Month: March 2017

We need designers now more than ever. And, the world is being designed now more than ever. Take a simple example: When you drink a bottle of water, you are supporting a design practice of water extraction, bottling, business model design, product design, marketing, and even environment design by virtue of putting more demand on the production of plastic products. Take our ingestion of graphic images, also products of design, and our production of graphic images–how many photos do you upload to a social network? This act of blogging is contributing to the world of design.

What this does is makes designers of all of us. To ‘design’ means to ‘mark out’–to put a stamp on the world. But this way of designing based on the innumerable actions you take on a daily basis is a more tacit form of design.

So how do you become a designer? Here are a few tips:

1. Think Solution: Designers love to solve problems. We love to look at the world as it should be not how it is. And when we find problems, or things that just don’t look or function well, we think about ways to solve them. Designers are concerned about how designed things are being used, and whether or not they can be designed better to be used better. A designer wants to make the world a more beautiful, well functioning place. This also relates to organizational change. We see organizations stuck in ruts or approaching obsolescence and we want to provide solutions.
2. Think Iteration: A solution doesn’t just happen first step out of the gates. Design is an iterative process, meaning that it takes multiple tries (and fails) over time. So many people are afraid of failing that they won’t even try to make the first sketch–or first line. However, when you think iteratively, the pressure’s off: if the first try doesn’t work, you just keep trying. Thomas Edison’s famous statement is apropos: “I did not fail,” said Edison about the lightbulb, “I just found 10,000 ways that did not work.”
3. Think Systems: Designers often see parts in wholes and wholes in parts. We often try to understand the system we’re in, and how it all works (or doesn’t work), as part of the design process. If we see a problem, we wonder what system constraints are causing it. And when we design solutions, we look for ways the surrounding system will be impacted by it. Being a systems thinker is important for being a good designer.
4. Think Vision: Designers do not work from here to there, as manufacturers do. Instead, we work from there to here: we begin not with the current state of things, but with a better future that we envision. Then, our design process is a way of pulling the future into the here and now one iteration at a time. Great designers are great visionaries.
5. Think Different: Designers love to live outside the conventions and norms of a system or society. They are often misfits who love to play in the world of ideas. To be a designer means you’re constantly pushing your ideas outside of convention. You’re always stretching your ideas to see a better solution.
6. Think Simple: Yes, we talk about systems and complexity, but design should be simple. Some people claim you need more complexity when designing for a complex system, but I disagree: the best design is simple and intuitive. Think Helvetica as a typeface–so lucid, so simple, like air. Or consider Massimo Vignelli’s famous design of the map of the New York Subway. Good design is simple design–it is as little design as possible.
7. Think Learning: Designers are constantly learning new things. Obviously, most people are learning; but to a designer, as one who loves to play in the world of ideas and unlimited possibilities, learning is critical. If you simply look up all the numerous design processes and principles alone, you could spent many years learning how to apply them. You have to always be learning new things that will give you a better vantage point on a particular problem or give you better tools for a solution.
8. Think Risk: If you’re afraid of risking, but want to become a designer, then you need to build up your courage. Designers have to take risks. Imagine this: you are going to pitch a major company a new idea, something they’ve never thought of before. You are putting your neck on the line–what if the client rejects it? But that is the discipline. You have to be prepared to push the boundaries of convention and create things that people perhaps have never seen before or thought of before. But that’s the beauty of good design.
9. Think Documentation: A good designer documents–through photos, video, note taking and journaling. Documentation is how you keep track of ideas. Some swear by Evernote or other tools. Some don’t leave home without their pocket Moleskine and Lamy Safari. Regardless of your style, you have to document your ideas. One simple way is to carry a pocket notebook around in which you jot your ideas down as they strike your mind.
10. Think Research: Designers are always researching new trends and ideas. Apart from learning, research is important for observing the world of the future, the world of tomorrow, not just today. A good designer has one foot in the future and another in the present. And thus research is a critical activity for the designer. It is also important to research broadly and across disciplines–you never know how two or more ideas will converge.

These are some of the basics for becoming a designer. The good thing about our world today is there are many designers, they’re in high demand, and the world needs more of them.

Creativity is for everyone. You can do it, I can do it. That’s because we’ve all been created to create. It’s like we have a creative gene that is essential to being human.

That said, we can create situations and surroundings that quell or diminish or hinder our creativity. And, conversely, we can create situations and surroundings that foster it–that literally enhance our levels of creative performance.

If you do something over and over again, it will become a habit. Creativity is the same thing–this is why writers will write everyday, painters will paint everyday, the business executive will work 80 hour weeks. What people are doing is building neural connections in the brain that will wire together and thus form a habit. Have you ever seen Picasso sit down and just start painting something awesome? He truly mastered his medium. It’s said that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at something. That’s because it takes that many times for your brain to create the neuronal connections. Now Steven Kotler, on whose 17 triggers of innovation this post is based, maintains that by mastering how to create flow states, that 10,000 hours can be cut in half. That could very well be.

What these habits do is create the conditions for a thing called flow. Steven Kotler, based on the seminal work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, defines flow as an optimal state of consciousness in which we both feel and perform at our best.

Here are 5 habits that enhance creativity:

1. Intense Focus: Aldous Huxley was known for answering the door of his house, having a conversation with the person, and then forgetting who it was when his wife later queried him about it. The famous writer G.K. Chesterton was known for calling his wife to tell her he’s at the train station, and to ask where he is supposed to be going. “Home dear!” she would reply. Intense focus is critical for creativity and innovation. It requires a single activity and solitude. You’ve got to shut off your phone, lock yourself in a room for days on end, and be alone. This is how many great writers and scientists and painters and musicians have created over the centuries.
2. Clear Goals: This is important. ‘A goal without a plan is just a wish’. This also relates to the goal itself. If you have no objective, you will have no direction. It could be the case that following the goal will take you into a different direction, but you still need to start with a goal. In group innovation, having a clear goal that is agreed upon is critical for solving that complex challenge.
3. Immediate Feedback: If you’re painting, and the colours don’t work or the strokes are too thin or the line you just wrote sounded terrible, you have immediate feedback. But what about that project for your director you’re working on? You need to get immediate feedback. This requires vulnerability. If I’m doing work for someone, I like to ship multiple iterations–I don’t care how good they are. I’m just trying to get new ideas out and get feedback on them.
4. Challenge/Skills Ratio: To be in the sweet spot of creativity and innovation you need be in the tension of a serious challenge that is almost beyond your ability to solve it, and you need to have the requisite skills to solve it. An artist will immediately see when he or she is pushing the boundaries of skill when venturing out on a work and thus might pare it down. You want to hit the mid-way mark between performance and anxiety. The challenge must be slightly greater than the skills we bring to it.
5. High Stakes: To be in flow we need to be working on projects that matter. We need to be taking a risk at something. I resonate with Richard Branson who claimed that if it isn’t fun and challenging he won’t do it. There is a time for playing it safe, but not in creation and innovation. And in groups, you need everyone on board with the risk, willing to stick their necks out to succeed. There has to be skin in the game.

These are just 5 habits of creativity and innovation. They will work with individual and group creativity. These become habits when one puts time into each of them, allowing them to become part of one’s daily practice.

In future posts, I will continue with more habits. Meantime, try these out and see how they work for you. Add a comment if you like what you’ve read.

Our world is a very complex one. The problems we have today require new ways of thinking and collaborating.

A problem is that while technological development is demanding new institutional structures and ways of working, the institutions themselves are often stuck in old patterns of thinking and working.

Many people are apprehensive of new structures and patterns for fear of failure, which sets up a seeming dilemma: on the one hand, many organizations are being forced to change in response to disruptions in the marketplace, and yet on the other there is a fear of changing those very structures that brought the company success in the past.

Here are some more common mistakes that will totally destroy innovation in your organization:

1. Old thinking: When seeking innovation, it’s important to think in new ways, to think about new things, and to think in divergent ways. For example, if you’re trying to think about a business solution, think outside business: look at breakthroughs in science, or other areas of research–that conflict of thinking will force your brain to process in a different way, thus shocking it into a new idea.

2. Stale environments: One of the most depressing things I have to face as a business consultant is the dreadful boardroom: the conventional polygonal table, rolling chairs, fluorescent lighting, suits, ties, and vinyl portfolios replete with cheap conference ballpoint pens–boring! You need a completely different environment; one that fosters lots of movement, fun–yes fun!–drawing, sketching, researching large picture books and articles and magazines, food–lots of good energy food–, oxygen from plants, music–yes, music during a meeting!–and natural light. Just by doing this one thing differently, your meetings will generate totally different results.

3. Cynicism and Black Hats: If you have complainers, and you’re trying to get new ideas, leave them out of the meeting until you’ve got some big ideas marked out and you need people to kick the can–then bring them in. Winers, complainers, black-hat doffers are brutal when you need innovation. Think of your ideas as seedlings–the last thing you need is someone clumsily stomping over them when the poor things have hardly had a breath of air.

4. Conformity, Complacency, Compliance: Workplaces are tribes: they have culture, belief systems, and policies that keep everyone in check. The problem is that people not only dress the same (whether the same blue suits and ties, or checkered shirts from Banana Republic), but also talk and think the same. This is thought of as successful cultural development–but it can totally destroy innovation. You want alignment around the vision of the company, but not about the ideas that will bring it to fruition. You need misfits, rebels, artists, outcasts–people who are committed to the organization, but not interested in conforming to cultural expectations that mean little to the bottom line.

5. Alignment too early: This is a killer of innovation, because it typically comes a) out of pressure to please the CEO, or b) out of laziness to come to a solution before it’s time. Innovation can take a long time, and it often requires a lot of oscillation and conflict for a new idea to emerge. Typically, organizations will jump to the first idea or solution that comes up, not realizing they haven’t scratched the surface of the problem their facing and what a solution would even look like.

6. Relevance: Those who try to innovate while keeping every idea ‘on topic’ to the problem at hand or to the current structure of the organization often fail. The whole point of innovation is to create something new, and, when it’s at its best, disruptive. And to do that, you’ve got to turn over all kinds of stones, and over turn innumerable boxes–and it’s not always going to look relevant. Those companies really good at innovation are working on solutions decades in advance, and unrelated to the current direction of the company.

7. Conventional structures: Innovation is a disruptive activity–its very purpose is to up-end the status quo and create something new. And yet, many organizations believe they can innovate by calling more meetings or having more brainstorming sessions (whatever that means), while keeping their organizations structured the same. Do you have a full-time R&D department? Do you have a full-time Innovation Department? Do you have people working on stuff that is totally outside of your current issues? Do you have people researching the future, reading Wired Magazine, and taking routine field trips to massive research libraries and zoos and museums and art galleries and hanging out at trendy cafes? If not, you need to rethink.

8. Lack of structure: To become innovative, Whirlpool needed to put a series of structures around how innovation would be done by everyone everywhere. This took years to work through and fully understand–but they took the time, and built the structures and practices necessary for it to take place. Innovation is a set of beliefs, it has a cultural expression, and it ought to have policies in place to help it flourish. Innovation is a kind of art; and any artist will tell you that creativity doesn’t just happen without structure and routine in place. If you want innovation, you have to go through a process of building it into your organization.

These are only a handful of innovation killers–there are many others. If you’re new to all of this, there’s a wealth of information out there. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not–the whole thing takes time and a fair bit of trial and error. The key is if you’re leading a company, or starting one, you’ve got to take this innovation thing very seriously–you’ve got to make sure you have structures in place to do it.

Having good ideas is important, whether you’re an entrepreneur, manager, artists, student, or just trying to manage your life. There is a history around the word ‘idea’, but I won’t go into that here. What we commonly refer to when we talk about ideas is a certain kind of thought that occurs in the mind as a result of our experiences–phrases like ‘flashes of insight’ or ‘eureka moments’ seek to pinpoint what ideas are.

There are countless books written about ideas. Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From will give you plenty of insight–at least it has for me. As a researcher, consultant, and writer, I’m always looking for good ideas, but even as Johnson maintains, it’s not always easy. Here are a few tips:

1. Drink coffee: You don’t like coffee? It doesn’t matter–drink it. According to Johnson, the Enlightenment was spawned by the rise of coffee consumption and the cafes; in fact, cafes, rather than pubs, became the breeding ground for the surge of intellectualism that period boasts. Does this imply that you won’t get good ideas if you’re a tea drinker, or don’t consume caffeinated drinks at all? Of course not. But coffee is known to dramatically stimulate the brain, spawning new ideas.

2. Write it down–capture it! If you’re after good ideas you can’t afford to go through life on autopilot. You need to capture your experiences, thoughts, reflections, brain waves. If you haven’t done this before, go and get yourself a notebook and play journalist for the day: write down what you see, conversations you hear, and your reflections on them–you won’t believe it. This is one of the oldest and most effective ways of getting good ideas–it’s no wonder that the acclaimed notebook company Moleskine was inspired by the notebooks of Hemingway, Picasso, and Van Gogh. I’m surprised by how many people do not practice this simple way of recording one’s life. Try it.

3. Walk around: The flaneur was a French phenomenon in the 19th Century embodied by the painter or writer or philosopher who would wander through the streets of Paris experiencing the world and…feeding his or her ideas. Did the flaneur have a particular place to go? No. Was the point of the walk to merely wander around? Yes. There is a rich history of the flaneur. How does it work? Simple. You’re working through an idea or problem, and thus your mind is attuned to it. But your idea or solution needs some diversity to pull all the pieces together into something rich and original and salient. You take a walk through the mall or along the streets and everything you witness jumps out at you and congeals with the problems your mind is working on–and whammo! The new idea or insight emerges. But you have to make sure you have your notebook handy to write it all down. If you want to see an entertaining movie about the flaneur, see Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

4. Give yourself time: Yes I know your boss is seriously pressing you for a new idea, or you’re a boss and you need a big idea for the next quarter, or you’re a student pressed for time on a research paper due tomorrow morning–but…you need to give yourself time. Ideas don’t just pop out of nowhere; and they can’t be rushed. Some ideas take decades to come to fruition. Think of the poet Bukowski who compared a poem–an idea–to a spider that he watches quietly crawling down the wall: it takes its time; it crawls a few steps down, then scurries back up. Do you have the patience to wait for it? Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From calls this “the slow hunch” contrasted with the often-used but rarely experienced “Eureka moment.” The slow hunch is the problem you walk around with for a long time; the one that requires a ton of experience to germinate; the one that is in need of other sources of knowledge and information and a diversity of practice to really emerge. It takes time.

5. Diversity of information: If you have a business problem, go to the museum. If you have a science problem, go to the mall and tinker around at the Apple Store. If you are researching for a social science paper, or working on engineering a new technology, go to a butterfly conservatory, or the symphony, or wander through the forest. You see, you need to get diverse, not monolithic. Your brain needs stimulation from other sources to put the pieces together–as mentioned above. If you’re working on a design problem, read about bees. Dive into the Encyclopedia Britannica and read all kinds of random articles. Do anything you can to get diversity. Johnson calls this “serendipity”: when ideas bounce around into other ideas and voila–a new insight.

There are many other ways to get new ideas, but these five are a good place to start. My go-to is the notebook–I take mine everywhere. It’s a slim one that slips into my jeans pocket, and in which I mark down as much as I can; a lot of it’s nonsense, but there are a few flecks of gold dust in there somewhere. Also, read everything. If you’re not a reader, become one. Read biographies, especially of creative people: how did they work, what were their habits? Read read read. Then jot down your thoughts in your notebook. Sounds simple? At least that part of it is.