Creative Reaction

A few days after I posted about creative spaces and This Ain’t No Disco, I came across this Behance Magazine article, where Ian McCallam, the creator of This Ain’t No Disco is interviewed. Ian shares a number of excellent ways to be both productive and creative in a business setting. They include:

• Meetings where members have only 40 seconds to make their point.
• Chair-back signs to indicate frame of mind; “don’t disturb” or “inspire me”.
• Completely clearing desks each month to minimize clutter.

He also talks about actively giving and receiving feedback on ideas, “The more inspiration and ideas you put out there, the more you get back.”

A worthwhile read, though you have to dig a bit to get to the good stuff.

In Let People Fail over at HR World, S. Caron encourages managers to back off and not redo employees’ wrongly implemented tasks the right way, otherwise employees will be deprived of a valuable learning experience. Worth reading, especially if the advice seems counter-intuitive.

This is a perfect tie-in to today’s inspirational quote over at Make it Great:
“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” - Nelson Mandela

As I wrote earlier, it is experience and learning from mistakes which allow for the biggest opportunities for personal growth and innovation. If we are to retain our employees by fostering an atmosphere of growth and trust, we have to think long-term.

There’s an excellent, self-explanatory post over at Signal vs. Noise - Forbes misses the point of the 4-day work week. Largely due to 37Signals’ influence, I’ve blogged about the same issue here at CR, with the same conclusions; i.e. work is not about presenteeism - it’s about results. (Preventing Workweek Creep is a closely related issue.)

Reducing work hours with the same expectation of results forces us to use the time we have wisely and always think, “what is the most important thing I should be doing right now?” And with the added benefit of having an extra day off, it’s a huge quality of life issue as well. This should not be confused with urgency for the sake of urgency; this is creating within constraints for a higher purpose. (See another 37Signals post here.)

This Ain’t No Disco is the ad agency counterpart to On My Desk, which we mentioned last week.

“This Ain’t No Disco is a portfolio of some of the best agency interiors in the world,” according to the blog’s description. Read The Perfectly-Designed Office first to gain some perspective. Let’s hope the best interiors inspire the best work!

As a quick follow up to today’s earlier post, Designing Your Optimal Creative Environment, I’m linking to the CreativityLab, designed by Paul Williams of IdeaSandbox. Within Starbucks headquarters, “this once drab conference room, filled with corporate-stock chairs and boardroom style table, is now a 336 square foot haven for brainstorming, problem solving and thinking. The room can hold up to 15 people comfortably - and all the ideas anyone can think of.”

While not for the IKEA-averse, this room is certainly designed to stimulate the senses. The linked blog post includes a description of the room, the philosophy behind it, several photos, and floor plans. Whether you love the space or hate it, it will definitely cause you to think.

There is no formula for a creative environment. What works for some people, would inhibit others. What works for some people under certain circumstances may not work under different circumstances, depending on the weather, mood, and other factors. Some creatives have more than one creative setting for just this reason. 

Innovative Space Exploration: Designing Your Optimal Creative Environment is an excellent essay to help you answer for yourself, “Where do I get my best ideas?” and then create one or more environments to help you do just that. (You’ll have to look past the bad, early 90’s web page design, though it’s worth it.)

Of course, managers and owners have a much bigger challenge as they have several or dozens of creatives to accommodate. You may want to look at earlier posts here, or here, or here.

I recently came across On My Desk: Creative folks share the stuff on their desks, which CR readers will likely enjoy. It’s not about desks, per se, as it’s actually more about studios/work environments. Several artists have posted photos of the inspirational environments which they’ve created. 

Interestingly, all of the photos demonstrate artists with strong organizational skills. Is there a connection between order and creativity? Perhaps the messier artists are simply too embarrassed to submit photos. Draw your own conclusions.

In an NYT article entitled Even the Giants Can Learn to Think Small (free subscription required - don’t bother) we see another nail in the coffin of the “if you’re not growing, you’re dying” mantra.

Part of the “thinking smaller” movement is a desire to provide better service through personalization, and part of it is the need to be leaner in an increasingly global marketplace. In the Times article, Professor Thomas W. Malone of MIT’s Sloan School of Management offers another reason - employees’ “noneconomic goals” like freedom, personal satisfaction and fulfillment. “How much energy and creativity might be unlocked if all the members of an organization felt in control?” he asks. Thinking back, this ties in perfectly to other times we’ve mentioned globalization making good talent harder to attract and keep.

Being smaller and agile has competitive advantages as well; companies as a whole tend to be more entrepreneurial. Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Linden Lab (Second Life), says optimizing a company for creativity involves helping all employees regardless of position develop an entrepreneurial spirit. “Most companies erroneously focus on competition and on differentiation from their competitors…the business opportunity lies in turning creativity into productivity.” And as most entrepreneurs know, ideas are worthless unless they are executed.

(If you do read the article, you may pick up on some similarities between Linden Lab’s and Pixar’s philosophies. And if have a really good memory, you’ll remember some similar posts on company and team size here, here, and here)

So, focus on fostering a collaborative, entrepreneurial spirit company-wide, and not growth for the sake of growth, for your business’ success.

In  The Perfectly-Designed Office, we contrasted offices that foster creativity and those which portray the idea of creativity. The pristine, image-conscious agencies want to look creative, yet what better way is there to woo new clients than to let them see your (often messy) creative process at work?

From Leland Maschmeyer (in this morning’s linked-to post), “Imagine being a prospective client walking into an agency… As you tour the office you’re inundated with ideas wherever you look. The energy of the agency being so vibrant and intoxicating that you feel the need to jump in on a project. And as you marvel at the prolific thinking swirling around you, you can’t shake the notion that maybe – just maybe - you are standing in the womb of creativity… Wow – what a great feeling to leave a prospective client with.”

Which brings us to our segue quote from earlier, “Clients who value your designs are good. Clients who also value your design process are better”.

The essay from which the above quote comes, details how Tupperware choose Frog Design to create Tupperware’s FlatOut! line of storage containers. “Tupperware liked what Frog had created for other clients (in other industries), but they also recognized that Frog’s design process was at the core of all those great designs. And most important, Tupperware understood how that process would benefit them.”

“Many clients don’t fully understand how designers create. And if your clients don’t understand it, or even know about it, then they won’t value it.”

Likewise, many clients do not fully understand how advertising agencies and production companies create.

Those who don’t, need to be taught. Those who do are more likely to trust agencies with their business without rounds of reviews and business pitches.

Wow. I stumbled across this amazing post, The Perfectly Designed Office, which discusses designed-to-impress ad agency offices and which is a must-read. (I’m somewhat embarrassed that I haven’t come across Leland Maschmeyer’s writing/blogging until today, though it’s safe to say I’ll be following his blog closely from now on.)

The Perfectly Designed Office drops a bombshell of a question, “should an office’s architecture communicate creativity or foster it?” then answers, “I think we’d all say ‘foster,’ but I don’t think these pristine offices do that.” Such offices are “not all that effective in generating creative thinking”, he writes, then provides four reasons why he thinks this way. Clearly not the type of person to merely observe and complain, he then offers a series of seven solutions. I’m intentionally not summarizing his points - read the article - though I will include a few quotes. “I think an agency should not look at its office as a place: it should look at it as a tool.” “After all, clients hire agencies for their thinking - not their architecture.”

While all of this is squarely aimed at advertising agencies, it is fodder for any creative or innovative business.

In another post, Maschmeyer provides a quote from another web essay, which I’ll both leave you with and use to segue into my next post:

“Clients who value your designs are good. Clients who also value your design process are better.”

What You Expect From Your Clients is What You Will Get, though from a programmer’s standpoint, perfectly parallels the creative business world, where many speak ill of their clients, claiming “they don’t get it” and often looking down at them. It’s simply absurd; without clients, business would cease. The problem is most rampant where both parties have several layers of bureaucracy; the creative process is stripped of almost all personal interaction and communication breaks down. 

Perhaps it’s stating the obvious that as long as clients are impersonalized as “them” and “they”, good communication and good service simply will not happen, and creative businesses depend on both.

The Design Funnel, another great manifesto on ChangeThis, is not about design as a gift or a rare ability or spontaneous insight; it is the process of design. Our clients have messages - stories to tell - and in creative businesses we must interpret (more often than not) vague requests, from which we form “concrete goals and results which are satisfying to (us), and effective for (our) clients)”. In a business setting, we cannot simply sit around and wait to be inspired; we have deadlines and air dates. And so while the work we do is creative, we must have a framework upon which to build, in order to meet business demands as well. The Design Funnel is a process which will undoubtedly prevent much of the heartache and frustration in “dealing” with clients, as it involves listening, communicating and collaborating. Download it and read it. It should change the way you interact with your clients.