Viewing entries tagged
creativity
I am thrilled to announce that Hashtag Sports has selected their Creators of Color cohort for 2022. I had the honor of serving as a judge, looking at all the impressive applications and providing feedback. I do not envy the tough decisions that the organizers had to make to take all the feedback and make the final selections, as every application I looked at was very strong.
Checkout this year’s cohort at https://creators.hashtagsports.com/cohort-2022.
“Curiosity about life, in all its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” – Leo Burnett
“If no one told you how to do your job, how would you do it?” – Sara Blakely
“Don’t you wish that everyone in society was as creative as the cheaters?” - Levitt and Dubner
You own the problems that create problems for your customers. They might not be your fault, but they are your problem.
For more about your relationship with customers, read "Customer Feedback."
Singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles, in her book “Sounds Like Me,” talked about the music making process.
“I have learned over the years that ‘not knowing’ is part of the beauty of making music, and that vocabulary is important, but not crucial in communication. Only patience is crucial in communication. Recording is exploration. You take a piece of music and excavate, searching for the shape of the song wants to take in the moment. You use wonderful musicians, producers, and engineers who help you navigate those waters and hopefully also help you remember that it doesn’t have to feel precious or scary. You try things that don’t work as you hunt for what does. And sometimes you even find it.”
Life is a bit like that. Learning anything is an act of faith and mastery is an act of patience.
The other day I heard that in the ancient world the most important ideas were documented in poetry and today our important ideas are captured in spreadsheets. Although not complete accurate, it is thought-provoking. What important ideas, passions, or world views are wrapped in the allure of facts and figures and presented as data? I have long contended that a spreadsheet was an exceptional tool for writing fiction. Not that people mean harm or to mislead, but each time you have to complete a cell you are making a host of assumptions. To use the vocabulary of Excel, every number in every cell is filtered. Filtered by your point of view.
It is the time of year when people are wearing sun glasses. Where I am from in Oregon, we might be even more sensitive after enduring (ahem, enjoying) months of overcast skies. And each one of our chooses lenses to wear – both literally and figuratively – to view the world. Some people wear rose-tinted glasses and see the world as friendly and optimistic (and boy, do we need more of those people in our modern world). Others see it shaded gray. Others buy specialty lenses that highlight colors or shapes, like the glasses one can buy for golfing that help the ball stand out on the green.
An interesting thing happens when you wear glasses for a while: you no longer can see the tint. Your eyes adjust and the world takes on the colors and meaning that you’d expect. You know the sky is blue, even if your glasses tinge it green.
Our ability to characterize and categorize input (to know what data is important) and to adjust our perceptions to our world view (like our eyes adjusting to tinted lenses), is part of what makes us human. And this humanity can make us blind to data that doesn’t fit into our table cleanly or points of view that differ from our own.
I was working on a financial projection spreadsheet recently (that became even more convincing, I must say, because it was accompanied by a PowerPoint slide deck complete with infographic images and charts from a research analyst) and was reminded the power of the lens.
When you are working on a presentation, you start by asking what you want the “take away” to be. What do you want your audience or reader to understand better because of the presentation you are giving? What decision do you want them to make? And although it is proper presentation planning, that desired outcome begins its work of filtering and coloring the work of the presentation. To avoid one-sided analysis, I sought alternative input and ended up putting in a few slides that presented an alternative view. A different way to look at the issue at hand. To open the door for discussion. To guard against too narrow thinking. And to document assumptions.
It was a hard thing to do: to get away from the data and the analysis far enough to see a different picture, to take in different input, to identify what had been “thrown away” to make the clean and compelling point. But it proved to be valuable and, in the end, will lead to a better outcome.
So whether your best ideas are captured in poetry or in spreadsheets, it is important to remember that your best ideas might be improved, if you take off your glasses.
This article was first posted on LinkedIn Pulse.
I recently heard Heather Andrew from NeuroInsights speak at a conference. She explained how our brains are separated into right and left sections. Emotions are on the right, but language is on the left. So, to express your feelings is to pass them between the two lobes of the brain.
This has several implications. First, it can be difficult for some, as men, for instance, have less pathways between the lobes. And secondly, the act of putting emotions into words, changes them. Makes them more rational. Our anger, becomes righteous anger or defensiveness. Our shame becomes blame. Our irrationalities and impulses get sanitized when they get communicated.
Perhaps instead of speaking our emotions (and passing them to language on the left), we should instead use our right brains to sing them, paint them, or act them out in dance. Or perhaps, that is precisely what the performing arts already do?
#CreatorsRule
According to USA Today, the millennial generation (which is from 18-34 today) spends 10% of their day creating content. What is the impact of this as they come into the workforce and into leadership?
A lot has been written about the different style of learning and how people approach thinking in different ways. Sir Eric Robinson touched on this in his popular TED talk about how schools are killing creativity. In the talk, he refers to a famous dancer and choreographer who finally find other people who thought like her (through movement) when she joined a dance class in elementary school.
Others of us think by creating. Some of us build physical models or like to get hands-on. Others of us think by drawing. Or by writing.
This week, think about how you think and experiment with some different approaches to see what new ideas emerge.
