Tag Archives: On Ideas

Just read: Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen

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I met Scott Belsky last fall at a conference and then spent a little time with him in NYC recently. He was kind enough to send me an advance copy of his new book, Making Ideas Happen.

I have not had a book lay my soul bare like this one did in a long, long time. It held a mirror up to me, and basically said “here’s everything that’s keeping your from moving projects, work and life forward.” Many aha moments, and many painful moments to be completely honest.

And it was dead on.

But this is not a theoretical book. It is a book based on hours and hours of research with world class creative people WHO GET STUFF DONE. He talked to them about their personal habits and methods for getting their projects from idea (fun!) to reality (work!), and the insights are inspiring. I’ve linked to some more robust reviews below, but I wanted to make the reco here, and give some topline takeaways. I’ll probably detail it more as I reflect and re-read certain points.

For the lifehackers and GTD fans out there. This offers a better solution and toolset for creative people because it is Project-based (i.e. the way creatives work) instead of Context-based (i.e. at work, at home, in car) like David Allen‘s methods.

Here are my top 10 takeaways from the book:

1. Less creative people who do more things will have a bigger impact than the genius who does nothing.
2. Doing trumps dreaming, but only if you care about making an impact in your life.
3. Every creative person will battle the tendency to just come up with ideas and never act on them because that’s the fun part.
4. You need constraints to be creative AND you need constraints to be productive. So, constrain yourself.
5. Quit taking so many notes! And especially stop filing them! Just capture Action Items, References and Backburner. Trash the rest.
6. Share your ideas with your community — the accountability will drive you to action.
7. Be transparent with your community — their feedback will give you insight into what ideas are right to pursue.
8. Creative people must learn to lead. Well, you do if you want to do anything great.
9. Dreamers need to partner with Doers to get anything done — not as obvious as it sounds; at least not in practice.
10. You have to be strategic about what to focus energy on, and then relentless in moving it forward.
11. (bonus) It really does come down to working hard on your idea(s) every single day and never, ever giving up until it is realized.

That’s just the 10 that stuck with me immediately. The book is a joy to read, and packed full of practical real-world tips, hacks and advice. It is available on amazon.com this Thursday the 15th.

You can find Making Ideas Happen here.

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Now What?

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Been thinking about what to write next and have too many ideas, so I’ll just put them all out here, and see if anyone is reading and cares:

1. The Seven Brand Archetypes
2. How Ideas Take Shape
3. Communication Architecture (con’t)
4. The Top 10 Book & Thinkers on Ideas (IMHO)
5. Deconstruction (con’t)
6. The 3 Things Social Media Is
7. The 3 Things Social Media Isn’t
8. How to pick an agency
9. Top 10 on Pitching business
10. Creativity vs. Innovation
11. Experts vs. the Child-like
12. APE = Ask, Play & Engage

Anybody care to read any of these? Give me a top 3.
Or anyone want to talk about any thing else?

I’m all ears.

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Deconstruction instead of brainstorming

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Brainstorming is taught as the primary tool for creative thinking.

The problem is it doesn’t work.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some who do it well. IDEO is legendary for their ability to brainstorm. They have rules painted on the walls. Everyone learns them. It works for them. They are the exception, not the rule We’ve all been in really bad brainstorming meetings. You know what I’m talking about – the ten minute burst of energy followed by the twenty minutes of crazy, useless ideas and the requisite eyerolling and explanations about “no bad ideas.”

I’ll let you in on a secret: there are bad ideas and brainstorming is one of them.

There are three reasons why brainstorming doesn’t work:

  1. People come unprepared to a meeting.
  2. Facilitating is not as easy as a (really good) facilitator makes it look.
  3. Brainstorming works on too big of a problem.

Here, try something with me. Get out a piece of paper and a pen and write down all of the innovations you can think of for a pencil. Take 60 seconds and list out as many as you can. (Not a very long list is it?) Okay, turn the sheet over.

We’re going to try a different approach — deconstruction. First, make bullet pointed answers to the following questions:

  1. Describe the pencil. What is it made of? What shape is it? How is it made?
  2. Tell me about its function. Who uses it? How is it used? To do what?

Second, take another 60 seconds and give me ideas for innovating the pencil. Work your way thru these individual elements (your answers to the two questions above) and list out your innovations. (cue 60 seconds of music) Finished?

Compare the two lists. Which one is longer? Which one has better, more novel ideas to pursue?

I call this tool deconstruction.

It’s based on the way that language works on our brain. When you see a pencil, your brain pulls together a host of past experiences and mental connections in order to let you know it is a pencil. This helps you get thru life easier than if every time you saw an 8 inch long, 1/4 inch thick hexagonal cedar tube filled with a thin cylinder of graphite and painted yellow you thought, “I wonder if this would be a good mark-making device?” You just simply know it’s a pencil, and that you can write or draw with it.

But this is a sizable problem for creative thinking and product innovation. It’s hard to see possibilities, and that’s the core of both creative thinking and innovation – finding new solutions, opportunities and possibilities.

So instead of just trying to invent a new version of the whole, we deconstruct the object. We break it down into its physical structure, its uses, its users or consumers, how it’s manufactured – even how it’s bought, sold, stored, shipped, etc. Innovations can come from any one of these elements – just by tweaking the right one (e.g. size, material, shape). A walk thru any office supply superstore will show you dozens of novel and useful iterations on the simple pencil.

Deconstruction can be used on nouns (i.e. things and stuff – places, too) but it also works on verbs – processes and methods. It’s simple to teach. It requires no prep work. And it puts a room in the right frame of mind for creative thinking and innovation.

So, next time you find yourself in a lame brainstorm. Stop and start deconstructing.

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Where Kevin Rose’s idea for Digg was born

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via img214.imageshack.us

Just saw this on Bryson Moore’s blog, and think it is a great photo for a three reasons:

1. It shows the power of thinking visually.
2. It shows how to get ideas down on paper.
3. It shows that tools you love help facilitate #1 and #2.

I don’t know Kevin, and I don’t use Digg that much, but I like his taste in notebooks and writing instruments.

Creative thinking requires the right tools, and those are two very practical and very powerful ones.

Go out and buy a pen and a notebook you will love, and that you will use. I have a shelf full of Moleskines and a cup full of these pens. You will use them more if you love them.

And the key to great ideas is to have a lot of ideas — and get them on paper fast.

Posted via web from Sean Womack’s Stream

How Ideas Take Shape

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Ideas do not come into the world fully formed. They take shape. This drawing is a model for bringing ideas to life. It is based on the acronym for Shape — See, Hear, Ask, Play, Engage. I used to hate acronyms until I studied the word. It is Greek and literally means the “tip of the word.” Some of the original acronyms were Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, RADAR and LASER. So, those are cool words.

Here’s how the model works:

1. See & Hear. Observation and listening are key elements in idea hunting. They are the primary activities — not talking. We want to ask questions and we aren’t very good at it and our questions introduce bias. So, just watch and listen. When I worked at Saatchi, we would take executives shopping for their products in stores and just watch them. Many couldn’t find their own products on the shelf.

Anthropologists have been watching people in their cultures for years. It’s a great way to learn that I discovered firsthand. Before I was married, I worked at a greeting card company in product development. I got an assignment to create baby products. You know, first year books, calendar, etc. So, I invited all the Mom’s I knew to a meeting, and asked them to bring their baby books. It was a revelation. Watching them look through the books and listening to them tell stories to the other women. I realized that these books were a measure of motherhood, and it shaped our development of a whole suite of tools for mom’s to capture those early years. But I got those insights by seeing and hearing.

2. Ask & Play. These are the first and second activities. First you have to Ask, but not with your mouth. Ask with your eyes – watch intently, observe. Ask with your ears by listening to conversations and hearing what people are really saying. Like those mom’s telling me about a baby book, but really telling me about their desire to remember and mark milestones in their child’s lives and lacking both the tools and time to do so.

After you Ask, you Play. This is the creative part of the exercise, and it should not feel like work. If it does, then you are doing it work. Work and stress are flow killers and constrict ideas. I’ve got a great tool for ideation called Deconstruction. I’ll share it in another post.

3. Engage your idea with the world. Get feedback (n:1) from lots of people. How do they like it? Watch (see) them use it. Listen (hear) them talk about it as they use it. Insight. Insight. Insight. Harvest these learnings and go back into the Ask or Play phase again. Iterate until you are ready to Engage again. Then repeat until you have a winner — and your idea has taken shape.

The diagram is a matrix with See & Hear on the Y-Axis and Ask & Play on the X-Axis. This makes 4 distinct activities: Two in the Ask mode, and two in the Play mode. Only then do you engage your audience. Repeat as needed. It’s a total of 6 steps. To recap the process:

  1. See/Ask phase. Watch and observe.
  2. Hear/Ask phase. Listen and learn.
  3. See/Play phase. Work out the pattern.
  4. Hear/Play phase. Talk out ideas.
  5. Engage phase. Get it out into the world.
  6. Repeat. As needed.

We’ll spend time on this in other posts looking at how to execute these phases — best practices, etc.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard

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They’ve done it again.

You don’t have to be a prophet to know that the ideas that Dan & Chip put forth in this book are going to enter the lexicon quickly. Their ability to find disparate stories and weave them into a cohesive narrative is rivaled only by Malcolm Gladwell (IMHO). But it is the quality of their thinking, and their ability to extract real useful insights from the most mundane of sources (i.e. books on eating habits), and their ability to make scholarly research readable, practical and entertaining.

Soon we’ll all be talking about the rider, the elephant, and the path (among other Heath-isms).

Their premise is simple – change is hard, especially when you don’t have any personal or positional power. What they do they is teach you step-by-step how to leverage what you do have or what you can influence. It’s one part manual, one part motivation, and totally enjoyable.

You can pre-order a copy here. And you can read and excerpt here. And follow them here. And find cities and dates for their book tour here.

*On a personal note: I’ve had the privilege to get to know Dan and Chip just a little professionally (doing a project for them), and they are two of the most delightful people I’ve had the pleasure to know. These guys could be jerks, and people would just probably dismiss it because of their talents. But they are gracious and kind in addition to brilliant.

Doing versus thinking…

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It’s really nice to just sit and think about things – to roll them around in your mind, take them apart and reconstruct them in various ways. In a way, it is very satisfying. But only in a way – and that way is fleeting. Just a moment.

Doing is very different. It is messy and difficult. Filled with fits and starts. Dead ends and frustrations. Embarrassing gaffes and elusive triumphs. But when you are done, something is there. Something new (perhaps) or at least new to you. But it is there and real.

I’ve spent much of my career thinking up stuff for my companies and clients. Most of it never came into being. That’s kind of the nature of the beast in the idea economy. Lots of ideas. Very little stuff.

Not true for my grandfather. He was a carpenter and a brick mason. He built things. If he thought about something at work, then it was how to build a wall or brick around a window. His thinking had a tangible outcome. I want more of this.

The good news in our knowledge/attention/entertainment/new media/adjective-of-the-day economy, is that the tools of production are democratized. No, not for everyone (although $100 laptop is getting us there), but for most in the US it is. That means that the distance between idea and production is smaller. And that’s a good think for the thinkers and the daydreamers of the world.

In that spirit, I’ve decided to build a structure for my thoughts. A place to capture the things that I have been thinking about over the past number of years – most of which I talk to colleagues or clients about. Some of the ideas are practical, some are half-baked (if that), some I’m just working out. So, I’m doing and thinking here – or maybe doing some thinking…in public.

I’m also in the process of starting an agency (well, it’s been three years in the making), but I plan to share the story as it unfolds. As much as clients will allow, and as much as you care to read. I hope an inside (and honest) look under the hood is helpful, and I’m hoping that anyone reading will share their wisdom along the way.