Book Shelf: The Art Of Asking

Recommendation

With this combination of autobiography and self-help manual, punk singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer expands on her popular 2013 TED Talk on “The Art of Asking.” Palmer has worked as a human statue, a performer and a singer. Each job helped her learn how to connect with others and ask for help. She covers life on the road in her art-punk band The Dresden Dolls, explains how crowdfunding makes it easier for artists to ask for help and discusses her personal life, including her struggles with shame and her marriage to author Neil Gaiman. Palmer’s message of how to ask for help is the core of her text. Her writing, like her life, is chaotic. Her memoir sometimes seems like a stream-of-consciousness exercise and its confusion makes her heartfelt ideas about the need to escape shame and remorse harder to find. Still, I recommend Palmer’s tale of creative ambition and fearlessness to entrepreneurs, inventors and artists of all types.

Key Points

• What singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer learned from her job as a living statue

• How her band – The Dresden Dolls – fared

• How to use the Internet to ask for help

• How to recognize that accepting a gift gives to the giver.

Summary

THE TED TALK

In 2012, singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer received an invitation to speak at a TED conference. She was surprised because she’s a punk musician, not a professional speaker. The organizers had noticed her Kickstarter campaign to fund her album, //Theatre Is Evil//. Almost 25,000 loyal fans paid a total of $1.2 million to support the recording. Artists and entrepreneurs can use Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites, such as Indiegogo or GoFundMe, to ask others – the crowd – for donations to pay for their projects. Kickstarter is all or nothing. If you don’t meet your minimum financial goal, donors get their money back. Palmer wrote her TED Talk to reach creative people who struggle with asking for help. She was surprised that her talk resonated widely.

In it, she discussed her life as a street performer and musician, her Kickstarter campaign, and the backlash that followed. Many people told her they felt she spoke directly to them. They, too, had problems asking for help, financial or otherwise. She learned that “everybody struggles with asking.” Palmer hopes people will just ask for what they need, despite their fears. She stresses that you must believe in what you ask for and be prepared to hear no. Ask with grace and compassion; never demand or beg.

THE 8-FOOT BRIDE

After graduating college at age 22, Palmer moved home to Boston. She scooped ice cream for $9.50 per hour plus tips – then decided to make her living as a human statue. Her costume was an antique bridal gown; white face paint; a full-length lace veil; white opera gloves; a black, 1950s pin-up girl style wig; black combat boots; and a glass vase she spray-painted white. She made her way to the middle of Harvard Square in full bridal regalia and stood perfectly still on a milk crate, holding the vase full of flowers. A small crowd formed, and a five-year-old
boy put a dollar in her hat. She moved her hands, pulled a flower from her vase and handed it to the boy without a word. Palmer made $38 in an hour. She decided never to get a real job or have a boss.

Street performers and their audiences have a different relationship than performing artists who sell tickets. Their interplay requires more trust, because street artists must connect with strangers one on one. Palmer found it physically taxing. Standing still in combat boots on top of a milk crate for 30 minutes hurt her knees, so she switched positions between crowds. She found that her emotional connection with people was worth the physical pain. She appreciated the few people who stopped to look rather than the majority who ignored her.

FEELING INADEQUATE

She experienced a feeling many people share: Sometimes she didn’t feel real. Psychologists call it the “imposter syndrome”; Palmer calls it the “Fraud Police.” The fraud police live in your subconscious and wake you in the middle of the night to tell you they know you are a fraud, that everyone else also knows it, and that you deserve neither success nor friends. Because they grow accustomed to criticism, many artists know the fraud police well, but most everyone eventually encounters them.

The higher you climb in your career, the more vigilant they become. Palmer recognizes that everyone fakes his or her life at some point. She contends that professional performers embrace that fakery; frightened people try to hide it. Palmer’s salary as the Bride was pretty consistent. She could make more than $100 – plus the costs of two bouquets of flowers – on an average day. She particularly disliked people who yelled, “Get a job!” She felt that she had job, one she had made up without asking permission from anyone. Besides her street patrons, others chipped in to help her, including a guy who gave her free burritos and a local florist who sold her slightly damaged flowers for much less than the regular price.

THE DRESDEN DOLLS

Palmer, a punk singer and piano player, started a band named The Dresden Dolls with drummer Brian Viglione. The name referred to Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five, which recounts the Dresden bombing. Palmer imagined the porcelain dolls that lay underneath the rubble.

Palmer and Viglione hung out at the Cloud Club, a four-story brick townhouse in Boston that accommodates a rotating cast of artist tenants. In the 1970s, a friend of Palmer’s had borrowed $9,000 for a down payment on the house to create a community of artists. The Cloud Club has housed more than 100 different artists over the course of 40 years. Palmer had written songs for the piano since she was 12 but she had rarely performed them publicly. The Dolls rehearsed on the top floor of the Cloud Club. She played her songs for Viglione, and he came up with the drumbeats. They played their first gig at a friend’s art gallery. They found vintage costumes and donned what would become their signature look, including white face paint.

Viglione loved to wear stage make-up and to cross-dress. The Dresden Dolls always had a special, mutually beneficial, relationship with their fans. During their first three years, they took any gig they could get, paid or not. Palmer maintained an email list obsessively. Because the band had no manager, record label or publicist, they booked their own gigs, located performing venues and found couches to sleep on through friends. The band gained a following in the Boston vicinity by sending out email blasts and posting flyers around town.

Eventually their popularity spread to other cities. The Dolls relied on fans for support – couches, meals and a few extra dollars to cover costs. Their fans were happy to oblige. By 2002, the band was touring a lot and making real money. Fans kept asking for their music, but they had no CD. A friend who was a sound engineer lent Palmer and Viglione a free studio after hours. They bought blank CDs and empty jewel cases from OfficeMax. Working in the kitchen, they made five-song discs they sold for $5. Fans were eager to buy them.

The band’s fan base grew locally and then regionally as Palmer and Viglione traveled to other cities. If they didn’t have a place to sleep, they’d ask the audience. Their couch surfing patrons became great friends as they bonded after shows. After every performance, Palmer and Viglione hung out and signed merchandise – CDs or T-shirts or their fans’ handmade art. Sometimes, the signing would take longer than the show. The signing line gave people a chance to tell the musicians their stories. Fans also asked Palmer and Viglione to listen to their music. They always accepted homemade CDs from their fans.

THE MUSIC LABEL

Constantly printing and mailing CDs to fans, booking gigs, and responding to emails and phone calls became exhausting. After two years of gigs, the Dolls still had no agent or manager despite drawing crowds of 500 people a night in various cities. Then they got an email from a heavy-metal label. Desperate by now, the Dolls signed a disadvantageous deal. In the beginning, the relationship with the label was great. It promoted the band in Europe and Australia and did a lot of marketing.

Palmer and Viglione got magazine interviews, and their music was in stores. The label thought the Dolls “could be mega-launched into the echelon of indie bands” such as The Hives, The Shins or The Vines, and wanted them to convert strangers into fans. The Dolls wanted to focus on their existing fans in line at concerts or online through Palmer’s blog or Twitter. The label didn’t want to pay for the band’s website, thinking it should be “up” only if the Dolls had a new record to promote. The Dolls shot a video in London for the song “Leeds United.” Fans came in droves and threw pies while Palmer lip-synched and danced on stage.

The label didn’t like the video, but Palmer refused to change it. The label was upset when she wrote about their disagreement on her blog. Then, the British group Radiohead released //In Rainbows//, the “first pay-what-you-want album” from a name band. The Internet was transforming the music industry: Artists and fans could connect directly.

Palmer found to her dismay that her label owner never heard of Radiohead. The Dolls did the work themselves on their first studio album and sold it to the label. For the second studio album, //Yes, Virginia,// the label paid for everything and its people thought the album would catapult the band into the mainstream. It sold 25,000 copies during the first week. Palmer and Viglione were ecstatic, but the label considered it a failure because radio stations wouldn’t play it. Palmer explains, “We were a punk-cabaret duo specializing in tear-jerking, seven-minute songs with drum solos. We were not radio friendly.” The Dolls wanted to break off with the label. Palmer posted the song “Please Drop Me” – sung to the tune of “Moon River” – on her blog and asked fans to video it and upload it to YouTube.

The label still wouldn’t oblige. In a fit of desperation, Palmer met with someone from the label and pretended to be drunk. She told him she was sick of the band and wanted to start a family. She lied by saying that she worried the label would drop her if she got pregnant. The label rep assured her this would never happen and promised he wouldn’t tell anyone. A month later, a lawyer wrote saying the label was dropping Palmer.

DIRECT TO FANS

The whole episode only confirmed for Palmer how unnecessary – and indeed, destructive – interacting with corporate entities can be for artists. The band had strong relationships with its fans. Those relationships provided viable  commercial support. The label didn’t want to or try to understand the Dolls, their fan relationships or the cooperative model of commercial success the band had created. Corporate entities understand only one paradigm and resist all others. Independence makes them uncomfortable because they can’t control an independent artist. Artists now recognize their true supporters are their
fans, not commercialized methods of distribution.

DIGITAL PANHANDLING

The Internet opens a different world for artists. Patreon.com allows fans to support artists directly by committing to a monthly donation. For example, Palmer’s friend, Samantha Buckingham – an Australian indie guitarist and singer-songwriter – sought patrons on Patreon. She gained 44 backers – including 19 who give her $1 monthly and one $50 backer – so she’s paid about $200 every time she releases a song. Artists can make a living via subscription services, “pay-per-piece-of-content pledge services,” or – for big projects – crowdfunding.

All these outlets rely on trust between creators and supporters. As long as the artists make art, their patrons are happy. Some critics of crowdfunding call it digital panhandling or “online begging.” Some Twitter users accused Palmer of being a “useless, entitled narcissist” who conned her followers. Not everyone understands how crowdfunding works. To succeed, you must build relationships. Sometimes, unknown artists are successful because they cultivate personal connections with their fans. Lesser-known artists have small but loyal followings that pay for their content. Ironically, Palmer acquired about 25,000 backers – about the same number that her former label had considered a failure in terms of sales.

CONFRONTING SHAME

Palmer wonders why it’s so hard for her – and others – to ask for help. She resisted letting her husband Neil Gaiman support her when she took time off work, even though, since he’s a best-selling writer, his help would have caused them no financial hardship.

From reading and talking to social scientist and TED speaker Brené Brown, Palmer learned that women often suffer shame from failing to be “good enough” – good enough lovers or wives or mothers or girlfriends or wage-earners. Palmer had difficulty even describing shame, because admitting to or experiencing shame seems in itself shameful. Her inner voices unfailingly reminded her that she was a fraud and undeserving of help. With a great deal of self-study and the support of her husband, friends and fans, Palmer began to understand that the act of asking for help is a powerful blow against shame. When someone offers you something and you accept it, “your acceptance of the gift is the gift” to the giver.

Quotes

“You can’t really afford to be choosy about your audience, nor about how they wish to repay you for your art.”

“Sometimes people just don’t want the flower. Sometimes you have to let them walk away.”

“American culture in particular has instilled in us the bizarre notion that to ask for help amounts to an admission of failure.”

“For every new bridge you build with your community, there’s a new set of trolls who squat underneath it.”

“I started judging myself a little less harshly every time I looked in the mirror.”

“Often it is our own sense that we are undeserving of help that has immobilized us.”

“Crowdfunding has to be a democratic tool, and mega pop stars have as much right to use the tool as anyone else.”

“When the gift circulates, we feel the very essence of art and life not just in the words and songs, but also in our deep desire to share them with one another.”

“When you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.”

“We have to truly believe in the validity of what we’re asking for – which can be incredibly hard work.”

“To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, whether that heart is full of light or trapped
in darkness.”

About the Author

Blogger, singer and songwriter Amanda Palmer is half of the former punk-rock duo, The Dresden Dolls. Her 2013 TED Talk on “The Art of Asking” has garnered eight million views.

Best Practice Series: Awareness

If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.

―Daniel Goleman

Some facts are chilling. Consider this one: the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. It is chilling because its implications are enormous. The key implication is that there is nothing – nothing—more important in developing organizational effectiveness than ensuring that people think for themselves with rigor, imagination, and courage. Every day, in every meeting, and in every interaction.

It begs the question: In hierarchical structures often driven by the alternation between reward and reprisal, what does it take for people to think clearly and for themselves? And how do we find the time?

The answer is not in our innate intelligence, education, experience, or power. It is not even the amount of time we allot to thinking. The key factor in whether or not people can think clearly for themselves is the way they are being treated by the people with them while they are thinking. The impact of our behavior on people’s ability to think is, whether we realize it or not, that big.

The quality of our Attention is the central principle and discipline of Deep Craft Leadership. Attention has long been the focus of many schools of thought from Buddhism, psychiatry, education, philosophy, and religion—to name a few.

The ability to suspend our attention is a meditative and psychological tool that helps us perceive the subtle patterns continuously occurring between others and ourselves. These patterns determine our behavior and the automatic ways in which we react. When we do not suspend our attention we cannot be fully aware of our behavior, nor can we perceive the unconscious subtle pulls continually placed upon us by others.

When we hear or watch any narrative, our brains go wholly into perceiving mode, turning off the systems for acting or planning to act, and with them go our ability to see reality clearly. This is one reason why humans have such trouble recognizing lies. First we believe what we are told. Then, we have to make a conscious effort to assemble facts, and disbelieve. Only when we stop perceiving to think about what we have seen or heard, only then do we assess its truth-value.

The ability to suspend attention is accessible primarily to people with a sufficiently developed self-esteem, which enables them to reflect back upon their own and other people’s behavior uncritically.

HOW TO PRACTICE

1. Hold some of your attention back while being in one of the three situations described above (become an observer).

2. A good way to begin is to feel your body (notice the sensation of your back against the chair or your feet on the ground). The process of sensing the body automatically holds some attention in suspension.

3. Become aware of your thoughts, sensations, and the emotions that are motivating you in the moment.

4. Discover that there is a particular internal, physical sensation that always accompanies the practice of suspended attention

TOOL: 3 LEVELS OF AWARENESS

How does new awareness change us? When we learn to see, taste, hear, and feel; when we learn to discern and discriminate through participation and observation; when we learn to make distinctions and become an expert; and, when we become intimate with the details of a particular medium from our activity with and in it.

Simply put, through practice, practice, practice.

--> Initial awareness is gained through reflection after an incident occurs. If we understand what the gap in our behavior is and know what it should be we have a shot at catching ourselves in the act the next time. (we started here)

2. When we successfully catch ourselves in the moment we get just enough time to make a different choice. 

3. When we catch ourselves enough times, we can spot a trigger coming rather than having it blindside us into rash reactivity. Seeing a trigger coming gives us even more time to choose a different reaction.

Note that you are in and out of these three phases ALL THE TIME based on how triggered you are at any time and how aware you are of your triggers when you are triggered.

RESOURCES:

• Klein, N. (2005). Time To Think: An Imperative of Behavior, Not Time

• Brenner, C. “Brief Communication: Evenly Hovering Attention.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (July 2000): 545–549.

• Roth, B. (2018). Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation. New York: NY. Simon & Schuster.

• Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock potential in yourself and your organization. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press.

• Harris, D. (2014). 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works - A True Story

Thought Series: 3 Lessons Business Leaders Can Learn From Master Craftsmen & Women

Thought Series provides actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.

Trade and craftsmanship are inextricably linked. We develop skills and learn to perform to a standard. We aim to be skilled in our respective trades. That said, most people will agree there is something sacred about true craftsmanship. Why is craftsmanship so rare? What can we do to cultivate craftsmanship?

There is, I believe, a craftsman in all of us. Everyone has untapped creative potential. Whether we’re talking about a stone carver or a paradigm shifting business leader it’s human nature to conclude that those who demonstrate unusual gifts owe their success to an almost magical quality that you’re either born with or you’re not: talent.

How we spend our time and what problems we choose to labor over says a lot about how we approach the idea of work. Moving an idea in any medium—working with raw materials or through people—is hard, but it is a battle that can be won through disciplined effort, focused attention, and obsession over a particular problem you feel drawn to solve. In fact, real-world problem-solving is most strongly linked to higher self-reported work quality. When your trade is in service of your craft, you elevate your work.

While the skills you bring matter, few of us ever reach the limits of our natural abilities. Instead what holds us back is a lack of commitment or a lack of focus. “Inspiration,” Picasso said, “needs to find you working.” Such advice often overwhelms us and makes us yearn for the recipe, standards, templates or blueprints to success. Showing up counts for a lot, because it deepens your ability. Effort matters.

But there is another component necessary to achieving true craftsmanship—preoccupation with your subject. Only when we are internally driven does effort combine with skill to manifest as achievement. In other words, it takes effort to get good at something. It takes effort to apply that skill, to create. But it takes obsession to hang in there for the long haul.

If you look at any master craftsman or admired business leader’s life story, for instance, they don’t begin by displaying savant- like brilliance at an early age. Clothing designer Eileen Fisher did not start out with the stores she has today. She started with a single rack of samples at a New York design show, “and it was a disaster.” In fact many craftsmen struggled. Several leaders experienced painful failures. What distinguishes their approach to their craft is that they regard the struggle to learn as part of the privilege of their craft. They work hard to make a difference and choose work that is worthwhile to them.

Rather than chasing a different dream each week or month or year, you need – at least eventually – to settle on a higher calling and never let go. Drive and determination, combined with single-minded direction, is what elevates your work.

Many people think that once you find your “thing” maintaining interest is easy—that it no longer feels like work. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow discusses the nature of work as complete absorption in what one does. While all masters and mentors referred to being in a “zen-state” or “meditative state” this mindset needs to be actively cultivated.

Interest and motivation are not fixed. They need to be nurtured and developed, much like learning a new language. Here are three steps from my latest research on master craftsmen and business leaders that you can take to develop yourself and level up your work – and begin to live and work with craftsmanship.

1. GET YOUR BEARINGS.

When you start a class or a job for the first time, you step in to a world where you don’t yet know the rules. This new environment has a particular ecosystem, with values, beliefs, procedures, and social dynamics that you have yet to learn. You do not yet know how to navigate the power structure, what passes for good work, or conventions for communicating with others. Your goal as you enter is to examine.

A common mistake is to “hit the ground running” in a way where you feel you have to prove yourself. If you are constantly seeking external validation and worrying about impressing others, you miss two things: nuances in the environment, and the ability to evaluate your own work. Early compliments can quickly become fickle, relying on them will lead you astray. Take time to understand the reality of where you are, how things work, and where you fit in best. If you want to impress others, it should be because of how serious you are about learning, not because you are trying to get promoted before you are ready.

Master craftsmen and admired business leaders have a preoccupation with a subject or concern. I refer to this as their inner compass (because it guides their awareness) and nothing will stop them in pursuit of this higher goal. How can you find yours if you don’t have one already?

There are two kinds of examining you are looking to do: internal and external. Mine your life. With what have you been and are you continually fascinated?

Second, observe and examine the system around you. Learn the rules that govern the system, understand “the way things are done.” Whether a craftsman or leader, these lessons are both spoken and unspoken, and a reflection of core values and beliefs. In business, you uncover these values by observing how successful people are recognized on the way up and how less fortunate people are treated while they struggle on the way down.

After taking in the rules of the system, it’s important to learn where the power lies. How does communication flow through the system? Who claims power and who actually has it? Who is moving up and who it moving down?

Last, what sparks you most about the environment you are in? Where do you find the most meaning in what you do?

By exploring these concepts, you can start to understand how things function, connect more effectively to your inner compass, and find your place in ecosystem. The importance of this step is to train you to examine every system you find yourself in so you can avoid costly mistakes. It is always best to look before you leap. And, you can’t effectively navigate the system unless you know it.

2. LEARN KEY SKILLS.

After you’ve been in your role for a while, you come up on the next principle of learning—choosing tools and acquiring skills. For some jobs, like operating a machine that always performs the same action, the skills you need to learn are obvious. Other jobs require more of a mix between physical and mental skills, like stone cutting or observing and collecting nature specimens to inspire a felting project. Still other jobs are vaguer, like working with and through people or examining research. Whatever the need, your goal is to make your learning simple, to understand what matters for you to become proficient, and what needs ongoing practice.

First, it is important to start with a single skill you can master. This creates your learning foundation. This will increase your focus and deepen your concentration.

Second, it is important to manage your frustration with setbacks. Challenges in learning are predictable. Anticipating early struggles, frustrations, resistance, and the fickleness of new commitment can help you better prepare. These things cannot be avoided when learning something new, no matter how motivated we are to attain mastery. The only way is through.

Marc Sokol, Editor of Human and People Strategy Magazine, commented on the nature of perseverance:

People say the key to being an entrepreneur is perseverance. Well, guess what? 

Successful entrepreneurs and unsuccessful entrepreneurs are often just as persevering. But, successful entrepreneurs figure out when adapt, and unsuccessful entrepreneurs don’t.

There’s a cognitive difference and a readiness-to-pull-the-cord difference, as opposed to optimism and perseverance.

This practice of skill is best understood by considering the greatest learning-by-doing model ever created: the apprenticeship. Given how little information was available in the Middle Ages, apprentices learned through observation, imitation, and repetition. Certainly their hands-on learning amounted to much, much more than the 10,000 hours needed to learn a skill. It’s not just engaging in a domain for thousands of hours. You have to change how able you are to do something. Anders Ericcson refers to this as deliberate practice. The cathedrals, castles, and walls are powerful examples of craftsmanship and engineering. Accomplished without the benefit of blueprints or books to describe them, and the result of engaging in the smallest of tasks, they represent the accumulation of skills and knowledge of several generations.

Learning through observation, practice, and repetition has a long history. We learned to hunt, forage, make tools long before we could speak. Even if the task is purely mental in nature, like learning a foreign language or computer programming, our like brains like the routine of learning by doing. In other words, reading-theories-doesn’t-make-perfect, practice makes perfect.

3. PUSH YOURSELF TO SEEK NEW EXPERIENCES, THOUGHTFULLY.

Operate on the boundary of what you can, and cannot do. The shortest and most critical part of the learning process is taking all of the skills you’ve acquired and actually putting them to the test—literally. A map can only get you so far. Sooner or later, you are going to need to evaluate your environment, rely on your gut, and use your judgment pm what direction to take.  Experimentation could mean that you step up and take more responsibility which invites more criticism of your work. Ari experimented each time he applied his current skills toward opening a new business. Master ceramicist Louise Pentz experimented her way through a sculpture by creating and destroying her way through it. She explains her process:

You have to make a lot of mistakes. You’re hoping for the mistakes, because that is usually where things are most exciting. Too much control and the outcome loses some of its essence. It ends up just like everyone else’s outcomes. Average. Within the norm. Mainstream.

Often when I create a piece I’ll build it and it will be good, but not very exciting. It’s good, technically, but I wonder ‘how I can give life to this piece?’

I start to break it apart. I might hit or punch the clay with a stick or I’ll rip a piece off of the side. All of those gestures make the piece stronger and better in my eyes.

Through working an idea, editing, and experimentation, you start to gauge your own practice, develop your own standards. You learn to take a stand in the presence of others’ judgments. In pursuit of ongoing development, you seek constructive feedback.

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Inner awareness and observation help guide us so that we do not need to be told what to do. Gaining new skills through deliberate practice helps us develop the ability to accept feedback and introduces us to standards. Seeking new experiences, we decide if it would be easier and safer to operate within a template, to do what we’re told, and to stay within our comfort zone—or if we feel the compulsion to forge ahead.

Like attempting the high dive for the first time, freedom is deeply attractive as well as terrifying. We are confronted with the question: Who would we be if we were truly free? There are surprising ways to access moments of freedom regardless of circumstance and it often results by initiating action before you think you are ready—just like taking the leap off of that first high dive.

You’ve completed your apprenticeship in a particular skill when there isn’t anything left to know in this environment. Your experiments no longer make you uneasy. Things become more or less predictable. Where to go next? Go deeper, find a niche, or both. By finding your true calling, honing your craft through dedicated deliberate practice, and responding to setbacks with an optimistic, problem-solving approach, you will follow in the footsteps of the many outstanding Mentors and Masters I have studied, all of whom are characterized by that mix of awareness, skill development, and practice.

To believe that only a lucky few are born with true talent, while the rest of us are not, is demoralizing. You might understandably wonder whether the focus on craftsmanship simply shifts this concern to a different trait: that perhaps a rare few are blessed with innate talent for superior work while us lesser mortals are destined to weaker will and an absence of meaningful work. In fact, studies suggest that mastery and achievement are not inherited traits, but abilities requiring cultivation. The common factor in people that live and work with craft is how they deliberately practice and change themselves and engage in very goal-directed practice activities. This leaves plenty of room for the rest of us to be influenced by other factors such as life experiences and deliberate cultivation.

Thought Series: Manifesto for new work

Thought Series provides actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.

The work we do matters. Doing is the new leading.

Sustainable development, growth without depletion of natural resources, has become synonymous with sustainable growth—doing what’s required to sustain corporate growth and profits to increase shareholder value. We hold the assumption that our responsibility is to increase shareholder value. Outcomes are generally to sell more stuff, file more claims, increase programs—the list goes on.

Change, almost always, comes too late. Post-crisis solutions gradually chip away at a persistent problem or maintain steady growth, and ultimately define the problem. Post-crisis creativity ultimately enables the problem to persist.

Our inability to embrace the emotional labor of learning, I am persuaded, is one of the greatest threats facing our society today. Investing (and betting) that post-crisis innovation is the primary turning point for an entire sector limits us considerably.

Learning to dance with uncertainty is the wisest investment we can make in our future. Embracing something that might not work is necessary to stimulate creativity and growth. What if our work (in business, government, or nonprofits) was naturally responsible for conservation not just of environmental resources, but human potential? What if each one of us could utilize business as a creative medium for self-expression toward opportunities and problems that face us today?

This is a manifesto for learning how to dance with that uncertainty.

A MANIFESTO FOR NEW WORK

We need companies that empower people to think like craftsmen again.

Craftsmanship requires self-reliance; knowledge of a process—end to end.

It designs something to work within the constraints of the ecosystem it came from, demonstrating an inherent elegance and sustainability.

It adheres to guiding principles of aesthetics and function.

It requires distinct attitudes and capabilities of solving the problem at hand, but also the intellectual vision and insight to find new problems. Seeing what is missing involves the application of creativity.

It requires discipline and—most importantly—joy in working through such challenges.

It incorporates and embodies the decomposition of its primary material. It makes the problem part of the solution.

Entropy adds value.

Master Craftsmen generate and reshape the process and the result as the work evolves. Inviting surprise, they are engaged in ongoing learning and adapting.

Master Craftsmen evaluate the effectiveness of what they create, and their methods, rather than measure. They are in constant conversation with their work, embracing the pursuit of balancing agility and stability.

For the Craftsman, the process of thought happens through making and repeating; making is a form of thinking. With muscle memory inscribed with thought, they take action. In the thinking and the doing they lead.

Craftsmanship deepens with understanding.

Craftsmanship is fundamentally different from business.

Craftsmanship engages in the uncertainty of projects that might not work. Craftsmen experiment. They ask permission from the market to get up the next day to do it again. Business requires the predictability of knowing what will happen tomorrow.

Business is a field primarily defined by its ability to grow.

Business is built around the ability to create customers (not necessarily solve or proactively find problems).

Natural and human resources are finite. Sustainability, responsibility, and citizenship are preventative efforts generally built in response to a crisis point. How these programs are practiced day to day represents the heart and soul of an organization’s core values.

Business takes many creative forms.

Could a non-profit exist, if there were not sizable gaps in the systems built to serve us? No.

Could a social business exist, if humanity’s most pressing needs were being met? No.

Theirs are businesses built upon the failure or collapse of an ecosystem.

They observe signals of failures and are inspired into action by the crisis in the present. Their innovation is byproduct of the emergencies they perceive.

Crisis gives all organizations permission to innovate. But living in a state of crisis is not a sustainable state of being.

When innovating out of crisis is the leading growth strategy, whole industries are diverted from their unique potential to go far beyond the opportunity of yesterday’s disaster. Instead, crisis defines them.

Could a venture-backed startup exist, regardless of a crisis? Yes.

Compared to other structures focused one and largely defined by crisis, business has incredible opportunity for flexibility. Yet it tends to adopt the straightest most reliable path toward growth it can find.

When economies are on the rise, innovation is actively encouraged and incubated.

The encouragement to think creatively and to anticipate needs are among the key differentiators between companies lauded as outliers or merely lucky, and traditional enterprises.

Leaders of creative companies embrace uncertainty. The entire premise of their organizations relies on their ability to learn and do.

While business finds success on the basis of balancing innovation and the status quo of steady growth, it misses out in not investing its energy into the craft of doing.

Simple reactivity (to markets, to competition, to crisis) can no longer be admired as the holy grail of steady growth. We must be more agile and responsive.

The craft of doing and learning are necessary for progress. In doing, we create new understanding. This understanding leads to shifts in behavior. In the doing we learn. In the doing we lead.

Traditional enterprise has failed to develop the discipline to split its attention from the din and crisis of the present. Strict expectations of growth have failed to encourage a diverse set of models and initiatives centered around the creativity needed to find the problems of the future.

Future leaders must anticipate needs.

Leaders of work of the future need to find balance between a set of new, previously unimagined problems, as well as the next evolutions for the present day’s most persistent social and environmental issues.

The next wave of leaders must include a community of those who choose to stop growth for growth’s sake. These are innovators who refuse to wait for the ticking bomb, or the building to collapse, or the ground to open up.

Leaders of new work embrace the proximity of problem solving in order to increase the potency of their solutions. Not only are these leaders carrying out change based on the information they are receiving, but also contributing to a new understanding. Let’s call these bright Counterpoints.

Counterpoints gain capability to make change in the world by first gaining awareness to their own uniqueness.

Counterpoints imagine a future that is tailor-made. They envision an ideal and backwards from the big vision.

Counterpoints are visionary and concern themselves with the study of systemic interventions.

They envision implications.

They generate scenarios.

They plan strategically.

They balance theory and practice.

Who are they?

Some are saving children.

Some are feeding the poor.

Some are housing the homeless.

Some are curing diseases.

Some are donating goods and services.

They are not necessarily in business.

Leaders of the past are fueled by reaction to these circumstances and as a result it defines them. Leaders of the future know they must be engaged with the crisis of the present, but also be responsive to crises of the future, ones that have yet to be defined.

These leaders are bright Counterpoints.

Counterpoints ask, “What if?” By embracing projects that might not work, they are facilitators of change.

Counterpoints will strike a balance between reactively embracing growth as a goal, and responding with a long term perspective of conservation.

The next generation of organizations must welcome and help develop these new leaders.

The individual practicing their life’s craft is the new leader of the future.

Purpose and creativity.

Prevention and reactivity.

Doing is the new leading. The world needs companies filled with craftsmen mindsets, now more than ever.

Welcome, Counterpoint.

We need you.

We’re glad you’re here.

The work we do matters, more than ever before.

Thought Series: The value of the intolerable

Thought Series provides actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.

Over the last month I’ve been asked to speak about my research findings. More and more, however, I’m noticing that people want tips, checklists, or recipes for success, getting mindful, or whatever goal they are after.

TIP: If checklists really helped, all of us wouldn’t still be struggling so much.

Below is yet another list…of points to consider. These are key takeaways from a study I did on values based leaders and how they manage scaling their organizations. Yet, the one concept that binds them all together is: tolerance.

Leaders that are a cut above have the ability to sit with and manage great intolerance. We go to trainings where we are told “it’s ok to get uncomfortable” or “it’s safe to make mistakes.” But people are coming with their team, where they will go back to an environment where they feel unsafe.

Question: How many trainings have you been to where people were actually uncomfortable?

I’ve only been to one. At Microsoft. Lisa Brummel brought an organization in to help change the culture from being dominating to being more collaborative.  One of the first hours of this training attempted to give vocabulary to the concept of feelings. Among a sea of engineers, where feelings were seldom acknowledged when negotiating tradeoffs for launch dates, vocabulary was limited. People could only identify four terms: happy, sad, mad, afraid. When it came time to identify one of these feelings publicly in conjunction with an exercise we were doing, several people got up and left, some shouted, others boycotted the day. The unspoken feeling was fear, that would be used against them in performance calibration. Since then, the training has been adapted and performance calibration has been revisited.

The point here is that it is intolerable in today’s society to register discomfort with anything. We must be happy, always know the answer, and demonstrate competence even while we are learning something new. restrictive environments like this squash motivation, ability to innovate, and individual creativity.

How much more can you tolerate?

GETTING PURPOSEFUL:

THERE IS NO PLAN. IT IS A WAY OF BEING.

Leaders that are highly valued among employees and even markets, have a great capacity to create the conditions necessary for innovation and ongoing experimentation. Here are some key takeaways from values-based leaders.

1. You Matter, Whether You Like it or Not.

A person’s consistency in word and deed sets the tone and depth for relationships, for how work gets done, for what is permissible. How you are narrows or broadens your prospects. If you take action and you’re committed to making a difference–great. If you’re one of those that decide that ‘well I don’t make any difference I’m just one of 7 billion people–what difference do I make’ (and you live your life that way) that’s the impact that you are going to make.  You know that people who don’t care are less fun to be around, and those that want to make a difference, do. You will have impact one way or another. How do you want to show up?

2. Create a Vision from the Future, Step into that Possibility Not Knowing How to Create It

Most visioning projects start off looking at the past and the steps that got them where they are. They then develop a series of steps to get them to their future. By identifying your future, and beginning to move in that direction the ecosystem will provide it. Each person individually commits to the future. If someone is just going along for the ride, when things get tough it makes it hard to have a breakthrough. What future do you want?

3. Individual Commitment.

All individuals have to commit to the vision. We, as individuals, have the power to create. Each interaction we engage in creates our future. We have the choice to determine the conversation, in that moment, of who we are going to be. Creativity lives at the level of each individual. Groups do not create. Autonomy is only as robust as the level of personal responsibility. There is a certain magic available to people when they operate like they are responsible for their own universe. There are rewards to living life where you consistently choose, and are held accountable for choosing, to serve your team and your community. What is it you are up to? Making a living or a life? What inspires you?

4. Develop & Celebrate Your People.

Most jobs are hard, that is why they call it work. I am not sure whether I would want to work with the type of person who would be willing to endure a job only for the pay. Observe each other’s behavior as they go about aligning to the vision. Teach the team to give and accept feedback during the next team meeting. People truly committed to the vision will accept feedback of their peers. The group develops into a supportive team of coaches that holds them accountable for making a difference.

Thought Series: The wasteful scam of sorting people, stop wasting talent

Thought Series provides actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.

“Sorry, there just wasn’t enough in the promotion budget this year. We’ve already allocated all the slots.”

“So many people wanted the Director position. We had our pick and such competition makes us a world class organization.”

“You’re on the bench for the next opportunity, but there is little movement at this level. Once people get here, they dig in.”

Speak with the well-intentioned organizational development folks, the managers with open positions, and executive coaches what makes good management material and who is likely to get fast-tracked, and they’ll say work is a meritocracy. There is only so much room as you climb the pyramid.

Or, they might point out that their job is to help the organization succeed, to beat the competition, to take on the burden of choosing from world-class talent.

All of these responses are dangerous, unhelpful and irrational. In a world where people get picked based on performance, this sends a bit of a mixed message.

As millions of people come to grips with their annual review, I’m hoping that they understand how little their results actually have to do with their ability to move upward.

When you’re starting out after college, and throughout the rest of your career, a single skill rises above all the others when it comes to hiring and promotion: Leadership.More than 80 percent of responding employers said they look for evidence of leadership skills on the candidate’s resume, and nearly as many seek out indications that the candidate is able to work in a team.

Team collaboration drives leadership. Collaboration results in higher motivation and morale stemming from greater trust between individuals and a sense of belonging to a community that is working toward shared goals.

Leadership drives relationships and trust. Trust in our public institutions, industries, and leaders is taking a severe beating. In the business world, the negative consequences from lack of trust are too numerous to list here. Probably the most devastating, however, is that it creates an “everyone for his/herself” attitude throughout the organization, especially at the lower levels. When me trumps we, individual development suffers.

If we’re a front line employee and we don’t believe senior management will do the right thing by us, we have no choice but to look out for ourselves. When we put our own agenda ahead of the organization’s, any chances of the company achieving its vision of winning go right down the drain.

“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

Amazon, another technology giant and one of many technology companies with similar management practices, reports a “bruising” workplace. Employees appreciate working with smart colleagues but criticize the company for a lack of a work-life balance.

It is not due to a shortage of talent that there is a lack of leadership opportunities. Leadership should opportunities exist, I believe, to create a learning experience for both the team and the leader. When you develop others, you develop yourself. When teams grow and learn, organizations grow and learn. This is the sentiment behind a rising interest in developing “learning organizations.”[vii]

But growth requires change. Change can involve risk and trying new things. Not all of them will work. Part of engaging in creative thinking is actually investing in the discipline of thinking. Dedicating time to think of new ideas doesn’t guarantee they will be good. Some will work, some won’t. While this isn’t new information to anyone, organizations generally bend toward efficiency. Time invested in generating ideas that don’t move the needle forward today doesn’t contribute to being efficient. Only the good ones are rewarded and given attention. When we adopt policies or processes that punish people because they’re making mistakes, what’s the lesson?

If you get ahead for years and years because you were blessed with luck, it’s not particularly likely that you will learn that in the real world, achievement is based as much on how you show up as it is on natural advantages. In the real world, leadership roles and the senior VP job go to people who have figured out how to care, how to show up, how to be open to new experiences. Our culture is built around connection, personal magnetism, learning and the ability to not give up when things are hard.

But that’s not easy to sort for in organizations, so we take a shortcut and resort to trivial measures instead.

What if we prioritized leadership by doing?  What if we prioritized leading by example? What if we prioritized doing the work, setting an example, living the brand—not living to work, but being a teammate? I’m not talking about abandoning your existence to the company by adopting the Marissa Meyer 130-hour work week. I’m talking about the person, that while at work, is present for themselves and for the team. That is different than being present for the organization. They are not just in it for themselves. They are not contributing to a world where someone else has to fail for them to succeed. What if we fast-tracked those employees, and made it clear to anyone else willing to adopt those attitudes that they could be celebrated too?

What if you got picked because you were resilient, hardworking and prepared to engage in continuous improvement? Isn’t that more important than rewarding the employee who makes their numbers but succeeds at the expense of others, or who never takes the time to develops others?

Before we promote the stars in our teams, perhaps we can promote the employee who takes time to keep everyone in the game, including themselves, because it takes both kinds of people to beat the competition. This isn’t about taking the last kid to get picked for kickball and giving him a ribbon. This is about acknowledging the diversity of skills that it takes to compete and win. The star player can’t be a star without several assists along the way. There is no need to tell everyone they are a star. The fact is, everyone has development areas. Just tell them the truth. Tell them that every single person who has made a career of being the best (every single one of them) did it with hard work and motivation.

At an individual level, work is for personal fulfillment, for maintaining a standard of living and providing for a family. It is for intellectual stimulation. Work means many things to many people. Work, journalist Studs Terkel wrote, is about the search “for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”[ix]

Business is more than creating customers to buy things. It has to exist to provide a societal good. Therefore, our work has to exist in the context of providing a societal good. Taken collectively we have to think of our work as a net positive for society in some way.

We’re not spending nearly enough time asking each other: What is Work For?

Let’s talk about work and figure out what we’re trying to do, and why.

Thought Series: What smooth jazz can teach us about innovation

Thought Series provides actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.

Kenneth Bruce Gorlick (Kenny G), in addition to playing the longest sax note, has sold 48 million records. There are those that will say other artists are more authentic or talented. However, there is no denying he was doing something right–forty-eight million records. He revolutionized jazz by creating a boiler plate template. Others did this too, he was just more successful at it.

Smooth jazz as a construct, brought money into the jazz industry like it had never seen. Kenny G was the best selling jazz musician of all time. His template, along with some best selling albums, created a money printing machine. He invented, for lack of a better metaphor, the $25 WordPress template for the music world. This probably makes Thelonious Monk the broken, non-deployable web site that you continue to go back to time and time again–because his is work just that good.

The template created a low barrier to entry–for the customer. While technically very gifted, there’s little that is controversial or thought provoking about his work. His music is appropriate for any venue: a wedding, getting the kids to nap, an elevator…. When Kenny G was popular other artists opted for the template in order to make money.

Among music fans, the question gets tossed around: If it’s so ubiquitous–so everything to everyone–is smooth jazz really jazz?

Right now, we are in the era of “smooth design” and “smooth products.” This translates to “smooth leadership.” Everything is very clean….very Apple-esque. It’s acceptable to everyone. It works. But, it isn’t interesting.

This happens with leadership too. “Smooth leadership” is when the leader opts for industrial model, plug-and-play tactics proven to work (from their pantheon). GE‘s calibration system was popular for a while, so Ballmer adopted it for Microsoft. It worked (said no manager, ever). It served a purpose from an operations perspective, but ruined cultures.

What do you get from smooth leadership? The same products you had before, only more efficient, cheaper, using less resources.

Up until now, a CEO was doing a good job if the company met its financial targets, the Board was happy and shareholders were rewarded. The formula of getting a good education and landing a good job continued to play out, further supporting the conveyor belt relationship between education and industry. Leaders implemented traditional business school formulas for economic success, profits increase. This myopic association reduces education to a mere employment agency.

But after a while, the job gets route. People start to feel a void every day at the office. Employees, go through the motions, doing just enough to earn a paycheck so they can find some contentment in life outside the office. The job starts to feel like factory work—precisely what our parents and grandparents wanted us to avoid!

But when is a product or brand going to stand up and be Jimmy Hendricks (only 24 million records)? or Prince (only 39 million records)? and say, “I’m willing to sell half as much, but I’m going to be unique.” This attitude made him a legend.

There is no “Kenny G experience.”

There is a very definitive “Jimmy Hendricks experience.”

The wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented in every job. This isn’t about “creating great art” or being the “Jimmy Hendricks of product development, UX, or leadership.” This is about trying to innovate within a space, versus allowing the space to dictate the boundaries.

New ideas belong on a canvas, not constrained by a box.

TO CONSIDER:

1. Are the ideas in your organizations doing something useful or different?

2. Is creativity coming in last in the execution queue?

3. The easy way is not necessarily the best solution.

“But, Apple did X. Google did Y.”

Perhaps, but these companies initially took risk and were innovative in order to achieve their simplicity. Don’t confuse ubiquity with being unique. They were unique and became ubiquitous. To follow them is to simply ride the coattails of what has come before and hope for crumbs of their revenue.

We are trying to get people through the funnel so fast, that we aren’t engaging them (as customers, employees, suppliers). Even if you are tied up in the data, the bounce rates always come back to “what is the story we are trying to engage them in?”

So take a stand – what story are you in?

Thought Series: MVP V 1/MVP: MOST VALUABLE TO MOST VIABLE IS THAT OK?

Thought Series provides actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.

THE WILD WEST

In the early to mind-90s, no one started their career saying “I’m going to do…the Internet.” People’s talents, from a variety of disciplines, found a way into this space because the internet needed so many different perspectives in order to help define what it was going to be. It wasn’t just a phone book, or an abacus. It is now enmeshed with everything that we do.

We have tackled the easy stuff.

We figured out the phone book (directory/search). We built the address books (personal information management). We figured out how to reach out and communicate with another person (instant messaging). We learned how to distribute complex files across space so others could view it like they do on television (audio/video streaming).

What we haven’t tackled, or we tackled it early on and lost, is the storytelling aspect of why we are meeting these same basic needs through this different medium (meaning, connection, purpose).

All of the places I’ve worked in–from Seth Godin’s lab Yoyodyne (permission marketing), Yahoo (making web easier to navigate), RealNetworks (audio/video streaming), Microsoft’s Office and Windows (productivity of the individual and organization)–crafted the first generation of their respective stories. After a while, people in the organizations (and sometimes the leaders) developed an attitude of having figured out the internet. When that first flywheel to revenue was figured out, people stepped back with their hands in the air, they stopped tinkering. They stopped learning.

There’s was a sense that “we’ve all gone and done what we said we were going to do,” “we’ve figured out these patterns” and “we know pretty much how people behave.” Next.

It’s Been Done Before

It is interesting to think about where we were in another art form, such as film. In 1912 Nestor studioswas founded. It is considered to be the first comprehensive, integrated movie studio in Hollywood. They started producing westerns and did them with such regularity that the genre turned into a business model. Twenty-one years later, we get films like King Kong. Compare this to the King Kong we have today…and there is no way we could presume where things were headed.

EARLY EXPLORING

Contrast this with the early internet. Let’s look at 1994, and the invention of the <blink> tag. This was the time when online content publishing really getting started.

<blink>What an awesome invention.</blink>

That is a blink tag. It was invented in 1994. Lou Montulli, often credited as the inventor of the blink element, has said that he considers “the blink tag to be the worst thing I’ve ever done for the Internet.”

This is a very interesting statement, and an important one, for a few reasons. First, when it came out, the tag was used everywhere–it was very popular–helping industrial grey pages, to have something of interest on them. More importantly, the HTML protocol (the code enabling pages) was not meant to do half of what it was used to do. Complex layouts were not possible. For example, tables were not meant to be supported by HTML. All this was pre-CSS. JavaScript was new. ColdFusion had no documentation (I should know, I programmed the first database for the Kaufman Foundation.)

It’s hard to think that just twenty years ago, the web was built upon series of workarounds. It was frustrating, but it also left a lot of room for innovation and creativity. This was a time when there weren’t a lot of best practices. Beveled tables, a background color other than grey, and something compelling enough to click on were big deals. You were allowed to do crazy things just to see what would happen. When something is in its infancy, you are allowed to experiment–because no one, not even the big brands, knew what they were doing.

Remember the falling snowflakes and the whale that could follow your cursor?

These things were neat (at the time). Today it is a distraction. But early on, this was the very simple layer added to sites to let the user know that the browser knew you were there. These were the first attempts at point to point connection with users–a kind of greeting.

Workarounds like this continued until Adobe Flash came out, enabling better design. There was a low barrier to entry and interopability with other tools–a virtual sandbox enabling designers to do things they couldn’t do in HTML. There was a time when all the sites winning design or brand awards were Flash sites.

When Flash was big, animation became more and more popular. Everyone had to had “something moving” on their site. A company called Icebox was formed to capitalize on the inherent “freedom of the medium” which the founders felt stifled creativity of writers due to the confining restrictions of the studio system and traditional media. People thought animation was solved. There was a belief that full length features would be possible using Flash.

With all these tools and experimentation, there was also a lot of garbage. Everyone had a web site, not all of them were good. Some were using 30% of the size of the screen. Some had piano music starting as soon as the page loaded. Some were full of rainbows.

The problem with Flash is that is allowed everything, by everyone–it became a kind of corral for people to gather and wallow in form (over function). The rest of the internet moved on. Soon, there were sites that could only be viewed with Flash. What had been a great enabler became a barrier. After the great party of connection and design, people needed more than a head counter to tell them what was going on these sites.

These sites were not cheap. A full Flash site for a company was a serious investment. After a certain point, clients were wondering what they were paying for, and the now standard question of “It looks great, but what’s the ROI of this effort?”

The shift went from interactivity to being data driven. Where are people from, what are their demographics? What do they buy? Data has revolutionized how we view and understand interactivity.

THE PROBLEM?

We use this data to make incredible numbers of creative decisions for us. We look at that data and don’t draw any other conclusion than “that worked, we should keep doing it”, or “looking at someone else’s data and saying that worked for them, it should work for us.”

An example of this is the notion of “page rank.” Once google came out with the notion of rank, companies were scrambling to be guaranteed a certain rank – they still throw chicken bones after SEO efforts over opting to have more face to face conversations (real interactivity) with their customers in order to strengthen their relationships the old fashioned way.

Looking at data and best practices are helpful – to a point – but they drive too much of our thinking and conversation. Good interactive design gets pushed further and further down in the conversation, rather than having a seat at the table.

Predictive analytics is now the hot topic. Tableau and other companies do wonderful things. Many of them have reduced workflow significantly, reducing work for the repetitive tasks we need to shorten.  Unfortunately, this mentality has been extended to such a degree that we apply frameworks such as rapid deployment to virtually all design decisions.

We should be making design and product decisions around content and experience, not around frameworks or quick deployment. This pattern give us thought shortcuts. Sometimes these are helpful–like when you deploy a virtual machine that has your whole environment on it. That saves time.

But it also means that that the “MV” in “MVP” goes from “most valuable” to “minimum viable.”

The minimum viable product (MVP) approach has its place, particularly when building applications or performing actions where you want technology to be in the background (executing a search or moving money). But should these actions be so thoughtless that we stop thinking about story, and art? When we forget about the quest we are after, some else picks it up and does it better.

Extending the minimum viable mindset to a wider array of thought processes and taking thought shortcuts where we should be innovating and taking risks…that is where we run into problems.

TO THINK ABOUT…

The photo below is of Stanley Kubrick speaking to an actor on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick wanted everything shot by candlelight. This required a special lens. On top of his already huge budget, he went to Paramount and asked for a specialty lens. When they initially rejected him, he said: “I make the films, the films don’t make me.”

As with most experiments, the initial reception was mixed. One of the reasons for the harsh critical response toward 2001 upon release comes from the fact that several popular critics of the time approached this film with an aesthetic expectations stemming from classical Hollywood cinema. Their complaints were all about how the film did not follow Hollywood conventions, and it frustrated them.

This example is an instructive way for us to think about how we work with the technology currently. We are allowing the restrictions and patterns to dictate how we should explore, to inform how we should do things.

We have to start exploring more.

Leaders have to provide the conditions for people to think.

We talk about the “sink or swim” or “dog eat dog” world we live in but fundamentally miss the point of evolutionary theory. It is not about there being two items, and one lives and one dies. It is that in this particular environment, this thing can thrive. In this other environment, another thing can thrive. They don’t cancel each other out.

When people do user testing and they look at A or B, what if C was the solution? The problem with most testing is that people never get to C because they either aren’t asking the right questions, or they aren’t looking past a very narrow patterns of operating in low risk.

Taking creative risk, is anti-pattern. Taking risk is always going to look broken and be a bit clumsy at first — the end result is probably not the kind of thing that is going to get you promoted. Remember those falling snowflakes, and eyeballs that followed your mouse?

Swiping on Tinder, or clicking tiles on an iPad would not have been possible without that initial experimentation.

We have it in us to ask the right questions. If we are not asking these questions of ourselves or our clients, we are not doing our job–we are being programmed by our patterns.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

Babe Ruth

Thought Series: The need for creative questions

INNOVATION /CREATIVITY

Thought Series provides actionable ideas and anchors for reflection on your life or your work.

Other disciplines make for great inspiration and sources of inquiry.

In a diner, for example, food needs to hot and fast. There is no room for personal expression.

But, consider modern art on large canvas. Why do we eat food on plates which are determined by plate manufacturers and not chefs?

And, think about how smells influence us. What if you had salt, fat, sweet, protein….and nostalgia?

Experimentation is key, but costs time and money. What if you took your slowest night and everything on the menu is an experiment, getting the customers to participate in your discovery process?

What if what fed you in your gut also stimulated you in your mind?

Grant Achatz is an American chef and restaurateur often identified as one of the leaders in molecular gastronomy or progressive cuisine. In 2007, Achatz announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth, which may have spread to his lymph nodes.The chemo process temporarily took his taste buds.

Alinea Revisited – A Life Worth Eating “The dish never got boring. Since this was a shared dessert for three people, each person picked and played with different combinations of ingredients making every bite taste different. This is the most memorable dessert I have ever had.”

Responding to what would have potentially crushed others, he prepared dishes by drawing them first and handing them off to his staff to interpret. “It’s not in here (the mouth), it’s in here (the mind).

Slowly regaining his sense of taste one flavor at a time revolutionized his ability to create.

At what point do you break out of the rules that go you where you are, and start to express your own point of view? 

At what point will you destroy what you know to begin a new train of thought? 

Mental Models: Feedback Loops

WE ARE ENGAGED BY SITUATIONS IN WHICH WE SEE OUR ACTIONS MODIFY SUBSEQUENT RESULTS.

How might this apply to great teams and cultures?

Feedback loops are simple to understand: you produce something, measure information on the production, and use that information to improve production. Every step in the process generates information. Enterprises can use such information to increase their efficacy across a variety of segments.

How might this apply to great products?

Does your system respond immediately to user input? Or can you allow people to play with the information, turning a status message into an interactive one? Use numeric data to show people how they are doing, or translate data into analogous visual information. Feedback can be immediate, in the form of a quick challenge, or delivered at a later date as a monthly report.

Consider

What systemic issues cause the most complaints? how do various population segments make their concerns known? what departments receive the most complaints? how quickly does the business solve problems on average?

See Also

Visual Imagery, Appropriate Challenges, Shaping, Sequencing, Periodic Events, Status, Achievements.

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In the whirl of our day-to-day interactions, it’s all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great teams, great cultures, and great products/services.

Mental Model Flash Cards bring together insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to your teams as well as the design of your products and services.