Get messy with creativity

There are lots of things we could argue about and debate but most of us would agree I’m sure that Leonardo da Vinci is justly deserving of the accolade of being creative.  Yet at the time of his work he infuriated his sponsors with multiple projects all running at once.  The Mona Lisa which many of us might have been privileged enough to see, took around seventeen years to complete, not literally seventeen years of hard effort but over a period of seventeen years and having travelled most of the way round Europe as bits were added to it.

Whilst many think in a linear fashion, da Vinci’s process was anything but linear.  Even paintings he conceived and planned were changed throughout their actual creation as he added new understandings of light and shade from combining his interest in art and science in one.  This must have been completely infuriating to his bosses, those who had paid for works but when you’re working with a genius maybe you have to put up with these things.

These days most people work for leaders who want things actually done.  Even Steve Jobs’ eye for creativity said that real artists have to learn to create a product that is shippable and commercially viable.   Yet what da Vinci does show us is prototyping and experimenting can be part of the process and that things are never ever quite complete.

I was raised as a classic project manager.  I was taught to nail down the scope, the deliverable and the expectation of the sponsor.  But I was also taught to deliver quickly, not because I had insatiable bosses who couldn’t wait to get their hands on a product although that was certainly true thinking of them, it was because those of us with project management nouse know that life moves on and if a project takes too long to deliver then there is a risk during its lifetime that people start to want something else.   What I learned as a novice project manager even though this was infuriating at the time was often the project sponsor couldn’t see what they really wanted until they were in touching distance of receiving what they’d asked for and having seen it, realised they actually wanted something else.

At the time, us project managers weren’t very complimentary about this style of behaviour and yet looking back it showed the nature of being human and being a creative explorer and what da Vinci was doing.  He conceived an idea and needed to get sponsors so he’d throw up a wooden model or a cartoon drawing to get people on board, take on some suggestions and devised an iterative process towards his work.

Many organisations will embody fail to plan, plan to fail as motto and to an extent they would of course be right.  The typical and standard planning process involves research, analysis of the research, construction of the plan and the budget, a build and then eventually an execution.  If you’re very luck what gets executed approximately solves the problem first conceived.  More often than not it doesn’t.  As a novice project manager it gave me no pleasure to be allocated to a project which was being expertly managed to deliver precisely what no-one now wanted – and to call that success.   Equally I can lament the other project manager’s trick which is to nail the scope down so tightly that again success in delivery is assured and yet no-one likes what they’ve inherited.

A better model involves four elements – adapt, build, launch and evaluate.  Why start with Adapt?   Out there reading my articles there may be a one of a kind genius and that may well be you, but for the rest of us mere mortals the key to creativity is not imagining that you are setting out to invent something that has never been heard, seen or conceived before.  The majority of inventions that have stood the test of time in the US in the last century were things that took an activity or pastime that people were doing and made it easier, faster, cheaper or a combination of all of them.  This is additive or adaptive thinking.  It’s not sitting in an orchard waiting for the apple to fall, which we know now wasn’t ever true anyway.  It’s through observing that works well and less well and ironing out the kinks.

Starting with adapt allows us to leverage all the good bits we already have and if you’re implementing change in an organisation, it’s likely to keep a number of things that people already recognise (you learn quickly as a project manager that humans and even less so project managers, love change).   From adaptation you can build incrementally and launch but shift towards evaluate with feedback.  And using that feedback you can adapt again using incremental building.

MBA textbooks revel in a range of big corporate system changes that never delivered what they set out to do or worse succumbed to sunk cost fallacy.  The sunk cost fallacy pulls people into believing even though they may really not like what’s being produced or doubt in its success or efficacy they’re so far into the project they might as well finish it anyway.  In the UK as I write this, the same debate is being made of a high speed rail line that will shave minutes off the time between Birmingham in the middle of England and London, is going to be delivered late, vasty over budget, unlikely to produce many jobs beyond those taken to build it and already by the time the first shovel hit the soil, high speed internet connectivity had taken the keen edge out of commuting volumes.

We’re in this deep we might as well finish it anyway.

Prototyping isn’t just for corporates.  As individuals we can prototype in a career space, we can offer to join someone else’s project or join a not-for-profit board or give our time away pro-bono.  In doing so we can test how our innate skills and knowledge work in new environments, we can expose ourselves to other people’s thinking, other people’s ideas and we can add and borrow as long as we wish to create new things.

Doubt me that prototyping doesn’t necessarily cost the earth.  It’s rumoured that the original design of the computer mouse came from something fashioned from an old sanding block with a cavity hollowed out and inserted inside a roll-on deodorant ball.   A great way to get a sense of what was to become a brand new and wholly influential way of operating computers without a keyboard.

Creativity is wonderfully messy, we just need to embrace the wonder and get stuck in.