The vitality of unrealistic ideas in creativity

Unrealistic ideas are vital to the creative process, even and especially in shared creative work sessions. It's no coincidence that groups manage to generate the most uninspired and cliched ideas as they strive to come up with realistic ideas that aren't criticism and rejection magnets.

It's also no coincidence that so many of the best ideas on the planet originated in forms that would seem to most reasonable people as unrealistic. Much of the best features of our world represented what would not long ago be deemed the impossible by experts and clueless alike.

We are in large measure more creative, alone and together, when we let all the unrealistic ideas we can generate spark and seed new ideas that work far beter than what the status quo offers.

#creativity #innovation #design

The Design HUB

A Design HUB is a work session dedicated to the design (or redesign) of anything. It can be the design of any kind of product, process, program, event or experience. It engages three elements: habits, use and beauty. Together these nurture the organic growth of design that works. The power of the process is how it engages every thinking style and talent around the table.

Habits

What are people already doing?

Whatever we're designing or redesigning for, people are already doing. Before PostIt Notes, people were already attaching paper to paper using paper clips and staples. Postits brought about a completely different feature for the same function, replacing sturdy solid materials with inferior glue.

New design gives people a different way to do what they're already doing. Here, we identify what for users is working and not working, what's most and least convenient, what adds value and what doesn't. Understanding current habits gives us a unique and deeper perspective on what else might be possible.

Use

What features and functions would be optimally useful?

We create usefulness by making something more accessible, useable with fewer steps or effort, producing a higher quality experience, requiring minimal or no maintenance, easy to personalize or share.

We generate as many feature and function possibilities, no matter how much we might judge them as "realistic" or "unrealistic." We consider interesting ways to introduce any kinds of technology and sociology into the options that emerge.

Beauty

What would make this more beautiful?

Beauty is aesthetics, simplicity and familiarity. Anything judged as attractive feels more useful and representing higher quality. Beauty entices us to assume that more attention went into the design and production of something.

Just considering the beauty of something we design adds another perspective on the importance of the user experience, which infuses more creativity and pragmatism to the overall value of the design.

#creativity #design

Why we need to be designers

There are countless ways we have design opportunities. Each of our shared dreams calls for something new that will exist and work because it's well designed. We benefit by learning as much as we can about design from any design discipline. Any discipline adds value, from the arts to technology and architecture.

Why wellbeing matters

High performance in any area of our lives requires a healthy mind. Nothing good happens wihout it. And the largest part of our mind is our body. The level of our performance never exceeds the level of our wellbeing. Anything we can do to grow habits of wellbeing directly pays off. 

What responsibilities do companies have?

In modern economies, money is freedom. Successful companies have financial freedoms to do and get away with whatever they can. They deploy marketing, legal and lobbying assets to keep the scope of this freedom optimally stretched. 

What companies can and should be responsible for is a new question. It relates to the people who make the business successful, investors and market champions, the users who depend on its deliverables and the countless impacts and implications of every business on people and planet.

An exceptionally simple model for the best meetings possible

 Agile Meetings

This is a simple, flexible question-based model for organizing any kind of meeting, or conversation seeking shared outcomes. The group stays collaborative and productive whatever the scope of work, diversity of participants and time available. The process doesn't require any special kind of hierarchy or pre-set agenda.

The model features four actions.

1. Identify the questions: Everyone is invited to share the open questions they want the group to work on at that point in time. Questions can represent any kind of wishes, concerns and issues. Each is spoken aloud and written on (physical or virtual) cards. Add backlog questions to what emerges.

2. Organize the questions: The group sequences the questions, considering factors of importance, urgency and dependencies. For each question, estimate the beginning and end dates when questions need to be worked on.

3. Triage the questions: Identify on the spot assignments - people who volunteer to work together on any question after the meeting. Any question that at least 2/3 of the group wants to work on gets worked on by the group in the meetings as time permits. Undone worked on questions move to the backlog.

4. Work the questions: For questions selected for the meeting, start work on each by identifying all the knowns and unknowns. Keep everything visible on cards. Any new questions that need more work gets assigned on the spot or added to the backlog.

The What-Ifs

What if the meeting lacks strong leadership or a clear topical agenda? It doesn't need either. If either exists, we still follow the same four actions.

What if people go off scope during the meeting? Everything gets formed as a question on a card and is either assigned on the spot or added to the backlog.

What if everything intended to get done in the meeting doesn't get done? Anything worked on that goes undone by end of meeting is either assigned on the spot or added to the backlog.

What if there are key people not present? They are patched in by phone when needed or invited into assigned on the spot work after the meeting.

What if we have people dominating and disappearing? Make sure people write each of their ideas on cards, one item per card, and read each aloud so the group stays optimally engaged.

What if email becomes inefficient for organization? Try if possible to never use email, only a shared space, ideally a free, secure Trello Board that optimally keeps everyone on the same page and new people quickly engaged. 

Is leadership still relevant?

Before the current era where teams can learn how to organize themselves, leadership was relevant. Without these mindsets and skillsets, teams needed leaders for direction, learning and support. Weak leaders would equate to weak teams.  

Until teams learn how to organize themselves, they still rely on leaders for performance, loyalty and growth. Peer connections are too weak to carry the team forward. Even bad leaders are believed to be better than none, evidenced by how many organizations would prefer to assign an unprepared leader to a team rather than let the team go leaderless. 

As teams grow in their self-organizing capacity, leadership becomes less relevant, even though strong leadership will still be marketed as essential by leadership schools, consultants and scholars.  Leaders capable of coaching teams to be self-organizing are quite vital in the transition. Others, not so much.

So if you're a leader who doesn't have this capacity, or passion for self-organizing teams, it's time to move on or back to being a specialist or expert in your field. 

The basis of autocracies

Historians are clear about the correlation between autocracy and cognitive deficiencies, regardlesss of one's economic or political power or status. What we might judge as moral flaws is at root cognitive limitations, specifically the inability to manage ambiguity and complexity. By definition then, increasing any group's ability to manage these increases its moral and innovative intelligence.  

Myth-busting inequity gaps

The research data continues to invalidate the performance power of incentives, especially in the form of pay inequities. On sports teams, the larger the inequities and incentives gaps, the worse teams - and their superstars - perform. Countries with smaller disparities have higher levels of wellbeing and performance. It's not a human condition. Even monkeys behave poorly in the face of inequity.

Leader as coach

Coaching guides learning in performance. It works from strengths and successes. It engages the imagination and questions of the learner.

Coaching is the heart of leadership. The tools of coaching are simple: Mindfulness, trustworthiness, good questions, useful feedback and faith in the learning capacity of those they coach. Coaching is an art we practice with our own learning at the heart of the effort. Our passion is shared delight in wonder and discovery.

The power of shared work ecosystems

Much of our work is about coaching teams and leaders in creating shared work ecosystems that achieve the best results. Like any ecosystem, a work ecosystem is the complex adaptive system of relationships in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

In a shared work ecosystem, people share decisions, learning, work, responsibilities, dreams, resources and opportunities. In the vast majority of organizations worldwide, the high levels of disengagement are indicative of work ecosystems that are not shared. People are disconnected by communications tools and methods, functional silos, divisions into resource and responsibility haves and have-nots.

People are smarter, better and faster together to the extent they interact and perform in a shared work environment. Coaching teams and leaders in creating these ecosystems is not complex work. It is rewarding in the short and long run.

Do company policies matter?

Policies have one purpose: to create consistent performance. In it's worst forms, they lead to more mindless compliance than mindful engagement. 

Consistent performance is a function of habits, not parental dictates, retraining, sticks or carrots. Without habits, all the lip service about accountability in policy obedience is just that. Only to the degree people know how to build new habits are they capable of performance consistencies.

The good news is that we now know the science of habit building. 

The problem with competent people

Competent people are a problem for leaders accustomed to less. They require an entirely different mindset and skillset. 

Competent people do well with constant learning, inspiring connections and meaningful work. They disengage and start new job searches or early retirement when the environment offers the opposites. Leaders who want to attract and grow competent people need to take an approach that works for them. 

The extraordinary potential of the workplace

The workplace can be an optimum place for learning how to share power, responsibility, perspectives and talents.  This learning is vital to doing the same in every other dimension of our personal and collective lives. There are few institutional places where this learning is possible because they are structured against it. The good news is that it doesn't require any more skills than an 8 year old has. It's simply a matter of engaging new habit chemistries of these abilities. 

When people feel heard

When people on teams feel heard by peers, they trust them. This is significant because teams move at the speed of trust. Shared trust is core to engagement and creativity. Trust cannot be mandated or incentivized. It must happen authentically in the quality of interactions and collaborations. It is not a factor of demographics or structures. It begins with how we listen.

Why we need to abandon performance reviews

Useful feedback happens quickly, ideally in real time while it's still actionable. It is not even postponed a week much less a year. Withholding feedback is a core barrier to learning. It is passive aggressive behavior, not useful compassion and support.

We would drop any friend in a minute who one day says they have important feedback for us but they're going to keep it secret until a an annual performance review they'll do with us. 

This is why we need to design quick feedback loops into all dimensions of work so people can be agile in their learning and course-correct as soon as possible, with zero delays in potential learning. Every workplace has the time to do this. All we have to do is reduce meeting and email waste by even 10% to free up time for useful feedback that is accurate, actionable, timely and confidence-building. 

Recovering our creativity potential

In early childhood, we use about 80% of our creativity potential. Conventional education reduces this to less than 10% by age 12 because our young brains atrophy as academic and developmental success is measured more in answer compliance than cultivated curiosity.

Thanks to the neuroplastic nature of our brains, we can reawaken our creative potential at any point in our life. We can learn and practice any creative form that appeals to us. It can be in any form of writing, drawing, painting, photography, studio arts, film, music, cooking, gardening or design. Nothing has to be shared or published. The learning is unlimited.

The weakness fallacy

In perfectionist cultures, weaknesses are accountability targets. They are not tolerated. They are considered a source of blame and shame.

In smart cultures, it's clear that we do our best learning and growth from beginner's mind. This is the realization that learning is essential to a life of meaning and meaningful work and they we have much to learn.

At age 90, the celebrated and incredibly inventive Pablo Picasso reflected that he felt like he was just beginning to learn how to paint. This is beginner's mind. This is the empowerment of not calling our learning potential a weakness, but rather, the greatest gift.

Why continuous improvement can fail

Despite the sincere intentions to improve how things happen at work, efforts can fail to attract support even when people are empowers. Improvement implies uncertainty and people who already feel they have already reached or exceeded their uncertainty threshold will resist even reasonable attempts at improvement. This is a call for an improvement process that turns uncertainty into an asset rather than threat to certainty. It can be done.

Belonging and kindness

Interesting research recently indicating that empowering people who lack a sense of belonging causes them to be more insensitive to others. Power without belonging leads to uncaring. This explains th bullying of leaders who feel increasingly isolated and competitive. Creating connections becomes key to a culture of mutual respect.