A Mess in Time...

How messy do you like it?

Mess is inevitable. It is an essential part of any creative process and an unavoidable by-product of making anything new. However we appear to have been seduced by the whole concept of production-line processes, efficiency drives and seductively linear Gantt Charts into thinking that mess is something that is undesirable, unnecessary, and able to be eliminated. Mess seems to be synonymous with waste, and both with failure.

But think about it. When have you ever been able to achieve a completely new outcome or change without mess? How could you have learned how to walk without falling over? How many lightbulbs did Edison throw away before he hit gold? How much chaff is disposed of in finding the valuable grains? How much mess do you make preparing a stir fry?

Mess is not an if, it’s a when. So when would you like yours?

Most business processes save theirs ‘til the end. Not by choice but by default. The choice they think they are making is not to have any at all, so there’s nowhere for it to go but last. Which is why 70% of all change programs fail, why 80% of innovations don’t make it to market and 90% of those that do fail, why 80% of workers are actively or passively disengaged with what they do (the most disengaged 20% costing their companies $10,000 each in profit a year), why only 10% of qualified sales leads are converted when experts say it could easily be 70%… and the list goes on.

The problem with this is that having the mess at the end is expensive. Much more expensive than building it in up front, when the stakes are much lower and the options of how to proceed are many. Just ask any successful entrepreneur.

Most businesses are modelled on production-line processes, but production-line processes are designed to reproduce existing outcomes, not to create or even predict new ones. For that you need a creative process.

The creative process is structured around mess, which is what makes it both unpredictable and yet reliably successful. It is based on the premise that to create something new from existing resources requires new connections. Which means dismantling or breaking the old ones and playing 52 PickUp with the elements.

Artists know that for every brilliant photograph or sketch there were hundreds of ordinary – even awful – ones.  That for every great ad or play that is produced, there are a graveyard of ideas that end up in the bottom drawer. That the better the novel, the more drafts and rewrites it was likely to have. That if a new idea has any merit it will make people uncomfortable.

I now know that when I paint, the piece will look like an incompetent mess for the first 80% of the process as I build up the layers of pigment, material and line and in so doing develop not just visual depth but a depth of understanding about the object I’m painting. And I’ve had to learn to just trust the process and live with the mess, knowing that out of that will eventually emerge the result I’m looking for. When I haven’t trusted it, when I’ve tried to draw the object too definitively too soon, the result is flat and ordinary and tight, and I then have to go back into the painting and ‘break it’; randomly throwing paint at it, gluing collage over it or even literally tearing the thing apart and sticking it back together.

Yet I see this ‘premature closure’ in businesses all the time. In the rush to get to the finish line following a predictable path, they are happy to replace messy upfront exploration with assumption and make it tidy, shutting down options and depth and relevance en route. To assume, as Henry Ford would have it, that what was needed was a faster horse rather than a motorcar.

David Kelley from IDEO observed that in his experience, clients want to skip the first two steps in the design thinking process (understanding and observation) and get straight into the brainstorming and prototyping steps – the outcome producing bits – without understanding that the value of those steps are totally determined by the first two. That without the exploration, the ideas are unlikely to be either truly innovative or relevant or successful. That the mess needs to go up front. That this is the absolute heart and soul and essence of the creative process. And that to rip this heart out is – as the roughly 80-90% failure rates attest – to deliver an expensive corpse at the end.

So if about 80% of any truly successful creative process is messy – when would you like yours?

The Joneses

Why is consensus around new ideas seen as a desirable thing?

Because it isn’t.  It’s like kryptonite.

New things are by definition disruptive. They have to challenge the status quo. So surely what we should be looking for is healthy controversy rather than consensus? After all, we don’t all agree on whether Froot Loops or Lux are great products, whether Hitler was a great leader or religion has any validity in the 21st century – and these have all been around for a while – so why on earth do we strive for agreement on something new?

Why? Because challenging the status quo is seen as a neurological threat. And even though we develop new ideas in order to create change and promote growth – all the stuff of progress that distinguishes humans as a species – we are biologically hardwired to resist it.  Change makes us feel uncertain, which creates stress.  On the other hand, consensus makes us feel safe, warm and fuzzy, which is why Roberto Cialdini identified it as one of the 6 key influence patterns that drive our behaviour.

Pity it also neutralises the idea.

Which suffocates innovation, and hammers the bottom line.

Because while truly innovative ideas – ideas that change ‘the way things are done’ like Facebook and iPhones and screw-top wine bottles – make up a mere 14% of new business launches, they account for a whopping 61% of profits.  And this doesn’t take into account the effects of positive press coverage, customer loyalty, and productivity from increased employee engagement.

The irony is that we adapt to the great new ideas so quickly that we forget how controversial they originally were. The Annie Leibovitz shot of the naked and pregnant Demi Moore that caused such outrage is now mainstream billboard fodder, while answering machines and mobile phones – which I can remember causing huge dinner party arguments when they were launched – are now ubiquitous.

The vast majority of people can only evaluate what they have already experienced, which by definition excludes a new idea.  Which is why in the movie Inception, the focus is on the structure and integrity of the idea. For the idea to act as a virus, for it to take root and to spread and become ubiquitous, it has to have integrity – it has to be both very clean and simple, and it has to be ecological. It has to be sympathetic to its environment in order to disrupt it without crisis.

So the trick is not so much to be popular, but to have internal and ecological integrity. Because new ideas are not about creating certainty and security, they are about creating disruption – disruption that spreads until it becomes the new norm. And as such, they carry inherent risk as well as almost inevitable unpopularity.  They might not work.  They might even need to fail in order to give birth to a better idea. But when they do work, the rewards can be be exponential. When they do work, it’s like winning the lottery.

So if you are looking for a way to judge an idea, don’t waste time on the popularity vote, look for its integrity:

• Is it simple?

• Is it single-minded in its focus?

• Does it stand on its own or require the stars to align and the seas to part for it to work?

• What assumptions are in play, and are they valid?

• Does it have its own logic?

• Does it have a whiff of post-rationalised inevitability?

• Does it make things easier and simpler and better?

Will it work?

Because whether or not people like it when they first hear it, if it works, they will in the end. Just look at the telephone, the car, the Beatles, the personal computer, the internet, and the iPhone…

Structural Support

So what’s your taste in skeletons?

Structure is critical. I had a fascinating discussion with a friend of mine the other day. Joanna’s an ex-lawyer and writer who teaches creative thinking amongst other things, so we have a lot of overlap in where we play. The fascinating thing is where we differ, and we tracked this back to the different structures or skeletons we favour.

There are 3 kinds of skeletal structures that appear in the animal kingdom, each with various advantages and disadvantages.

Endoskeletons are hard internal support structures that allows for huge flexibility and growth, that can adapt to environmental stress and self-repair, but which leave all the soft stuff vulnerable.

Exoskeletons are hard external support structures that vary from elastic to hard shells that provide protection from environment and predators, but limit how big the creature can get and have to be shed (thus making the creature vulnerable) to allow the beastie to grow..

Hydrostatic skeletons are soft fluid filled support structures found mainly in aquatic critters like octopi an jellyfish. Great for a low energy existence but suitable to the rigours of dwelling on land as most would dry out and be too flimsy to stand up on their own.

Turns out that while Jo & I can both play with either, we have different preferences. Jo favours the exoskeletal model. As she put it, she wants nice solid boxes so that she can go crazy with creating stuff inside them. That’s what allows her to be at her most creative and most effective. Me? I’m an endoskeletal chick. My drive is to get to the core of something – an objective or idea or issue – so that I can then leverage it to do amazing things. So it’s no surprise that she teaches creative thinking (Juicy Thinking ™) in a way that provides people with a rich array of proven techniques – boxes – to give them more effective ways of doing things. I on the other hand teach Studio Thinking ™, using art techniques to rewire people and give them more effective ways of being, so they can then change how they do and create results. Drawing, for example, is all about learning to see invisible underlying structures and using them as shortcuts to get better faster results, then applying that principle in every other situation you can conceive of.

The cool thing was that having each realised our personal preferences a while back (albeit without making this distinction), we were both amazed that the more we work with them and build them into the way we structure the work we do, the more creative freedom we have and the more effective we become with less effort.

Organisations – which after all are just organisms – fall into the same distinctions. Virgin would be of a more endoskeletal persuasion, with a core philosophy and purpose that allows them to play in a variety of markets, while Kellogg would do the exoskeletal thing, where a clear understanding of their core business means that they can be highly creative in a very defined context.

Either way, the question is not which one is better. They are both brilliant and useful in different ways. The questions that are more useful to ask are:

1. Which one is more effective in what situation? Which one is in play in each situation? Can you recognise and work with it?
2. Which one do you favour? What type of structure gives you the security you need to be most free and effective in creating things? Where do you feel most at home?
3. Which does your organisation favour? How do you work with that, and how does it support your way of doing things?

And Hydrostatic Skeletons? It would seem that our current environment is too harsh for them. On the other hand, maybe that’s exactly the sort of skeleton we’ll need when we finally learn to live in a flow state…

Here's Looking At You

You cannot consciously change what you do not consciously notice.

Of course, we unconsciously change things all the time. We fail to notice the bin as we back the car out and change the shape of our bumper bar and the mood of the day. The boss is consistently late or didactic and pretty soon that defines the culture of the company. Governments choose to ignore the fact that paper theory and reality don’t match, and we get the GFC.

But to create the result we want – on purpose – we must start with observation.  With noticing.

Drawing is fundamentally an act of change or transformation.  In most cases, we are taking something out of one context and recreating it in another.  We change a 3D object into a 2D image, an imagined concept or perspective into a tangible representation, etc.  The reason most people are convinced they cannot draw (and often, by misplaced corollary, are not creative), is that what they draw bears little resemblance to either the subject they are drawing or to the outcome they are expecting.  Fair enough.  But the reason for this is not lack of capability so much as lack of attention.  Noticing what is really in front of them rather than what they assume or ‘know’ or expect to be there.

And ironically, the more familiar and less complex the ‘subject’, the more we take our knowledge for granted, the less energy we have to spend paying attention to it and the more likely it is that we’ll make mistakes and get a crummy result. (Ask any marriage councillor…)

So when drawing something as simple and familiar as a cup, we unconsciously access our mental ‘cup’ file, and instantly know that it is 3 dimensional, useful for holding liquids, sealed at the bottom, open at the top, circular around the rim, often straight on the sides, and sits flat on a flat surface.  No problemmo.  Until that’s what we draw.  

A drawing is not a 3 dimensional thing. So to successfully change a 3 dimensional object into a 2 dimensional drawing requires that we change our understanding of what a cup is.  That we get curious about what makes a cup a cup in a new context and pay attention to the things that will make it cup-like in a flat world. That we notice.

And when we pay attention in this way, we notice that even though we know the rim is a circle, what we actually see is an ellipse.  And that even though we know it is sitting flat on the surface, the base is actually a curve. And that just by making these two adjustments, we get a far more successful result.

So what are you wanting to change? To improve? To create?

Organisational culture?  Notice how things are really ‘done around here’, and why.
An innovation?  Notice where a similar process or pattern happens in a different context (the Sydney Opera House sails were based on the way an orange peels, and the brassiere on a cantilevered bridge).  Or notice where people are using work-arounds and short-cuts and design something that doesn’t need them.
A strategic plan? Notice where you are really starting from – instead assuming you are where you were yesterday, or wish you were or think you should be.
Your career?  Notice what you do effortlessly (as distinct from what you are good at), and notice what people come to you for.
Your relationship?  Notice…everything.

All the evidence is there. The resources you need already exist.

Pay attention.  Observe.  Notice.  Then use what you see to create what you want to create.

A Mouthful of Magic

Have you ever turned someone into a frog?

Of all the magic words in all the stories through history and time, Abracadabra, or later, Abrahadabra, is probably the most recognisable.  It was the Word Of Double Power that represented the union of the microcosm with the macrocosm and roughly translated into the rather wonderful phrase “I will create as I speak”.   It is a cultural icon with a noble etymology and yet wiki notes that the word is now ‘applied contemptuously to a conception or hypothesis which purports to be a simple solution of apparently insoluble phenomena’.

Which explains why the world of business wizards and gurus have had to find new words to use instead.

They’re easy to spot – the polysyllabic verbs that are uttered with a certainty and assurance that confers upon them the solidity of tangible, concrete nouns.  As if merely by uttering them in the right tone and in the right context we can turn an action or a process into a real live philosophers’ stone that will transmute all the base metals of everyday business into solid gold.  Dumbledore would be impressed.  In theory, thundering these magic words through the press and annual reports and down the channels of internal communication is all we need to do to unleash a tsunami of employee commitment, enthral the marketplace and send the share price stratospheric.

And if we haven’t found the right word yet, it’s not for want of trying.  We’ve experimented with Management, Leadership, Communication, Relationship, Partnership, Change, Creativity, Innovation and lately, Engagement, to name but a handful.  Sometimes we sprinkle in a few Power Adjectives like Radical, Disruptive or Excellence to sex them up a bit but in the end it’s primarily posturing.  Kind of like shouting louder so the foreigner can understand us better instead of finding way to communicate effectively.

Going on about building an Innovative Culture doesn’t replace actually doing it: being prepared to add flex and risk and chaos and failure to the list of accepted – even embraced – practices.  Prattling about Leadership is useless unless you build a culture where autonomy, creativity and responsibility are rewarded.  And preening about Engagement policies is irrelevant while conformity and control are the order of the day, no matter how many team building activities and CEO Vlogs there are.   In business, actions really do speak louder than words.  Even magic ones.

Of course, we may crack the magic formula yet.  We may even give Midas a run for his misery and money.  In the meantime, the irony is that by investing these words with purported magical abilities, we abuse their true magic and strip them of any meaning at all.  We nominalise them in every sense of the word.  But winning the lottery still seems to be easier and more seductive than working for a living, so…

ABRAHADABRA!…?

A Vision To Die For

Jim Collins’ famous study showed that Visionary Companies, companies that have core values and ideologies that drive their business activities, are 15 TIMES MORE PROFITABLE than the general market, even though they claim that profit was not their primary motive. *

15 TIMES!!  1500%!!

For Disney, this means they strive “to make people happy”.  At Johnson & Johnson, they are driven to “alleviate pain and disease”, and each define their success in all areas by how it contributes to their purpose.  They are absolutely clear about who they are and why they exist.  They are strong brands working with a clear purpose.

So if it’s that straightforward, why is this not the way all companies are structured?

I think it’s a case of mistaken identity.  I think we’ve lived for so long in a commmoditised, conformity-driven, mechanised world that we’ve replace Who and Why with What”.  As a result, people almost invariably identify themselves by what they do (“I’m a lawyer/brand manager/artist”) and companies by the widget they make or the service they provide.  They make their identity a generic ‘what’ instead of a unique Who.  And the Why as often as not becomes either self-centred (because I enjoy it) or transactional (because I need to pay the rent). Which is a pity, because most people join companies because of shared values and goals and the chance to contribute to something meaningful – they just end up in the transactional trap when those avenues are closed off to them.

It’s no surprise then that when these What identities are undermined (the executive is made redundant, the competitor redefines the market – iTunes anyone?) that a massive identity crisis and nervous breakdown ensues.

I mean really, which would you find more inspiring?  To work for a company that ‘makes personal care products’ or one whose mission is ‘to alleviate pain and disease’?  An animation house, or a company that strives ‘to make people happy’?  To do tax returns and audit books or create financial security for young families?  Teach maths or inspire young minds?

It’s not merely a rephrase or a redefinition of the market (e.g. from cereal to breakfast).  It’s a fundamental reframe.

Every person and every company and every brand has a unique Who and a personal Why.  We’ve just forgotten them, confining ourselves to safe, limiting little What boxes instead of exploring the rocket fuel of Identity and Purpose.  With Identity and Purpose come motivation, passion, meaning and agility – and a limitless variety of possible Whats.  With Identity and Purpose come vision and momentum.  With Identity and Purpose come 1500% greater profitability than the general market.

So I ask you again:

Who are you –  really – and why are you here?

* From Built To Last , Collins & Porras.  Similar figures can be found in the more recent Firms of Endearment (Sisodia, Wolfe, Sheth) and Meaning Inc (Bains) albeit from slightly different standpoints.

Tutti-Frutti

I love Apple.  Not in a tragic way, honest.  PCs & Androids are brill, I just don’t speak the lingo.  I speak Apple.  It makes sense to me and I am forever grateful to it for enabling me to morph from a technical klutz to an aspiring whizz-kid.  Well, relatively competent, anyway.

So I’ve been somewhat peeved by their crappy handling of the whole iOS4 debacle.  I can deal with living in a Forever Beta world so long as they take responsibility for it when it doesn’t work.  And it doesn’t.  My 3G iPhone, hitherto a perfectly functioning extension of my very life and limbs, instantly spat the dummy and rolled over with its metaphysical paws in the air and it’s tongue trailing listlessly on the pavement.  Resuscitation was a long and tortured process, but at least gave me the experience to know what to do the next 4 times it died.  Until…  until the awful day I upgraded to 4.1 in the desperate hope that I might be able to once again download an email in less than an a week only to find myself holding a corpse.  I began keening and booked myself into therapy.

It took a week to be granted an audience with a Genius.  The very pleasant Jace tried and failed to restore my phone before informing me sadly that since it was out of warranty, all they could do was replace it with a reconditioned one at a cost of $250 and a wait of about a week.  This is for a 15 month old phone that was expected to last a 24 month contract, that cost $800 and only died when (at their insistence) I upgraded to their bug-riddled-beta-bloody software that they then wouldn’t let me downgrade from.  Now call me old-fashioned, but that strikes me as a tad unreasonable.  Blatantly unfair, in fact.   And certainly no way to repay a brand loyalist and hitherto advocate.  I were, to put it mildly, downright miffed.  And fortunately well-prepared.

I opened my eyes wide and asked Jace nicely about the statutory warranty situation, which of course he knew nothing about and was understandably desperate to avoid exploring.  After all, it says that regardless of manufacturer warranty, you can expect an item (particularly an expensive one) to last a reasonable amount of time and do what it is supposed to do.  And you should be able to trust the manufacturer’s sales advice.  A tick on all fronts, frankly. After another failed restore he disappeared out back – ostensibly to see if there was anything loose in the machinery – and eventually came back with a replacement phone!!

Be still my beating heart.

He used his discretion… one time only… such a loyal customer…I’d already been through so much hassle over it… he’s a consumer too and would be seriously pissed off… yada yada yada.

Did the warranty info help? Probably.  It could merely have been the increasingly disturbing signs of an addict suffering severe withdrawal that I was evidencing.  Maybe he was avoiding the fuss. Maybe it gave him an excuse to do what he probably wanted to do anyway.  It certainly didn’t hurt.  But it shouldn’t have been needed.

As their share price continues to climb on the backs of the early adopters that launched the brand into mainstream, Apple is morphing rapidly from a group of maverick pirates disrupting paradigms in the name of consumer freedom to arrogant corporate control freaks.  They no longer extol us to Think Different but instead shrilly insist we Do What We’re Told.  Which is not a brand positioning I identify with.  And Forever Beta? Fine: either subsidize us to test it or fix it when it fails. As it will.

The beautiful phrase “Sync in Progress” began to glow reassuringly from the screen, and I felt my missing limb re-graft itself to my torso as my blood pressure abated.  At least Jace still seemed to represent the Apple philosophy I’d bought into.  But for how long?

I’m beginning to wish I could switch sides.  I probably will, at some point.  It’s just that in the meantime, well, I speak Apple.

It Ain't Easy Being Green

I’m still not sure why I succumbed.

It was late in the evening.  I was unwell.  It was a moment of weakness.  We had the same name.  I must have been nuts.

Even when Maureen rang me the night before to confirm the appointment, I didn’t rescind.  It wasn’t until she showed up on my doorstep at 9am armed with a full government mandate to help me reduce my carbon footprint, settled down for her first cup of tea, opened what must have been a 1598 page questionnaire on her laptop, and blithely informed me comfortingly that this would only take 3 (THREE!!!) fully participatory hours that I felt the tentacles of doom grasp me by the nethers and drag me mercilessly towards the abyss.  But it wasn’t til she asked me how many minutes a week my printer was used that I realised what ‘abyss’ really meant. read more »

A Perfect Match

Just when you think you’ve seen everything, you go to a school reunion.  At the last one I attended, we all gleefully got to play ‘who on earth is that?’  An awesome testament to the powers of surgical transformation and personal chutzpa, our mystery classmate commanded the spotlight as she did the mwa-mwa tour of the room, dragging everyone’s helplessly mesmerised gaze with her.  Only when I heard her speak could I work out who she was, and then the game of finding any remotely familiar features was on.  Utterly riveting.  Amanda (appropriately enough, not her real name) had morphed from a scrawny, awkward, unkempt and rather odd girl into a buxom, pouty lacquered vision of… what must have been someone’s vision of a middle-aged barbie doll.  Unreal.  In every sense.

What was particularly striking however was that as fascinating as she was, people didn’t see her as a ‘who’, but rather as a ‘what’ – as a curiosity.  It’s hard to build a meaningful relationship on those terms.  But then brands have been doing that for years. read more »

Brave New World

I’m a printmaker (among other things) which means I make intaglio etchings – like this one.  There are a pile of ways of doing this, but all basically involve etching a groove in a ‘plate’ of some sort, then smearing it with ink, rubbing that back so that the ink remains in the grooves, and transferring the ink to damp paper by running it through a printing press – which looks something like the old wrangle washing machines.

I fell in love with this art form years ago, having avoided it for ever because I thought it was so rule-bound, meticulous and uptight.  How wrong could I be?  Maybe it was in Rembrandt’s day but these days anything goes, and ‘mistakes’ are not only rampant, but actively sought. read more »