Making Ideas Happen (10 page)

Truslow explained to me that there is less need for consensus in a team when individuals are empowered to take incremental actions on their own throughout the creative process. Fledgling ideas are road tested early on, exposing dead ends and leading to prototypes that point the way forward. IDEO’s concept of The Shop—the infrastructure that supports rapid iteration—can be replicated by any team through tools like giant whiteboards, rooms dedicated to experimentation, or team wikis. Some Web development teams go so far as to develop extra “sandbox” environments that al ow developers to add and play with new features and tweaks outside of the standard development pipeline. As a leader of a creative team, you should create an environment that al ows premature action. Whether you work alone or with a team, a commitment to early action—without too much conviction—wil help ideas materialize.2

Kill Ideas Liberally

If you can learn to take action more quickly, you wil reap the rewards of having more preliminary data about new possibilities. But the ability to act on fledgling ideas wil help only if you also have the wil power to abandon them when necessary. When asked about their greatest failures, many of the teams I met shared instances in which a new idea came up and pushed a project offtrack—an idea that should have been kil ed once it was clear to everyone involved that it was a dead end.

The ability to expose an idea’s faults and doubts based on data from early actions is a critical skil for productive creative teams. Often this force of skepticism comes from a few members of the team who tend to see the downside of ideas rather than their potential. Some might refer to these skeptics as “Debbie Downers” or “kil joys”—drains on the excitement in the room—but their viewpoint is incredibly valuable. Those of us who work alone must find ways to cultivate this skepticism on our own. Whether it means playing the role of the skeptic for our own ideas or engaging others to play it, we must incorporate this proactive element of doubt.

Walt Disney is known for his boundless creativity, not his skepticism. But it turns out that Disney went to great lengths to ensure that his creative teams vetted ideas ruthlessly and kil ed them when necessary. An article by personal development specialist Keith Trickey describes how, when developing feature-length films, Disney implemented a staged process using three different rooms to foster ideas and then rigorously assess them:

Room One.
In this room, rampant idea generation was al owed without any restraints.

The true essence of brainstorming— unrestrained thinking and throwing around ideas without limits—was supported without any doubts expressed.

Room Two.
The crazy ideas from Room One were aggregated and organized in Room Two, ultimately resulting in a storyboard chronicling events and general sketches of characters.

Room Three.
Known as the “sweat box,” Room Three was where the entire creative team would critical y review the project without restraint. Given the fact that the ideas from individuals had already been combined in Room Two, the criticism in Room Three was never directed at one person—just at elements of the project.

Every creative person and team needs a Room Three. As we build teams and develop a creative process, our tendency is to privilege the no-holds-barred creativity of Room One. But the idea bloodshed that occurs in Room Three is just as important as the wild ideation of Room One.

Through the use of physical space and clearly articulated objectives for the phases of idea generation, Disney created an extraordinarily productive creative enterprise that changed the world of entertainment. In their book
The Illusion of Life: Disney
Animation
, Ol ie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two of Walt Disney’s chief animators, wrote that “there were actual y three different Walts: the dreamer, the realist, and the spoiler. You never knew which one was coming into your meeting.” It seems that Disney not only pushed his team through al three rooms, he embodied the characteristics of the three rooms himself.

The best practice here is to value the skeptic’s role in idea generation. When you find yourself (or your team) ral ying around a brand-new idea or applying creative touches to a project, you must summon a dose of skepticism to ground your judgment. You don’t need to set aside three actual rooms, but you do need a period of scrutiny in your creative process. You also don’t want to create too much structure around when you can and cannot generate new ideas. However, you must be wil ing to kil ideas liberal y—for the sake of ful y pursuing others.

In a rare interview in
BusinessWeek
on Apple’s system for innovation, CEO Steve Jobs explained that, in fact, there is no system at Apple—and that spontaneity is a crucial element for innovation, so long as it is paired with the ability to say no without hesitation:

Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hal ways or cal ing each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people cal ed by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

And it comes from saying no to a thousand things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are real y important.

It is typical that in creative environments spontaneous idea generation gets in the way of fol owing through on any particular idea. The wise creative leader understands that idea generation is a wild animal that requires a stolid trainer to tame excitement with a healthy dose of skepticism. You need to say “no” more than you say “yes,” and you need to build a team and culture that helps kil ideas when necessary.

Measure Meetings with Action

Most meetings are fruitless. Amidst al the brainstorming, we must find ways to measure the outcome of meetings. While some of the greatest ideas and solutions come up in meetings, we often fail to connect these ideas to a tangible set of next steps.

Ideal y, meetings should lead to ideas that are captured as Action Steps and then assigned to individuals together with deadlines.

Meetings are extremely expensive in terms of our time and energy. When a meeting begins, the work flow of every team member stops. Al progress comes to a grinding halt —and every person’s effort to execute is put on pause as the team comes together. At the very least there is an agenda for the meeting, but al too often there isn’t. And if there is an agenda, it is likely that attendees were pol ed for agenda topics and encouraged to add something—a practice that only makes meetings longer. The worst part is that most teams plan meetings as liberal y as they drink coffee.

After years of observing teams struggle to balance productivity with the desire to meet, I can report that the most productive teams plan meetings sparingly. Using the Action Method lens on life, we can argue that meetings have little value without any actionable outcome. In most cases, leaving a meeting without anything actionable signifies that the meeting was just an information exchange and should have taken place over e-mail.

Here are a few practices worth considering when it comes to meetings:
Don’t meet just because it’s Monday.
Abolish automatic meetings without an actionable agenda. Gathering people for no other reason than “because it’s Monday” (or any other day) makes little sense. Lacking an agenda, these automatic meetings have the tendency to become “posting meetings,” when everyone just shares updates to no particular end. If you can’t entirely eliminate regularly scheduled meetings, at least al ow yourself (or encourage your leaders) to cancel them liberal y. In busy times when there is nothing actionable to meet about, fruitless meetings become even more costly.

End with a review of Actions captured.
At the end of a meeting, take a few moments to go around and review the Action Steps each person has captured. This exercise takes less than thirty seconds per person and wil often reveal either a few Action Steps that were missed or a few that were double captured (leading to duplicated work). It also breeds a sense of accountability. If you state your Action Steps in front of your col eagues, you are more likely to fol ow through with them.

Call out nonactionable meetings.
When meetings end without any Action Steps, it is your responsibility to speak up and question the value of the meeting. Ultimately, doing so wil earn you respect, boost productivity, and preserve your team’s energy. Just don’t plan a meeting to discuss worthless meetings (yes, this has happened before).

Conduct standing meetings.
Courtney Holt, the former head of digital music and media at MTV and now head of MySpace Music, conducts what he cal s “standing meetings.” Lengthy, pointless meetings are less likely to happen when everyone is standing—and gradual y getting weak in the knees.

Don’t call meetings out of your own insecurity.
For team leaders, the true purpose of a meeting is sometimes just to get reassurance. In some cases, leaders who are unable to keep track of what their people are doing wil cal a meeting to figure out what is going on. Or, in other cases, leaders are uncertain about their success or decisions and crave a little positive reinforcement from the head-nodding yes-men for pure self-gratification. Having our team members in the room to report what they are working on is soothing. But addressing our own insecurities as leaders should not be so costly. As leaders, we should recognize the cost of cal ing meetings and identify other ways to build trust and accountability in our teams. Great leaders candidly ask themselves why they are cal ing a meeting, and they are fiercely protective of their team’s time.

Don’t stick to round numbers.
Most impromptu meetings that are cal ed to quickly catch up on a project or discuss a problem can take place in ten minutes or less.

However, when they are scheduled in calendar programs, they tend to be set in thirty-or sixty-minute increments. Why? Just because it’s the default setting! Ideal y, meetings should have a start time and then end as quickly as possible. Some teams have experimented with cal ing meetings for ten or fifteen minutes and were surprised to see them end on time, even if they used to take thirty minutes or an hour.

Always measure with Action Steps . . . or something else.
Sometimes, we must meet for a concrete but nonactionable objective. Whether it is to align goals, to sel everyone on a new change, or to address a cultural concern, meetings with a nonactionable objective can be valuable. However, meetings that lack both an objective
and
an actionable outcome should never happen. If you’re not measuring the outcome of a meeting with Action Steps, then you need to measure it with something else. For project management meetings, value should be measured with Action Steps. For cultural change meetings, value should be measured with a shared understanding. And for alignment and buy-in, value should be measured with a new level of understanding and consensus after the meeting that wil help improve the team’s chemistry.

The Biology and Psychology of Completion
In April 2008, the Behance team held its first “99% Conference,” inspired by the Thomas Edison quote mentioned earlier. In a world ful of conferences dedicated to inspiring ideas, we created one focusing solely on their execution. As such, speakers were requested to refrain from talking about the source of their ideas, revealing instead their process and struggle in implementing them. It was a grand experiment: would people want to spend two days talking about the laborious and despised process of turning ideas into action?

The 99% Conference sold out, and a truly diverse audience from multiple industries attended. One of our featured speakers was the exceptional y productive author and marketing guru Seth Godin, known for his prolific blogging and numerous books on marketing and leadership.

Godin consistently executes. Aside from his bestsel ing books, he has created products, started companies, and founded a rather unorthodox six-month MBA training course.3 Godin’s abundant success has garnered a significant fan base that considers him a genius. However, Godin has a different take on his success. He agreed to speak at the 99% Conference to shed some light on his real track record and how, as a creative professional, he became regarded as successful.

His presentation had one slide—a col age of images representing al of the products, books, and other things he had created over the course of his life. He motioned to the slide and explained to the audience that the vast majority of the products or organizations he had built failed. “But,” he explained, “the reason that I’ve managed a modicum of success is because I just keep shipping.”

“Shipping” is when you release something—when you put a new product on sale, when you debut your latest piece of artwork in a gal ery, or when you send your manuscript to the publisher. Shipping is the final act of execution that so rarely happens.

Godin made the case that shipping is an active mind-set rather than a passive circumstance. “When you run out of money or you run out of time, you ship. . . . If your mind-set is ‘I ship,’ that’s not just a convenient shortcut, it’s in fact an obligation. And you build your work around that obligation. Instead of becoming someone who’s a wandering generality—and someone who has lots of great ideas and ‘if only, if only, if only,’ you are someone who always ends up shipping.”

The reason Godin has failed so many times is because he has shipped so many times. At the same time, due to this mind-set, Godin has also shipped some marvelous work—trendsetting books and new businesses that have captured the imagination of the masses. But to ship with such frequency, Godin has had to overcome some of the major psychological barriers of the creative mind.