Predicting Lightning

As someone who works in a creative field, I’m often asked how a creative professional can be “on” all the time. For eight hours each day, these folks produce a consistent level of creative, imaginative work in defiance of the myths that inspiration is something ephemeral and artists sit around waiting for a fickle muse to come around. In reality, most high-output creative professionals, including writers, designers, developers, and strategists, follow a process that takes advantage of a couple of hidden truths in the creative community: we’re all creative and conflict can be a good thing.

Here, I’m offering a few process guidelines for harnessing the creative energy of a team.

The Process: Brainstorming

The first step is to bring the entire project team together. If you gather people from diverse professional and personal backgrounds, you enrich the creative landscape. Remember, everyone can be creative, so the goal is to work as a team and try to come up with the best ideas that fit whatever project you’re working on.

The initial meeting is often called a brainstorming session, but it’s not the 90s era brainstorming in which all ideas were accepted as equally valid, because that system allows weaker ideas to live longer than they should. Conflict, often seen as counterproductive, has recently become recognized as excellent fuel for creativity, but only the right kind of conflict. You need to pit the ideas against each other, not people, which means leaving egos at the door. To facilitate healthy conflict, one person needs to guide the meeting. He or she is a neutral party who focuses on keeping the team moving forward, stays focused on the project goals, and ensures that the conversation doesn’t degrade into personal arguments.

Tips for the Guide

Consistently compare ideas with the project goals. If your team continues to veer away from those goals, you may want to revisit or reestablish the goals with your team members. There may be a misunderstanding, and as the guide, your primary job is to keep communication clear and moving forward.

Be very careful not to participate in the brainstorming with your own ideas. This is the most difficult part of guiding a brainstorming session, because when one of these sessions is going well, everyone gets inspired and starts pitching or developing concepts. You, however, need to stay focused on your job and work to facilitate the creative process.

Make sure your team understands that there is no right answer. Many solutions can be equally effective, so you’ll need to get rid of the false dichotomy of right and wrong.

If you’re guiding the meeting, one obstacle to keep an eye out for is fixation. If someone becomes fixated on a single idea, they may be getting emotionally invested, which means that the discussion could quickly become about people rather than ideas. If this happens, you could try to change topics, and make sure to tell the person that his or her idea will be noted and you’ll come back to it.

Another issue to look out for is jargon. Nothing stops the creative process like jargon. Jargon only serves to divide people by creating a perception of insider knowledge. Scott Berkun, the best-selling author and speaker, asserts that the person who uses the most jargon is the least confident in his or her ideas, but sometimes, we’re so used to using industry jargon, like acronyms, that we don’t even notice it. Your job, as the guide, is to notice it. When you get a diverse team together (which is the best kind of team), you need to make sure you’re all speaking the same language. Eliminating jargon will also make people think more deeply about what they say rather than letting pre-packaged metaphors think for them.

This initial meeting also requires another person who will need to bite his or her tongue: a scribe.

Tips for the Scribe

The scribe’s job is to keep track of the ideas and discussion, which can be a difficult task considering the velocity of creative meetings. Just like the guide, neutrality is key. The scribe needs to focus on what’s going on around him or her and capture the tone as well as the outcome of the discussion.

If you’re the scribe, you’re the unsung hero. Without you, we’d never know what happened. Teams can come out of a meeting with a creative high, but in a few hours, they won’t remember which ideas stood up to scrutiny.

A good scribe will have a system for keeping a record of the core concepts, iterations of those concepts, and which ended up on their way to the guillotine. A team could have an idea going strong for 20 minutes and then find a fatal flaw, or some idea could get bumped down by a better one. The scribe will need a way to quickly note these events.  The scribe should keep track of the evolving project goals and help make the connections between these goals and the ideas being tossed around. Unfortunately, people do not think in a strictly linear fashion, so traditional meeting outlines don’t always work.

At the end of the meeting, the scribe needs to be given some quiet time to go through his or her notes and recast them for the rest of the team. The notes that he or she takes during the meeting might not make sense to anyone else, so the translation process will include making those notes clear and solidifying the meeting’s high points so important events aren’t lost. The notes are then passed on to the rest of the team and the artist goes to work.

The Process: Ideation

After brainstorming, the creative professional or team also needs to be given some space. He or she will digest the discussion and develop preliminary ideas. His or her process is probably unique. When it comes to solitary work, all professionals develop a system that works best for them.

It’s true that there are moments of inspiration that can strike with unexpected ferocity, but those don’t happen out of the ether. Artists don’t spend their time looking at Facebook until their creative vision clears. They assemble resources, they research, they sketch, and they work.

The Process: Review and Refine

Once the creative individual or team has developed a few ideas, the team reconvenes. To dispel another myth about creative types, the stereotypical temperamental artist would never survive this process. When, for example, a designer delivers his or her ideas to the team, that team needs to be able to pick apart the designs and test them against the project goals.

Tips for the Artist

At this time, the designer needs to do the hard work of distancing himself or herself from the work. A designer is going to get emotionally entangled in his or her work, which isn’t a bad thing; it may be part of the artist’s creative process. As a professional, however, he or she will need to be able to step back to get more out of a critique session.

As and artist, if you find yourself unable to conjure the words to defend your work, but you still want to defend it, you’re too close. You might want to let the rest of the team, ushered by the guide, spend some time discussing your work before you chime in. Try seeing your work from other people’s perspectives, and remember that audiences cannot fail. They might not see what you see, but that does not constitute failure on their part.

When it comes to the question of how a creative professional can be “on” all day, the answer is simple: they’re never off. When it comes to producing consistent creative work, the process is key. Engage a diverse group (including a guide and a scribe), give the creative professional space and resources, then bring them all back together to review and refine. Although everyone can be creative, a professional understands that being able to consistently produce creative solutions is a product of dedication, education, and cooperation.