Creativity Technique: Visual Explorer

Way, way back in the day, when I was a young research assistant, I helped set up focus groups.  I have mailed out hundreds of socks to focus group respondents, catagorized "day in the life" pictures, and helped get our moderator ready to do the Visual Explorer exercise.

A decade later, it is still one of my favorites.

Here are the basics:

The Visual Explorer card set is offered from the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC.  A typical set has about 200 images that are intended to leave themselves open to some degree of interpretation depending on the prompt that that facilitator gives.  Some of my favorites are an adult hand holding a baby hand, some particularly creepy doll faces, and some puzzle pieces.

The moderator/facilitator spreads out the pictures, or hangs them up depending on preference.  I like to hang them up because it is easier for a large group to see.  The participants are then given a prompt and asked to choose a picture that reflects their feelings/experiences.

The group then debriefs on their selections.   If you are doing several groups, you are then able to compare pictures/experiences across a larger sample size, although the primary usefulness of this exercise is to get qualitative feedback.

We did a series of groups in a company that I worked at formerly on innovation. Using the visual explorer deck of cards, we asked employees to choose a picture that showed what it was like to innovate at the company.  Here were some responses:

Picture of a Roadblock: "It is like a traffic jam.  You know you need to get somewhere, but there are so many things that get in your way."

Picture of Men in Suits with Boxes Over Heads:  "It's like we have so many meetings, and things to do that we are stumbling around blind with no direction."

The deck from CCL is highly affordable and there are a ton of different ways it can be used.  Here are some ideas:

1. Choose a picture that represents how Brand X makes you feel.

2. Choose three pictures that represent the problem Product X needs to solve.

3. Choose a picture that shows what it feels like to complete Service Experience X.

4. Choose a picture that represents the one problem we need to solve to achieve our company goals.

5.  Choose a picture that represents what it should feel like to work for Company X in five years.

The possibilities are endless.  For more info on Visual Explorer, visit the CCL website:

http://solutions.ccl.org/Visual_Explorer_Facilitator's_Letter-size_Set 

Creativity Technique: Twitter Brainstorming

In one of my previous posts, I reviewed the book The Tao of Twitter.  Inside the book, there was a brief description of a virtual brainstorming session that was quite clever.

The author has a "virtual" company.  He is a consultant with no employees.  He needed to fulfill a request for a client for some ideas, and he knew that to get the best ideas he needed to get some outside the box thinking, i.e. ideas from people other than him. 

As the author of a book on Tweeting, he has a pretty fleshed out Twitter Tribe, so he issued an invitation on Twitter to a web-meeting later that day.  He had several people who attended.  He outlined the problem.  He let the creative juices flow.

In less than 24 hours, he had a list of ideas to turn over to his client without spending a dollar on an agency.  Another advantage, he helped establish some personal relationships with people who prior to were just Twitter followers.

Social media allows you to reach out to a multitude of divergent thinkers with little cost and quick turnaround.  

How can you leverage your social media to stimulate innovation and creativity in your business?

Quote of the Day: Biz Stone

"Timing, perseverance and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success."  Biz Stone, Co-Founder, Twitter

Book Review: Tao of Twitter

I have a few confessions to make before I review this book. 

1. I struggle with Social Media.  I am excellent at posting pictures of my little boy on Facebook so that his adoring family can ooohh and aaaahhh over his cuteness, but I am much less disciplined on updating my LinkedIn, or posting to Instagram, or Tweeting.  Upon reading this book, I had maybe Tweeted 15 Tweets, ever.

2. I didn't understand the business purpose behind Twitter before I started and after reading the book, I still struggle.

3. I didn't love Mark Schaefer's other book - Born To Blog, but gave Tao of Twitter a chance anyway.

Full disclosure.  But here is the Creative Space rating:

Readability:  A
Creates Consistent Interest:  C
Applicability:  B
Design:  C
Differentiation:  A

Creative Space Takeaways:

1. My first takeaway was more a reflection after the fact, but I, like you, get piles of business cards after a conference.  It occurred to me that by adding these folks to my Twitter feed, it allows these relationships to essentially "run in the background" so if later there is a need for a more personal contact, the groundwork has been laid and in general, there is some grasp of what is going on with them in the "in between times."

2. Most of the Tao of Twitter was based on the three elements that could potentially drive tangible business and personal benefits:  1. Targeted Connections 2. Meaningful Content and 3. Authentic Helpfulness.  The author provides a few examples of how Twitter interactions helped drive business results for his company through these elements, but as I am not a consultant, the tangible benefits are a little harder to understand.

3. Twitter users are content creators for sure.  Tao of Twitter provided some stats from an ExactTarget survey that stated that more than 70 percent of Twitter users publish blog posts at least monthly, 70 percent comment on blogs, and 61 percent write at least one product review monthly.  Further, daily Twitter users are six times more likely to publish articles, five times more likely to post blogs, etc. etc.  My biggest concern here is if Twitter is just being used by content creators how far is the reach for people who just consume.  Is Twitter just a little incestuous tribe of people who like to opine?

4. "If you have fewer than 200 people who are connecting with you, Twitter will be boring."  This is me.  I have fewer than 200 people.  I am both lame and bored.  Later in the book, it says that if you have just 20 minutes a day to devote to social media, spend it building a Twitter Tribe of 200.  Then your social media will start to grow more organically.

5. To get Twitter followers, "do a basic search."  I tried this, I searched #innovation, #creativity, #wellbeing and so on and so forth to look for people who were Tweeting on these topics.  The process was still like pulling teeth, but in all honesty, I put in about ten minutes.  Will do better next time.  I promise.

6. Tweet three times a day, at different times a day.  I have never achieved this, not even a single day.  Totally makes sense though- it keeps you in the feeds of people who only check once a day.  Provides enough touchpoints to provide the personal touch tweets plus meaningful, business, building content.  Maybe I will set this as a goal for a week, see if I fall in love with Twitter.  Because there are people who are in love with Twitter.  (Which I suspect is similar in nature to those who are in love with going to the gym.)

7. Twitter acronyms.  I don't know jack about Twitter acronyms, but the Tao of Twitter did provide a glossary so now I am hip to RT (Retweet) and MT (Modified Tweet).  I have no idea how I would have figured this out without reading the book.  Seriously.

8. Hashtags for me are a source of contention.  As an avid Facebook user, it annoys me that so many people hashtag when Facebook doesn't search based on Hashtags.  But they are super useful in Twitter for searching and curating content.  Feel free to hashtag #findcreativespace :)

9. Because most people have multiple social media platforms to manage, the author provides some options, such as Hootsuite, to keep it all together. The huge advantage is that you can schedule your three tweets a day, at different times a day, without actually tweeting that often.  #hugetimesaver

10. To learn Twitter, you have to do Twitter.   This was the most important.  I think this book would have been much more important and usable for me if I was already at least a basic user of Twitter.  Usually I donate my books as soon as I am done, but I think I am going to try what I have learned a little bit and then revisit The Tao of Twitter in order to get the best value/information from it.

Quote of the Day: T.S. Eliot

The endless cycle of idea and action, 

Endless invention, endless experiment, 

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; 
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; 
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word...
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Divergent

In the June 2015 Harvard Business Review, in the Idea Watch, the author encouraged audiences to find analogous fields and recruit members to help with novel ideas.  The example in the article was hiring skaters to help redesign safety equipment for roofers.  A popular example I have seen pop up in others places is studying hummingbirds to improve aerodynamics, and so on and so forth.

I took an innovation training recently, and it explained two of the basics of ideation for innovation- divergent and convergent thinking.

In Divergent thinking, you create as many ideas as possible.  You don't judge any of the ideas, you don't consider the reality of bringing them to fruition.  You just throw them out into the world.

In Convergent thinking, you are taking all those ideas and combining them, assessing them, and discarding them until you have a couple of good, tight ideas that you can work from.

Divergent thinking is the primary reason that most people hold innovation retreats, go to companies like Ideo, and create incubators within their companies.  Driving divergent thinking is the primary reason the authors of the IdeaWatch are encouraging readers to look to analogous fields.  (Totally a Harvard Business Review word, by the way, a normal person might just say "different."

If you don't have access to some skateboarding champions, here are some other ways you can drum up some divergent thoughts:

1. Read two magazines a week.  On different topics, cars, plants, homebuilding, art, etc.  Don't just read Fast Company.  Get outside your own box and you will get some great ideas.

2. I bet you have a bunch of friends on your social media that do things other than you do- put a challenge out there and see what comes up!

3. Write down your ideas and random thoughts as you get them.  As your thoughts start to accumulate, you can read back through your notebook and see if anything gets your brain cells firing again.

4. Think back to other jobs that you have had.  Maybe an experience you had while cleaning dishes at the Olive Garden will help you with a current management conundrum.

5. Look on Pinterest.  Put in a super vague search criteria.  So, for example, if you are trying to create new packaging for product, search "boxes" on Pinterest. You would be amazed at what you can find.

Get your creative juices flowing!  Don't just think outside the box, think outside your profession!

Quote of the Day: will.i.am

"I'm good at thinking outside the box, so much that you realise it isn't a box to begin with."

Creativity Technique: Give and Get

While reading the recent Harvard Business Review article, Leadership Summits that Work, the authors introduced a technique to drive collaboration that 1. I hadn't heard of before and 2. Was actually pretty clever.

To read the complete article, click here:

https://hbr.org/2015/03/leadership-summits-that-work

Here's the process:

1. Use "Give and Get" as part of a breakout session, ideally with 30 to 60 people.

2. Label to charts, one "Give" and one "Get".  Hang them on opposite walls.

3. On each chart, each participant is assigned a column with her or her photo, name, function, business unit, and location at the top.

4.  In the "Get" column, each participant posts a card that completes this sentence:  "If I could get help in one area that would make me and my team more successful in the coming year, it would be...".    Examples of potential "Gets" include help developing a new product feature, reconfiguring a plant layout, or adjusting a customer contract."

5.  In the "Give" column, the participant completes the sentence "If I could name one area in which my team and I have developed expertise that may be useful to others in the company, it would be...."

6. After all the Give and Get cards have been posted, participants are given Post-it notes and asked to circulate around the room.  If a participant sees a get that she or someone she knows could address, she leaves a Post-it with a message about how she might be able to assist.  If she sees a Give that could be helpful, she places a posted with a message under the card.

7. After the meeting, all the Gives and Gets are recorded and distributed for follow-up.

In a variation presented in HBR, you can also trade rooms with another breakout to generate more connections.  I think if I was a participant, that would become both tedious and overwhelming, but might be worth a try.

One of the most important pieces of this process, however, is the followup.  If you don't distribute in a timely manner, or if contact information for the benefactors/recipients isn't clear, the whole process falls apart.

Worth a try!

5 Tricks to Keeping your Leadership Retreat on Track

It is that time of year where traditionally, I would be kicking off the process to plan the semi-annual marketing meeting at my old place of work.

It was a time-consuming process, that wasn't related to my job description. 50% of the job was listening to my co-workers complain that they didn't want to go, that it was boring, and trying to beg, borrow and threaten the presenters to get on time, on topic presentations ready prior to five minutes before they were scheduled to present.

The big day finally arrives, and everyone is on their phones, they start to migrate after the second long presentation to the back of the room, by the afternoon, everyone had an "important call" and are sitting in the hotel lobby chatting.

Some good plans for the future might be made, but for the most part, are abandoned about a week out as people get caught up on the tons of e-mail that accumulated while they were out of the office.

Does this sound familiar?  Of course it does.  

As a former organizer, I know for a fact that the management who orchestrate these events have good intentions, but so often, things go wrong.  And this isn't limited to just my organization.  Harvard Business Review released an article in March 2015 about "Leadership Summits that Work."  It has some great insights on what to do prior to your summit, during your summit, and after your summit to really drive collaboration.  What really struck me though, were some of the horror stories about how much money and time is invested in these summits for little to no return.

Here is the link to the full article, for some light reading:

https://hbr.org/2015/03/leadership-summits-that-work

In homage to retreat planning season, here are my 5 tricks for keeping your leadership retreat on track:

1. Manage Technology.  I have a love/hate relationship with my phone.  I am tethered to it.  I sleep next to it.  Google knew I was pregnant before my husband did.  It is a compulsion to look at it.  In a leadership retreat, it is a killer of collaboration, causes mass distraction, and when everyone has theirs out, a clear sign that things have gone totally off track.  I read an article that recommended doing a "phone check" similar to the coat check, which I guess could be effective, unless you have a child in daycare or a thousand other reasons why there could be a legit emergency. 

As a horrible person, at one management session I led, I obtained permission from HR to bring Nerf guns and the group was given permission to shoot anyone who got out their phone during the session. Not only did people think twice about getting out their phone, it also injected some fun into the day.  Not appropriate for all audiences, but totally worked.

2. Let Your Leadership Retreat Get Off Track.  I led a management/innovation retreat once upon a time to discuss marketing strategies for the medium duty truck market. I had planned a tight schedule and I was dedicated to keeping people on it.  Fifteen minutes into the session, a long discussion emerged regarding "What is the Medium Duty Truck Market?"  There was apparently zero consensus, which I didn't see coming.  It blew my schedule to hell not just on day one, but before even the first break.  BUT, if we hadn't had the discussion and got some consensus on this important topic, I am certain that we would have left after three days and been unable to proceed.  

3. Take Breaks. Even if you plan the most engaging presentations, lots of brainstorming sessions, and have enough humor to make your presentation seem like a Kevin Hart performance, people need breaks.  I have sat in retreats where breaks were five minute dashes to the restroom so you could return to an uncomfortable chair for another three house stretch.  Research shows that people focus best in 90 minute increments.  Also, if you want to drive collaboration, it doesn't hurt to allow people to have enough time to actually learn the names of the other people participating.  Plus, everyone loves the conference cookie.

I recently attended a conference that kicked off every day with a 5K walk around downtown Indianapolis.  What a great way to get people up and refreshed and focused for a day of presentations!

4. Make it Easy. We had a yearly meeting where we needed to get the various marketing departments in our organization to give updates on their major projects.  We would limit the presentations to 20 minutes and give no other direction.  Painful does not even begin to describe the process.  Plus everyone ran over.  We shifted this to give presenters fifteen minutes and provided a detailed template that asked five questions:

• What is one thing your department needs to start doing?
• What is one thing your department needs to stop doing?
• What do you need to do more of?
• What is one thing you need help with?
• What is one thing you are proud of?

In general, presenters feel more confident in their direction, the presentations hit the major points, and attendees don't feel like they are in presentation hell. Win. Win. Win.

5. Get stuff out on time.  Meeting organizers are whipped by the end of these meetings.  It is hard work to get them together.  The actual summit days are long, draining days, and just having them over seems like a celebration.  But- it is critical that you keep up the momentum, so conference after-materials like notes, next steps, presentation videos, etc need to get out within a few days after the conference.  Two weeks is too long.  People lose excitement, get focused on other things, etc.  Also, keep up the communication in measured increments after the conference.  A two week check in, a month, a quarter, etc. Keep what you learned on your team's radar.

Nothing is going to change the fact that a leadership retreat or conference is a certain amount of time away from your daily tasks, but making sure that the time is well-organized, and well-spent and helps create an environment that makes your team more successful will make it one of the most rewarding experiences in your team's year.

Quote of the Day - Amy Poehler

"As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people's ideas are often better than your own.  Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life."

Reputation Management

I was reading the March 2015 edition of Quirk's Marketing Research Review (late, of course) and in the Product and Service Update section I was scanning the updates and noticed the phrase "Reputation Management."  

The context of the use of reputation management was totally different than the direction I am going with it, be warned, but the idea for this post came from that source!  They were talking about online reputation management and I began pondering creativity and innovation reputation management.

During the course of establishing yourself, your department, or your company as creative and innovative, there are probably some roadblocks that will come up.

• Do you have the reputation of being tedious in meetings?  NOT innovative.
• Does your department have the reputation for being the data nerds?  NOT creative.
• Has your company had a dry spell in terms of the new and exciting.  NOT awesome.

Establishing your reputation as a creativity force to be reckoned with is one thing, but you have to maintain that creativity over the long term.

In my previous life I ran a department that was in charge of both volume planning and corporate reporting as well as innovation functions and strategic research.  The numbers were important to the company, but if we got too lost in the millions of data points, we lost some street cred for creativity and innovation.  Seriously, if someone comes to you for ideas and you give them Excel spreadsheets, something went wrong.

Kind of like establishing your personal brand, you have to live innovation and creativity, everyday.

Quote of the Day: Amelia Earhart

"Adventure is worthwhile in itself."

Genius on a Cocktail Napkin

The winner of the caption contest in the "Strategic Humor" section of the Harvard Business Review for April 2015 was paired with this picture.  The caption: "Did you see a cocktail napkin with our entire marketing plan on it?" 

Check it out from the source here:
https://hbr.org/2015/03/strategic-humor-cartoons-from-the-april-2015-issue

I loved this particular cartoon because I am crazy about just scribbling my ideas pretty much wherever I can find to write them. One of my favorites was the back of the vomit bag on a US Airways flight, but normal people just carry around a notebook.

It is well documented that it is important to write down your ideas when you have them.  I have read multiple places that you should keep a notebook to write your ideas on when you go to sleep- first of all to help you sleep, but also to help you remember the next day.

In the book The Organized Mind, the author explains the importance of keeping notes as a way to clear your brain space for focused thought.

My old boss held a staff meeting once on the importance of taking notes in creating the perception for clients that what they are saying is important and we are understanding it and retaining it.

I take things a step further and almost always draw out my Powerpoints in colored markers to get my story straight before I actually sit in front of the computer.

What are your thoughts on note-taking?  How does it help your creativity?

Quote of the Day: Lorraine Hansberry

"Never be afraid to sit awhile and think."

Book Review: The Organized Mind

I don't even really remember how I came across the book The Organized Mind.  I'm pretty sure I saw it in a bookstore and then ordered it off Amazon, but not totally sure anymore.  Bottom line, I ordered it and then it served as decoration on my bookshelf for some time.  I did finally kick it off after a very productive reading January, and it took most of the way through February to get it done.

Not that it wasn't a good read.  It has been fascinating because I am also taking a class from Coursera on Emotional Intelligence and there is a significant amount of overlap between the neuroscientific principles presented in both books.  Who know I would learn so much info about neurochemistry in 2015.

This book was an incredibly easy read for such a complicated topic. I had read another review that said it was hard to get through- but I didn't have that experience.  I did, however, just read The Idiot by Dostoyevsky so I could be biased. 

Here is the official Creative Space rating:

Readability:  A
Creates Consistent Interest:  B
Applicability:  B
Design:  C
Differentiation:  A

The design rating is a C- but at the end of the day, this wasn't intended to be a "pretty" marketing book, so who cares if it isn't pretty.  The content was great.

Creative Space Takeaways:

1. Decision Making and Sleep:  So this book hit home about two days after I started reading it.  A little back story... I am on a diet.  I also sometimes have trouble sleeping.  The Organized Mind discusses all of the cognitive issues that go along with lack of sleep.  So I have a hard night sleeping because I am on diet and I am hungry.  The next morning I am driving to work and pass by Bojangles, home of the best chicken biscuit on the planet.  I am having this mental discussion with myself that goes a little bit like this:  "Kristen, your cerebral cortex isn't functioning at its best due to lack of sleep and it is affecting your ability to control yourself.  STAY AWAY FROM THE BOJANGLES.  I passed it by.  It is one thing to get a biscuit because you have a craving- it is another thing to just shove it in your mouth because your brain is tired.

2. "Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.  Although most of us have no trouble ranking the importance of decisions if asked to do so, our brains don't automatically do this."  Bottom line- this is why it takes so long for me to clean the kitchen. I can't prioritize my tasks unless I think it though- it is lumped into a category called "clean the kitchen."  So, I wander around the kitchen, picking up a piece of trash, walking to the trashcan to throw it away, noticing the laundry needs to be switched, then the dog needs to be fed.  Put away two dishes, my son asks for a glass of milk.  Etc. Etc.  

3. "Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your saving in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument."  My work life is one hot mess of interruptions.  I am sure there are tons of advantages to open workspaces, but one of them is not being able to work without a ton of questions, snippets of conversations from co-workers, phone calls, etc.  And don't even get me started on the constant e-mail alerts.  The Organized Mind states that a multi-tasking brain is about as good at doing its job as a drunk brain.  Or a sleepy brain.  Let me have some wine with the Blackberry Instant Messenger.

4. "Memory is fiction.  It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion.  Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting."  I just got done reading the book Patterns of Childhood, which was a fictional reflection of a girl remembering growing up in Nazi Germany as a German.  The purpose of the book was to emphasize the importance of memory in preventing things from happening again, an interestingly the point was also made in that book.  In short, write it down.  Eyewitness testimony is crap. You fill in the blanks for things you can't actually remember and your brain tricks you into thinking it is real.  

5. The importance of triage.  A lot of The Organized Mind emphasized the way that really important people with a lot of moving parts to their lives function.  First, these folks have a process to have information enter their sphere and a process for how that information gets sorted into "take care of now"  "take care of later" and "delegate or delete".  Second, they don't fill up every waking second of their time.  The schedule time to get the important things done.  Musicians schedule time to write.  Executives cut the meetings so that they can focus on what THEY think is the most important way to spend their day.

6. An organized home really does help keep your brain working.  If you aren't having to focus on where your keys are, because they are always in the tray by the door, you can focus on your diet, remembering to pick up the drycleaning, etc.  Another great read on this topic that I actually found to be more helpful was The Art of Tidying Up.

7. Flow States.  "Flow occurs when you are not explicitly thinking about what you are doing; rather, your brain is in a special mode of activity in which procedures and operations are performed automatically without your having to exert conscious control."  There are times when I can get into the flow state when I am writing and there are times that I can't.  The key though is that when I have been writing consistently, it is easier.  When there are fewer distractions, it is also easier.  

8. Previous to reading this book, I was a huge believer in Ambien.  However, studies apparently show that people who take it only sleep on average eleven minutes longer.  Further, they influence the way that your brain consolidates memories at night reducing cognitive function.  BTW, if you read this, prepare yourself for several nights of sleeplessness because they do pack one hell of a placebo effect.

9. In the chapter on "Organizing the Business World" there is a section regarding trademarks of good leadership.  It inspired me to take a class on Coursera on Leadership and Emotional Intelligence.  It is such a fascinating topic.  As a marketing person, you know that people are strongly influenced by emotion, but we tend to forget that that is also the case in management.

10. Final takeaway- my brain is doing stuff I don't know about and don't think about to get me through the day.  The least I can do is figure out what cognitive shortcuts I can cook up to make its job easier.  Or I can just check my phone another thousand times and never let it focus on what it needs to.  It is all up to me.

Quote of the Day: Daniel Levitin

"Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather they are people who are happy with what they already have."

Book Review: Ditch Dare Do

The book Ditch Dare Do, by William Aruda and Deb Dib, caught my eye while browsing Amazon because of its tagline "66 Ways to Become Influential, Indispensible and Incredibly Happy at Work.  At the time, I was not incredibly happy at work.

This book was incredibly helpful for another reason entirely, it helped me ask some pretty insightful questions about how I want the world to see me... what is my personal brand?  This is a question that supercedes my thoughts about how to be more successful and happy at work and instead starts to focus on what I see my value as being to any organization.

This book walks a fine line, however.  At the beginning, the topics in the book are pretty high-level, like relating to people on a personal level.  At the back of the book, it has gone pretty deep into the tactical pieces of developing a personal brand, but it has gone almost all the way into a laundry list.

Creative Space Ratings:

Readability:  B
Creates Consistent Interest:  A
Applicability:  A
Design:  C
Differentiation:  B

I have recommended this book twice since I read it and both people who read it enjoyed it and, interestingly enough, got something completely different from it.  As I read it, I did not do all of the assignments.  Maybe on a second reading I will go all the way- and this is definitely one of those books that you hold onto.

One thing that I didn't love was the name of the book.  Ditch, Dare, Do refers to some next steps at the end of the chapters.  "A ditch replaces thinking and habits that don't help you move forward.  A dare propels you to take new, exciting tasks.  A do is a critical step you must execute to build your brand."  There were also Sparks, Go-Time Grids, Know, Show Grow and Go sections, etc. etc.  It was all a a little much.  Plus I kept getting confused about what I was supposed to be doing.  The content was really good- all of the "helpers" didn't really help.  As a reader, I'm not stupid.  I got this.

Creative Space Takeaways:

1. Be YOU:  "To truly be yourself you must know who you are, where you want to go, and what drives you.  You much also understand others' perceptions of you.  Only after deep introspection and regular pursuit of feedback can you gain true knowledge of yourself and true clarity about your reputation.  That clarity - that authentic comfort in your own skin- build a confidence that is magnetic to others.  We all know people at work who radiate authenticity and confidence, and we like to be around them.  They are natural leaders; they make us feel better and do better."

2. Be Open: Arruda and Dib make the point in the book that without self-awareness, you are going to have a really hard time establishing your personal brand because you have no way of knowing your starting point or whether you are making positive progress.  Getting this kind of feedback is painful, but the hard messages will be the most valuable to your progress.  Thinking of it like doing a benchmarking survey about yourself!

3. Make Your Mark: "The difference between distracted (and distracting) multitaskers and strong brands is this:  Strong brands don't fight distraction with attention; they meet distraction with intention.  Intention means knowing how and what you want to contribute so you don't miss opportunities to make your mark- to express and leverage your brand on a daily basis.  If you've attended your meeting but were working on the report that is overdue rather than actively contributing and leaving your mark, have you done your job?  When you check your e-mail while on a teleconference or text under the table in the middle of a client meeting, have you missed an opportunity to build your brand?"

4. Ditch Dare Do incorporated a clever series of questions to ensure that not only do you have a personal brand, but that people around you will want it.  They call it the Why-Buy-ROI formula:

• Here's who I am
• I know what you need right now
• I've done it, here's how I did it
• Here's what happened when I did it
• And I can do it again.

5. Keep a Job Journal - I always send my boss a reminder e-mail of my accomplishments immediately prior to reviews.  They probably think it is annoying, but they are as busy as I am and I think that it is only fair to have the opportunity to give them a rundown of what they need to keep in mind.  Ditch Dare Do takes this concept a step forward and encourages you to keep a job journal that keeps a running summary of major accomplishments so that you can have them on the ready when you need them.

6. The Aesthetics:  Make your resume reflect you.  Choose a brand color.  Take a good headshot. Create a trademark for you.  These were some of the ways that the book suggests that you make sure you are always putting your best foot forward.

7. Brand Your Office:  After reading this article, I went and massively purged my office.  It didn't reflect how I wanted to be seen and perceived.  I got a standing desk because I wanted to be seen as someone on the move.  I got rid of a bunch of paper and hung up infographics.  I made sure to have some cool marketing books around.  Your space is a reflection of you.

8. Blog to Bolster your Brand: "A well-written blog is a direct path to virtual visibility and better Google results.  A blog lets you promote your ideas and accomplishments to communicate your value.  It helps you build community with people who are critical to doing your job.  It will make you a more branded, attractive, quoted and admired professional - and deepen your differentiation from other professionals who seemingly do what you do."  

And I started a blog.  Well, look at that!

Book Review: Fascinate

I first encountered Sally Hogshead when attending the 2014 Corporate Researchers Conference in Chicago.  She was the keynote speaker and we received free copies of her book "How to Fascinate" for attending.

I am OCD and still haven't read How to Fascinate, by the way, because I felt like I needed to start with the first book in the collection, Fascinate:  Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation.

One of the cool things about this book is that you are able to take a quiz when you buy the book on Sally Hogshead's website to figure out your fascination type.  When this book was originally written it was to determine which of the 7 triggers you gravitate to, but as her fascination research has evolved, you now take a quiz to determine which of your fascination archetypes you can leverage to become "more you." 

It's a pretty good deal- you get your archetype and a 30 page report on what that means, what it means to others, and your strengths and weaknesses.  Also, Sally sends out some pretty decent information on an on-going basis once you subscribe to the newsletter.

In case you are wondering, I am The Provocateur.

So, let's get this party started.  Here are my overall ratings:

Readability:  A
Creates Consistent Interest:  A
Applicability:  B
Design:  B
Differentiation:  A

Some of my favorite takeaways were:

1. On a first date? Measure his elbows.  Sally kicks off her book with a pretty decent description of the biological roots of fascination.  How your brain keys into fascination, how you become attracted to certain people and certain brands. This isn't immediately applicable to the book, but it provides the most fascinating (haha) "bet you didn't know that" type facts.  Things like you are most likely to attract a person with a favorable genetic profile if you are NOT on birth control.  Fascination is a complicated subject!

For more on the elbows, read the book.  But FYI, it isn't the size of the feet!

2. Why is the Mona Lisa fascinating? 

"The Mona Lisa was recently analyzed with cutting edge software developed to recognize facial emotion.  Mona Lisa, according to the program, is 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry."

So, the Mona List is fascinating because we can't quite figure her out.  I wonder what the software would have to say about RBF.  (Resting Bitch Face)

3. Trends Driving a Distracted World

The book had an interesting point about in the past you spent money to go to the movies and you were essentially "paying" attention.  Now, people are so inundated by choices for entertainment, even in your free time it is hard to make a decision.  Why all this clutter?  Sally indicates that you have to deal with an overload of distracting choices, the rise of ADD culture, and people have become more skilled at blocking out messaging.  Now if only I can figure out how to block out my incoming e-mail!

4.  So what makes a message fascinating?

There is an easily, digestible list!  The Gold Hallmarks of a fascinating message include:

• Provokes strong an immediate emotional reactions
• Creates advocates
• Becomes "cultural shorthand" for a specific set of actions or values
• Incites conversation
• Forces competitors to realign around it
• Triggers social revolutions

5. The seven triggers of fascination include:  lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice and trust.

6. Lust: "The pursuit of pleasure is often more fascinating than the pleasure itself.  Keeping that desire unfulfilled, or at least never entirely satisfied, is the key to long-term fascination through lust...  Lust engages our imagination.  It allows us to participate in the process, filling in the possibilities.  As with the mystique trigger, lust makes us want more, yet once we experience the complete truth, our desire might weaken."

7. Completely random fascinating fact from Fascinate!:  In 1636 there was a huge economic bubble driven by high demand for tulips. Many economists consider this the very first economic bubble and subsequent burst. At this point in history, a single tulip bulb was sold in exchange for four fat oxen, twelve fat sheep, four tons of butter, a thousand pounds of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, a silver cup, and large measures of rye, wheat, beer and wine.  No wonder tulips are my favorite. 

The end of the book includes some pointers regarding how to create your own fascination plan of attack... I thought the recommendations were kind of one-size-fits all, regardless of whether you were talking about becoming more fascinating, or whatever else you wanted to do to improve your company.

Overall though- it was a good read.  Definitely will read the second book, to understand some more about "personal" fascination.

Quote of the Day: Amanda Palmer

"You are an artist when you say you are.  And you are a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected."

Book Review: Creative Confidence

I found Creative Confidence while wandering through Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon.  As per the usual, I had decided to limit my book-spree by purchasing only one children's book, one personal development book, and one fun book.  On this particular excursion, Creative Confidence ended up being the personal development book. 

Creative Confidence was written by Tom and David Kelley, two brothers who have somehow both gravitated to Innovation and Creativity as life pursuits.  Tom is the author of The Art of Innovation and David is the Founder of IDEO.  I know, you may of heard of it!

Here is the Creative Space rating:

Readability:  A
Creates Consistent Interest:  B
Applicability:  B
Design:  B
Differentiation:  B

For a complete description of the Creative Space rating system, click HERE.

The book was an easy read for sure.  The writers are casual, there are fun cartoons and pictures, and the book just feels good.

Creative Confidence Top Ten

1.  The Creativity Myth vs. Creative Confidence:  The creativity myth is described in Creative Confidence as the believe that creativity is limited to the traditional artsy fields like painting, writing, sculpting, whatever.  This book asserts that everyone has the potential to be creative in their given field, but we have over time lost the confidence to pull out the mental crayons and attack that blank page.

2. Go Wide then Go Deep.  I took a Harvard Business School class on Innovation a few years ago.  They opened with a discussion of Divergent vs. Convergent thinking.  Same idea.  Throw out as many ideas as possible, narrow down to the most feasible, viable, and desirable, and then dig deep to get the idea to implementation. 

3. Have a Growth Mindset:  Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychology professor, is quoted in the book describing individuals with a growth mindset.  They "believe that a person's true potential is unknown and unknowable; that it is impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil and training." The opposite is a fixed mindset. 

4. Intentionality:  Intentionality is discussed during a description of a project worked on with Steve Jobs.  (Which I of course hate because Apple is the most overused creativity and innovation example on the planet).  It is described as the ability to see a way to improve the status quo and then seizing the opportunity.  Easier way to say it- Have an idea.  Do it.

5. Self-Efficacy:  For those not familiar with this term, it is simply the belief that you can do what you set out to do in the world.  Developing self-efficacy is of course an important first step in developing Creative Confidence, but during this book, it really got me thinking more about whether self-efficacy is a growing or declining personality trait in our society.  Conundrum.

6. Strategies to get from blank page to insight:

• Choose creativity.
• Think like a traveler.
• Engage relaxed attention
• Empathize with your end user.
• Do observations in the field.
• Ask questions, starting with why?
• Reframe challenges.
• Build a creative support network.

I think it is highly worth getting the book just to read threw these tips and tricks.  "Engage relaxed attention" was my favorite and really brings you back to some of the neuroscience findings related to the switching between focused attention and daydreaming mode.

7. Cool quote from Steven Pressfield's book Resistance:  "Most of us have two lives, the life we live and the unlived life within us.  Between the two stands Resistance... Late at night, have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to me?  Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint? an entrepreneur who never starts a venture?  Then you know what Resistance is."


8. If you want a team of smart creative people to do extraordinary things, don't put them in a drab, ordinary space.  I'm obviously a big believer in this concept.  As a former member of the khaki cubicle society, I know how stifling it is to not be able to inject a single piece of personality into your working space.  We even had template desktop backgrounds.  We were like an army of clones.

9. "Leaders can't dictate culture, but they can nurture it."  I'm in the middle of taking a class on emotional intelligence, which posits that developing resonant relationships within organizations is one of the most important functions that a manager can engage in.  Similarly, developing this creative environment and letting go of control to let your people do their thing drives creative confidence within an organization.

10. Just get started.

Creative Confidence was an easy read and a fun read.  One limitation though is that it is highly focused on the kind of creativity problems that IDEO solves, so, essentially, the examples in the book are very "stuff" driven, so if you are working in consulting or in a service industry, while there is plenty that is applicable, there is also quite a bit that won't be. 

Welcome to Creative Space!

Welcome to the inaugural blog entry of Creative Space!

I am starting this blog because after six years of working in corporate life, I am so in tune with the fact that most executives understand the need to be creative and drive innovation in their organizations, but it is hard.  

I know.  I travel 2-3 weeks per month.  I have a team that needs me to keep projects moving and make sure all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed in a heavily  bureaucratic environment.  Not to mention the expense reports, full day workshops, budget meetings, planning meetings, team building activities, and industry events you are required to attend, in addition to just plain "getting the word done."  

So how do you get time and "creative space" to just sit and let your mind wander in front of a blank piece of paper (or a napkin, or the back of a boarding pass, or your hand!)

How do you actually get time to turn your great ideas into reality?  

How do you provide the right environment for your team to think outside of the way its always been done to create the next big thing?

I don't have the answers- but I am committed to providing the tips and tricks that I have come across to help you find your creative space.