea, right? We think, Oh, great, I have a brain idea. I needed it. Who? But we don't understand necessarily the process by which that happened on, and we don't understand how to replicate that process on the back end. So if we make a great photograph rate or we write a great piece or we come up with a great strategy, that's wonderful. But we don't understand where it came from, and we don't really know how to replicate that again. I think that creates a kind of pressure for us. I was reminded of this when I was home a couple of years ago. Six a dog laying on the couch and I was flipping channels and I came across this guy, Julius Sumner Miller. You guys Never. This is because he's this guy. I used to have a show called Demonstrations and Physics on PBS, and he would do all these massively crazy physics experiments with his wild hair. And so he was. I flipped across is he was just kind of caught him and he was holding in one hand, he had a yardstick, and then the other hand, he had a newspaper and he had this crazy mad physicists look in his eye and I thought, Whatever happens next, this is gonna be awesome. Whatever he does, this is gonna be great. Right side, I flip back, started watching the show, and he proceeded to do an experiment where he took the yardstick any place that place it on a table on the edge of a table. And he took the newspaper and he placed it over the part of the yard stick that was still on the tables. You've got yardstick. You've got newspaper, you've got edge of table. And then he asked in his best mad physicist voice, what's gonna happen when I strike the protruding edge of this yardstick? The part that's hanging off the edge of the table right So I'm thinking I've got a rudimentary understanding of high school physics, right? You've got a lever. That's the yardstick. You've got a fulcrum, the edge of the table, the newspapers a relevant right. It doesn't matter. It's just a newspaper. You can fling it around, Doesn't weigh anything. So I'm hypothesizing he's going to strike the end of the yardstick. It's gonna go flying through the air. It's gonna break a couple of flasks again. This is going to be awesome, right? This is my internal dialogue. But what happened when he actually struck the edge of the yardstick? Anybody? No, the artistic snapped in half. It's snapped in half. Now I'm thinking, Wait a minute, this newspaper, I could pick it up. I can fling it around this. This doesn't matter. It's irrelevant in the equation. It doesn't matter at all, right? Why would this yardstick snapped in half? He went on to explain that the reason is that there's an unseen force. At work we don't see is that there's something like £15.9 of atmospheric pressure pushing down on every square inch of that newspaper. So over the course of the entire newspaper, there are thousands and thousands of pounds of atmospheric pressure just pushing down. And if he hits the yardstick fast enough that it doesn't equalize, then that atmospheric pressure will actually snap the yardstick and half. Now we don't see the atmospheric pressure well, even feel it because you've grown so used to it. And yet once we understand its dynamics, we can begin to leverage it to accomplish purposes like snapping yardsticks or, more productively, like flying airplanes right? I think that's a little bit with the creative process is like for us. It's the ethos that we operate in. We move through our day, and occasionally we have a yardstick snap in our path. Biggio. A brilliant, wonderful, brilliant idea. I am the champion, right? But we don't understand where that came from. We don't understand how to replicate it. It's like atmospheric pressure. It's just this force at work, but we don't get it. We don't understand it, and that's not to belittle people who consistently come up with great ideas. There are people who are able to do that over and over again. But even in their mind, I think there's always the question. Can I do this again. Where's the next idea gonna come from? And again, it creates a tremendous amount of pressure. So that's one of the reasons I think we feel we're not living up to. Our creative potential is that we don't understand the dynamics of what creativity is. Even we ask about that we all come come up with different answers. The second reason is that we now exist in what could only be called a create on demand world. And Shawn, I think you mentioned that when you're introducing yourself, you said I create on demand. That's what Ideo right and I think that that creates a unique said The pressure's, too, because now, not only re accountable for this mystical, elusive force that sits somewhere to pray in the U. S. Tax code, but we also have to do it on time on budget, you know, according to client expectations, in order to keep our job, Thank you very much, right? It's a tremendously pressure packed way to earn your living. Any time we enter into a world war accountable at a moments notice for delivering on this process that we marginally understand, it's dangerous, it's dangerous. It's personally danger dangerous. It's emotionally dangerous. It's mentally dangerous because it creates this pressure to do something that we don't really get. We don't understand and again not to belittle people who do this well and do it consistently over time, right? There are many people who do that, and I think even they, over the course of my time working with brilliant creatives, have confessed. I don't know where it comes from. It just it just happens. But when you have to do an on demand, that doesn't really work for us. We need some kind of systems and infrastructure to help us. So let's address that first issue. What is creativity? What is the creative process at the heart of it? And Sean, you mentioned this, and I think you've read. You've read the actual creativity, but creativity of the heart of it is problem solving. So a designer solves the problem by taking some issue that's going on some problem that needs solving and designing something visual that matches that need. It's a kind of problem solving A strategist does the same thing, and entrepreneur does the same thing, this white space in the market. I see that white space. I create something that fills with white space. It is a creative solution, and the best creative ideas have two components there. Novel, which means that there's something that's unusual is something maybe we haven't thought of before. It's a place that people aren't normally looking for ideas. So it's novel, and sometimes we confuse novelty with creativity. We think all of its novel it's creative, not always the case. It also has to be appropriator has to be useful in some way. It has to sold the problem we're trying to solve. Sometimes we confuse novelty with creativity. A lot of times that we skew toward the appropriate sideways skewed toward the the useful side, and we hover really close to the middle. Me don't get out toe where the real value lies creatively. So the creative process looks like this. You have a problem that sits at the center of your world. This is what my problems look like. Um, and you've got lots of bits of data that live in your environment. These air stimuli, things you've seen you've noticed you've experienced in the past. Other problems. You've solved all the problems. You've encountered problems piers have sold other things your company has done in the past. All these stimuli that live out in your environment and the creative process is the process of pushing out into that stimuli, purposefully pushing out and combining things in Steve Jobs that creativity is just connecting things right. It's pushing out into those stimuli, and you begin to see connecting points emerging between these bits of stimuli in your environment, things you've seen, you've noticed other things that are relevant to the problem you're trying to solve. Many times the brilliant insight that you're looking force. It's far outside of the place you would normally look if you Onley hover close to the middle. If you only do things that are appropriate that are useful, but you're not. Venturing out into those places were truly novel. Valuable ideas reside, but when we're under pressure, we tend to stick close to the middle. We don't push out and is Steven Johnson called it in where good ideas come from borrowing a term from evolutionary biology, he called exploring the adjacent possible. We're not tinkering and playing and combining things and and we don't give our creative process. It's do we don't create white space for the creative process toe happen when we're under pressure. And because of that, we end up with ideas that maybe aren't is valuable as they get otherwise be. Now. This creative problem solving process has five steps. Typically, the first step is you define the problem. It's very difficult to do something you haven't defined at least to do it intentionally. The second step is you explore options plural again intentional. The third is you choose the best option, hopefully the fourth. As you execute, as in you do it not, isn't. You kill someone again. Usually, um and then Renson repeat. And what this means is that this is gonna be an iterative process. It's gonna be a continual climb up the mountain. So you're gonna be constantly defining the problem. What is the problem I'm trying to solve here? I mean, really not. What's the project that's been given to me? But what problem? And I'm really trying to solve here because your mind is well equipped to solve problems. Your mind is constantly predicting what's gonna happen next. That's what your mind does. It creates models of the future based on your past experiences and says if you do these things, you're less likely to be eaten by the saber toothed tiger tiger that jumps out of the bushes, right? Our mind is wired to avoid danger and to avoid anything that's gonna lead us down the wrong path to remind us constant predicting was gonna happen next. Great problem solving skills that your mind has. But we have to define the problem. What are we looking for, Where we're really trying to do here now, what's been handed? Just what we're really trying to do. Their sometimes very different things explore options, which is the process that we just looked at pushing out into lots of different kinds of stimuli. Experimenting, playing, trying, being willing to risk failure, being willing Teoh. Confront our fear as we talked about earlier, but pushing out into those options, choosing the best option with the available information we have. And that is not always necessarily the best idea. It's the best idea now choosing the best idea we have now acting on it, so executing and then rents to repeat, which means now, based on what we've learned from acting on this idea, let's go back to the beginning. Let's redefine the problem again. Let's ask. OK, is there something new that I know now that has redefined the way I should be looking at this problem based on my decisive action? And Kirkegaard said. Decisions part the fog on stagnant waters Cowardice kills us, right? So it's acting on what we know combining playing, experimenting after we've explored options acting, then rinsing, repeating, going back and asking now, based on what we know now, are we still solving the same problem or is there something new this has to be interred of? The problem is many times is creatives and his organizations we like to go through this process. Since they done, we're done right because we haven't created this space to be able to do this iterative process that it requires to get to the really body body is now when we're in a create on demand environment, when we are under a tremendous amount of pressure, we actually turn this five step process into a four step process. We panic about the problem. We explore the first option that comes along. We choose that option and we execute Great. I'm shipping are you shipping raw shipping? We're getting it done. We're pushing ideas out into the world, and then we move on to the next thing. But in doing that, we sacrifice the real value that we have to contribute to the world, or the ideas that we have the offer. And when that happens, sometimes with really novel ideas that may not necessarily be appropriate. Which reminds me one of my favorite quotes, Which is this. If you can play a guitar and harmonica at the same time, like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, your genius. But make that extra bit of effort and straps of symbols your knees and suddenly people want to get the hell away from you. And that, I think, is what an idea that's novel, but not appropriate is in a nutshell. And we've all seen those ideas that just make us want to get the hell away from them, right, because they're really novel. And it's like, thank you very much, really appreciate your idea. That's beautiful. That's wonderful. Now please go away. We've all seen that before. That's not what we're looking for. That's not creatively. That novelty without appropriateness, however, most of us don't land there. We land on the other side of the equation, meaning our ideas air to appropriate there, too close to the middle. When we're under pressure, we go back to the same wells over and over and over again. We're not preparing ourselves in advance for the moment when we have to be brilliant, and the fundamental reason that we do this is because of what I call the tension between possibilities and pragmatics. So the creative process is the pursuit of the possible. It is. It's venturing into those uncomfortable places you cannot pursue comfort and great work. At the same time, they're mutually exclusive objectives. You may experience comfort in your pursuit of great work. That may happen, but you cannot make them both your objective, because great work is done by those who consistently do what's right in spite of the fact that it's uncomfortable they venture into this place is they're willing to risk failure. They're willing to risk not adding you. Maybe, maybe not, adding the kind of value they hope that they would add in order to take a risk and try something new. It's the pursuit of the possible, which is uncomfortable, but we're constantly real. Backed by pragmatics time budget client expectations. Manage your expectations, our own internal expectations of ourselves. We're not just creating for ourselves where creative pros were creating on demand, creating for clients for customers. And so any time that happens, we are inherently living, swimming in this world of possibilities versus pragmatics, right? So there a couple of ways that this can play out for us as creative professionals. This possibilities versus pragmatics tension. The first is time versus value. How many of you are paid to show up in the morning and sit in front of a computer monitor and just stare the monitor all day? If that's all you did, you would still get your your paycheck. No, right? No, No way. That's not what we're being paid for. Were being paid for, what? For the value that we contribute. I'm being paid. My company is making a bet. If they hire me that I'm going to contribute more value to the bottom line than what is what they're paying me. Otherwise, it's a losing proposition for the company, right? I'm being paid for value, and yet how many of you still have expectations to be a certain place at a certain time. Yeah. How many of you have meetings you have to go to on a regular basis? Yeah, we all the right. We all have these expectations that we have to meet related to time. But let me ask you this How many of you have had a brilliant idea that has emerged at some point outside of work hours in the last six months? Yeah, right. When you work with your mind, your mind is constantly on. It's not like you can say OK from you know, 8 to 6, 7 to 7, getting closer with 7 to 7, right for 6 to 8 30 right. We are in San Francisco. So it's more like, you know, we just kind of go home every once in a while. Let the dog out. Or even not even that. But, um, you know, when we're under pressure like that, when it's when it's that we're creating value with our mind, that's what we're being paid for. When there's that kind of pressure that exists, we don't turn our mind off. And so we might be in the shower or we might be out to dinner with our our spouse or significant other. We might be at our kid's soccer game, right? And there's this constant pressure to be contributing value to be thinking about the problems we're trying to solve. Does that make sense? Resonate? You can't shut your mind off, okay? You're not being paid for your time. You still have to be somewhere. You still have to be somewhere between certain hours. But the value you contribute might come outside of that. It creates attention, the pursuit of the possible versus the pragmatics of time. And when that happens, you know, it can. It can really, In many ways, you can really begin to really cause us to question Am I proving my worth, right? I mean, that's what keeps a lot of people really struggling. Am I proving my worth as a creative being paid for my value? But am I really proving my worth as a creative? What kind of value should I add? And by adding the right kind of value May I worked with one creative director who said that he woke up. He kept his phone, his IPhone by his bed. Let's be honest, How many of you keep your phone but plug in next year? Yeah. Okay. So full disclosure here last night, I When I checked into the hotel here, I suddenly realized after about 1/2 hour that I didn't have my computer bag with me, that I had left it in the car on the way to the hotel. And you would have thought that I had just picked up a newspaper or looked online, and I had seen World War Three breaks out across your or whatever it was this impending sense of doom. My world, my world is in this bag great. It's just crazy way feel this constant need to be contributing value, stay connected all the time. In those tools, they help us stay connected. This creative director kept his phone by his bed. He confessed that he woke up 3 to 4 times a night to check his email. He would even set alarms to wake him up at one in the morning at three in the morning, the check his email to make sure that he was staying connected with what was going on in Asia. What was going on in Europe because he felt the need to constantly be connected to be in the know and that had less to do with actual expectations on him and more to do with his impending sense that if I'm not showing that I'm contributing value constantly, then where does that put me in the organization? Right. That's what creating on demand does to us. It has its constantly questioning my adding the right value. Am I adding it at the right time and by contributing in such a way that others are going to recognize it, recognize that value so that can again create a tremendous sense of pressure. So those ideas sometimes come when we're at the soccer game or whatever. We can't show their mind off. But we have to deal with that pressure because they're not being paid for time were being paid for the value we contribute. Um, the second is predictable versus rhythmic Okay, So organizations organize. It's what they do. We all are getting paychecks. How many of you like getting paychecks? You asked. We do it. We love getting paychecks without organise it. What if the organization you said, you know, we're just gonna leave this up to the wind. At some point, we'll get a paycheck to you. You know, it's keep doing your word. Trust us. It's all gonna work out. We wouldn't like that very much. Organizations organize. It's what they dio. The problem is that sometimes those systems can run counter to the way the creative process actually functions. So we have, for example, a situation where you know you've got you know, over time you've got you, the organizations have to be able to predict what's going to happen. So you've got kind of unequal input, equal output kind of things. Organizations like to keep things within a certain bandwidth of productivity. We know if we spend this much, this many resource is on this thing. We're gonna get this kind of output. This is what we're gonna get in exchange for that, right? It's a simple equation. This helps the organization stay on the rails. The problem is that the creative process actually looks something like this. All right, you have peaks and you have troughs, and you have tremendous value that's being created in these peaks. But you also have troughs involved. What happens when an organization looks at the creative right here and does a sort of snapshot productivity analysis, right? And says, Wow, look at Mel. That is awesome. Look at Mel. She is really producing. Wow, She's one of our best contribute. That's awesome. Or six months later, they look at Mellon. They say, Whatever happened the mouth. Why is Mel producing down here? What happened to Mel? She fell off the planet, right? What is going on? Creativity is rhythm it. There's an ad. There's a flow, their peaks and troughs. And we can't squeeze ourselves into this predictable mode. What happens when we squeeze ourselves into this predictable mode is that we cut off. We cut off the peaks, we cut off the troughs. But in the effort to cut off the trust, we cut off the peaks as well. When organizations say we want this predictable output from you, Right. So we missed this really great value because we don't allow people to have those seasons where maybe there in between it's white space in between. They're brilliant ideas. Now, the worst thing Mel, that could happen to you. And I know this has never happened to you. And I'm sorry to pick on you by the way. But I know this has never happened. You will never happen to you. Right? But the worst thing that happened is when an organization to snapshot productivity analysis and they say, Oh, look at Mel. That's awesome, Mel, Thanks so much. You are a great contributor. You are an amazing contribute. This organization, we value you. Thank you so much. We're gonna pay you for your contributions. Awesome. Thank you. And by the way, this is now your new expectations, right? This is where we expect you to produce all the time. And please do it predictably. Or else we're gonna have to have a conversation about moving you outside the organization, Right? In other words, hiring you. Yes. Um, that's what happens in a lot of organizations. We've seen this during the economic downturn. It also happens with clients, right? If your photographer, if you're right or you're a designer, whatever it is, you have some amazing thing that you deliver to them and that becomes the baseline expectation. So it may be the absolute best work you have ever done in the history of humanity in the history of your life. To create a pro But that's your new expectations. So you better live up to it, right? That is predictable versus rhythmic. Okay, So most organizations have this thing this way of approaching work where they say Okay, so, in creative services industry, for example, so on Monday, we have the client kickoff call on Tuesday. We have an internal meeting to talk about how we're going approach the project on Wednesday. The brilliant idea emerges right on Thursday, we put in production on Friday. We delivered to the client. Now it's highly truncated. But how do we know the brilliant idea is gonna come on Wednesday? We don't We don't know that. That's this thing working out. I mean, the brilliant idea, you know, is gonna come from a series of peaks and trust. We don't know where it's going to come from, and yet organizations have to organize. We have to make promises to clients right to the market. Okay. So creates a tremendous amount of pressure for us. Those peaks have the lineup with our expectations. It is difficult. You can't do that haphazardly. You have to build systems and practices like we're gonna talk about it a bit. Okay. The final way that possibilities versus pragmatics plays out is what I call. And by the way, I'm a terrible artist. So I apologize. Throughout the course of the day today, most of my drawings are gonna look like that. So I'm just warning you in advance. I could do this, but I'm not great at that, um, its product versus process. So the creative process is a lot like for me. It's kind of gross analogy, right? It's kind of like childbirth. Okay, you've got a brief moment of conception, a brief moment of birth, but a huge gestation period in between those things and so brief conception, I have the brilliant idea. Lots of gestation Will house. Yeah, you're gonna take form. What's it gonna look like? Lots of federation in the process, right? The baby is sort of growing in the womb, and then you have the moment of birth with you when you deliver it to the client or to the market. Well, are you judged based on the quality of that gestation period? Right. Wow. Thanks for taking those prenatal vitamins. That's awesome. You know. You know, I mean again, it's gonna break down very soon. are you going to go? But are you judged in an organization for how great your processes? No, no. What do you judge? Based on the results? The product, The final 1%. That final delivery herbal that you give that. That's what you're being judged based on? Yes. You walk into a room and you put it in front of a group of people who are all going to give you their 12th opinion, like, make it more purple or make the logo bigger, right? Or can you change this? Change that. But maybe you spent six months working on this thing, right? Make the logo bigger. Yeah, right. You spend six months working on this thing, and now you're gonna be snapped, judged by someone who's basing their opinion on a 12th impression of your work. Okay, that's product versus process. That's the tension. Most of what we do is creative is process, focus its process based. And yet the biggest thing that we deliver are the results of that process. And so again it creates a kind of tension for us. We spend most of our time doing things that are invisible to the organization they don't even see them. They don't know they don't care about them, Right? Because all they care about is undeliverable. Yeah, that's most of our world. Does that make sense? Does that click? So it creates this gap between us and the organization. The organization saying, you know, I don't understand. Why does it take you a week and 1/2 to design this thing? What does it take you? A week and 1/2 the world? Well, because there are a lot of little things you have to do in order to prepare yourself to be successful, right and ready to do your best work. But the organizations and get that cause they're just looking at this equal input, equal output, you know? Hey, we're supposed to deliver this on Friday, or you're gonna have it for us. Okay? So again, nothing we can do about it. This is just reality. This is the ethos that we operate in as creative professionals. But we have to be aware of these tensions. If you want a position ourselves to do best work and t countermanded