If you’re an Israeli entrepreneur or have just started working on your own ‘something’, there are a number of places in Tel-Aviv where you can get a nice office, amazingly supporting environment, free Internet and plenty of free coffee. One such is The Hub TLV and another one is The Junction (@TheJunction32). When you go there you always meet a great number of enthusiastic young people working and talking about .. well, everything, I suppose.
What’s more, these places regularly organize free sessions and lectures dedicated to various topics and it’s always a pleasure to attend one. Last time I visited, there were a number of Android sessions in The Hub and this time I went to hear Hod Fleishman (@Hod_Fleishman) talking about “Creativity Management” in The Junction.
So what is Creativity Management ? The lecture was very educational and inspiring; it explained very nicely that creativity isn’t just a nice word, most probably associated with some kind of a light bulb. It is a process and being a process it can and should be managed properly. Below is my summary of this session and you are invited to watch the recording (in Hebrew): 1, 2, 3.
- Creativity = Ideas + Execution. It is not enough to bring ideas, as well as it’s not enough to be a top performer. Creativity always requires both, otherwise it doesn’t work.
- Creativity is all you’ve got, whether you’re small or big. Small startups need creative solutions to stand out from the crowd or even get noticed, large and established companies need them as badly to beat the competitors and stand out from the crowd as well.
- There is a metaphor of red and blue oceans where red oceans represent “bloodshed” arenas in which companies fight for well established market share and whose boundaries are known and defined. Blue oceans represent industries that don’t exist yet and where competition is very weak or non-existing. “In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over.” Naturally, creativity puts one’s business more in the blue oceans.
- Creativity is a process. Something that may appear as an “overnight success” may take decades of hard work, practice and training.
- Picasso was a great experimenter and used to draw a great number of compositions before making the final one. His point was mostly to explore all possible alternatives because once you have alternatives you can choose. Since plans always change, especially today, having alternatives becomes even more critical.
- There are two islands: Problem Island and Solution Island. We tend to spend most of our time in the Solution Island, enjoying the comfort of it. But we’d better spend most of the time in the Problem Island, analyzing it to the last detail. And once one spends enough time in the Problem Island he starts seeing Solutions Islands and that’s another advantage of spending most of the time digging into The Problem. “Beauty and the Beast” is a good example of this approach: Belle spends her time dancing with The Problem thus making it into a beautiful Solution afterwards. Rushing into Solution right away can make it weaker than it can be.
- Staying with the problem makes our experience grow as we answer 3 basic questions: What’s the problem? What’s the impact of the problem? What caused the problem? It is only after we provide good answers to these questions that we can cut the analysis phase and start working on the solution. But, in fact, creativity doesn’t really have starting and ending points, it is a never-ending process.
- Model the solution first. Pinocchio father created a wooden model of a child he’d rather have.
Take your understanding gathered into a practical model, that can be touched and felt. Bringing the idea from the back of your mind in front of your face makes the feedback loop start. A model can take any form as long as it is a physical one: UI sketch, YouTube video, wooden or plastic toys. Every time we model our solution based on a feedback and our impressions of it – it gets better. That’s what Picasso was probably doing with his numerous intermediate drawings. Ask yourself whether the model really answers the problem you’re about to solve. - Start with the End. It is easier to imagine the success and go backwards from it rather than work the path towards it. How did you get there? What happened before ? What happened earlier? Build the process from the end to the start as if you were sailing there, the end point is what really matters.
- End point is user experience. We want user to enjoy and smile! When a user enters our site – what does he see and feel? How does it look? How, where and why will he buy anything? Who’s our best user?
- Fail early, fail plenty, fail often. Making mistakes is a must for any creative process. It is the best way to explore alternatives and, as explained in this video by by Derek Sivers (@sivers), it makes our memory work better and builds up a “growth mindset”. Trying out various things and crossing out what doesn’t work should be done as early as possible. Iterate over different ways to achieve the same goal, eat your steak in small pieces, don’t swallow it all at once. McDonald’s try out all their stores with giant models and exact replicas of existing ones just to see what works and what doesn’t. The whole idea is to try, fail and move forward.
- “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”. “Falling is not failing, not getting up is.” “I’m only one but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.”
- Once you have a company, listen to other people. Founders can only go so far in their creativity so most new ideas will come from employees. People should be allowed and encouraged to express themselves and provide feedback. Based on my experience I can say that ignoring employees opinions is usually the point where companies start going down as employees are first to notice what goes wrong and why. Allow them to fail, express and be creative. Let them bring more ideas!
- How does one solve problems? One popular problem-solving procedure is “The Toyota A3 Report”:
- Initial problem perception – identify problem or need.
- Clarify the real problem – understand current situation.
- Locate area and point of cause.
- Root cause analysis – ask “Why?” 5 times.
- Find countermeasure to the problem.
- Evaluate – work out an implementation plan.
- Standardize the solution.
It is important to note that all the above steps are based on a very deep understanding of a problem. First 4 phases spend time understanding the problem, last 3 spend time creating a solution.
- All problems are generic. Most solutions solve identical problems: they either save time, money, effort or make processes more efficient by eliminating the waste. See how others or even you solved an identical generic problem and try to steal, borrow or learn from their solution.
- Summary:
- Who are you and what are you about?
- Creativity is all you’ve got.
- Creativity is a process.
- Focus on the problem, not the solution.
- Progress by modeling your ideas.
- Always start at the end.
- Fail plenty, fail early, fail often.
- Support your peers.
- Problems are generic.
For a long time I didn’t quite believe in a Web version of Word. Later, Google Docs and Zoho Writer made me think again, of course. After a while I decided to stay with Zoho and let it keep my textual notes. It seemed like an ideal solution for keeping data online, quickly and readily accessible from any computer.
