BEHAVIOUR 05 OF 10 . DESIGNING

Does a creative process have to happen in order?

No, and a process that only works in order is a fragile one. Real creative work leaps. Design the sequence so that somebody can jump ahead, and so that if the jump fails they land somewhere known rather than nowhere.

Designing is the one everybody mistakes for admin

Think, do, be. An agenda is not a design. An agenda is a list of topics with times next to them, and you can tell it apart from a design by one test: nothing in it can absorb a surprise.

Designing is the shape you put around other people’s thinking. That shape either holds them or exposes them, and they will feel which one it is within about ten minutes.

Where this came from

Early days, learning the craft. I was the support in the room, not the one running it.

The session was with department heads from the UK Department for Education, and my colleague was running it. She set something up, and I got inspired.

So I sketched an idea. Then I got up and ran the whole room through a complete concept that answered the entire brief, with no input from anybody else. I had even drawn how it would work.

I sat down thinking, job done, solved it.

The room went completely silent.

She looked at me, then pointed at the agenda on the wall, and said we are at point two of about eight.

The clients sat there wondering what on earth was happening. I have rarely felt a bigger fool.

Two things were true in that room

The first is that I broke the session. Not by being wrong about the idea. By delivering it at point two, when nobody else had been anywhere yet.

An answer that arrives before the room has travelled is not an answer. It is noise with confidence on it. There was nothing for anybody to do with it, which is exactly why the silence.

The second took me longer to admit. The design could not take it. It only worked in order, walked one step at a time, and it had no way to absorb somebody arriving early.

And in creative work somebody always jumps. That is what happens when it is going well.

A sequence that can only be walked is a fragile sequence.

Which is where Snakes and Ladders came from

I could not let go of the question. Why does it always have to be by the numbers? Why can we not make a bold leap ahead, knowing that if it is wrong, or it fails, we simply fall back to the last known place?

So I drew the process as a board.

The six steps are all still on it. Brief, insight, ideas, test, develop, launch. But it is a board, not a line. The ladders are the leaps. The snakes are the falls back. And every square is a known place, so a failed jump costs you a bit of ground instead of the whole game.

There are two instructions printed at the top of that poster. Start here. And start anywhere.

Both of them are deliberate. Design for the leap, and the room can afford to have one.

What the evidence says

Flow is a design specification, not a mood. Csikszentmihalyi’s account of flow turns on the balance between challenge and skill. Too much challenge for the capability in the room and you get anxiety. Too little and you get boredom. Flow lives in the matched middle, and it needs clear goals and immediate feedback to stay there.

Which explains the silence better than embarrassment does. By presenting a finished answer at point two, I dropped the challenge in that room to zero. There was nothing left for anybody to do. That is not respect for the work, it is boredom, and I had engineered it in about ninety seconds.

And people remember the peak and the end, not the average. Redelmeier, Katz and Kahneman (Pain, 2003) ran a randomised trial with 682 patients undergoing colonoscopy. One group had up to three extra minutes added at the end, with the discomfort reduced but the procedure otherwise unchanged.

Those patients remembered the whole experience as less unpleasant. They rated it lower against other unpleasant experiences. And over the following years they were more likely to come back for another one, with an odds ratio of 1.41. A longer procedure, remembered better, because the ending was better. Duration barely counted.

Now look at a standard workshop agenda. The strongest moment is somewhere in the middle, and it finishes with actions, owners, next steps and a conversation about the car park. You have designed something that will be remembered as admin.

What to do on Monday

Take the agenda for your next session and make two passes over it.

Mark the peak and the end, then design them. Not the content in between, that mostly takes care of itself. Where is the moment people will remember, and are you finishing on it or burying it at 11:40? The last ten minutes are doing more work than the middle ninety.

Then ask the leap question. If somebody in that room jumps to the answer at point two, what happens? If the honest answer is that the session breaks, then it is not designed, it is only sequenced.

Give every stage a known place to fall back to. Then a leap is a ladder rather than a derailment, and you get to find out whether they were right.

Designing is behaviour five of ten, and it sits with Facilitating and Leading in Module 3, Accelerating Creative Project Work.

Sources

  1. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The challenge and skill balance, and the anxiety and boredom conditions either side of it.
  2. Redelmeier, D. A., Katz, J., & Kahneman, D. (2003). Memories of colonoscopy: a randomized trial. Pain, 104, 187-194. 682 patients; odds ratio 1.41 for returning, p = 0.038. doi:10.1016/S0304-3959(03)00003-4
  3. BIF source: The Snakes and Ladders of Accelerated Innovation poster, which carries both “start here” and “start anywhere”. Matt Hart on the Department for Education session.