It’s a simple question. When I ask people what they want to get out of a training course with me on design or creativity, a common answer is ‘greater confidence that my ideas are good’. But how do I know if my ideas are any good? In this post I provide an answer that is simple, but that has deeper consequences.
Inspired by Tom Lehrer’s The Elements, I wrote the Structural Elements Song to be an itinerary to an educational world tour of structural form. Like The Elements, it is set to the tune of a Modern Major General by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Today I’m sharing a principle of workshop design about how we gather feedback in workshops. But the principle also applies more widely to how we get feedback in design.
For me the Designer’s Paradox is a key concept in helping people understand what the process of design is. The term was coined by my colleague at Think Up Ed McCann.
The Designer’s Paradox states that the client doesn’t know what they want until they know what they can have
Ed McCann – see Think Up (2018). Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers (online) – notes and resources. Available here [Accessed: January 2021].
In this post I’ll explain why I think this observation is so useful and how we can use it.
One way I use this blog is a jotter for ideas that I’m mulling over and discussing. By having all these musings in one place, I’m creating a sort of written Kalideascope. This weekend I’ve been thinking a lot about left-handedness.
This week’s Weekend Engineering Works post is about Ticket to Ride winning strategies. The game involves racing against other players to build a network of railway lines across different counties and continents. What I find exciting about the game is the recreation of an age of bold and adventurous engineering: the railway era. I particular enjoy building routes that I have travelled down in real life. But what I enjoy most is dreaming up winning strategies, and then testing them out.
In this post I describe my few of my more successful Ticket to Ride wining strategies. Alongside, as you might expect from this blog, I’ve also provided some wider musings on their philosophical implications.
I regularly ask this question on my ‘How to Have Better Ideas’ workshops (the sequel to ‘How to Have Ideas’). It’s a short question that triggers a wide range of answers. But the one I am looking for is this:
‘A good idea is one that meets the brief’
My aim is marrying up the brief and the idea. I want to emphasise that the two should match. If the idea doesn’t meet the brief, then we have three consequences:
You are in a state of flow. The next action flows from the previous. You are in the moment. Then boom, in comes an email that sets off a chain reaction of anxiety and worry. At least that’s what just happened to me. Your creative surplus – time and attention – gets burned on managing your personal response to that email. You are back to zero. What do you do next?
When then there’s too much going on to do your creative work then merely create something. I picked up this term ‘merely’ concept from Seth Godin in this interview with Tim Ferris.
Sometimes not doing something takes up more effort than quickly doing it. As Godin explains, there’s a voice that says what we might produce might not be good enough. We spend time and direct our attention towards worrying about not being able to do something good.
In my second post on building creative surplus – the time and energy we need to invest in creative thinking – I describe the OOOOOO, an approach for overcoming organisational overwhelm and takes away our creative time,
Creative surplus is what you invest in order to create new ideas. Like operating surplus – or profit – it is what is left over when an organisation or individual’s basic operating needs are met, which is available to invest in growth of the next project. Rather than pounds and resources, creative surplus is the mental space and energy available to you to think creatively. Unlike profit, I see that creative surplus is something that most organisations spend little time thinking about.
That’s what my 8-year-old daughter said to me yesterday. Truth be told, I’d been talking earlier in the week about ski-lift engineering as a job that combines so many of her passions: rocks and minerals: climbing; being outdoors; skiing (following a single trip to a dry ski slope); making Lego zip lines; drawing. No wonder she likes the idea. So do I. In fact, wonder if it is too late to apply?
Here’s four things you can do straight away to give your project a creative boost.
Write down the brief. What are you trying to do? Who are you serving?
Write as many things as you can about the project in a big piece of paper. I recommend using the following three headings as prompts: Information, Questions, Ideas. Stick it on the wall near where you work.
Talk through your ideas with someone. Ask them just to listen and not say anything until you are done.
Try to ignore the project for a day (I bet you can’t), and then the next day, write down five new ideas that will inevitably have emerged.
You are a world class performer at living your typical day. No one else has practised the precise set of habits, in the same precise sequence that makes up your typical day and with same ease as you. From how you wake up to, to how you speak to family or friends, to the first thing you think when you arrive at work to what you do in the evenings.
Our experience of life is what we do every day. Habit, developed over time, adds terrific momentum to our routines until they become a hard-to-stop force in our lives (I might need to do a dimensional analysis on that statement).
It’s a phrase I picked up a long time ago from Tim Ferriss and it has stuck. What you do is much more important than how you do it. More and more I notice lots of organisational energy being spent tweaking how something is done rather than addressing what needs to be done. Here are some ways that it is showing up for me at the moment.
I picked up this tip at home yesterday – thanks Mary. It’s a formula for getting to the point when writing emails. What do you want the person to think, what do you want them to feel and what do you want them to do. That’s it. You can save background context for another time for further down the email if you wish.
As an added challenge, see if you can get it down to three sentences.
Facilitation means making something easier. It isn’t about controlling; it’s about following, listening and enabling. In a workshop setting, it’s about having the confidence to let go of control and see what happens, and if things don’t go as expected, being confident to step back in and help everyone get back on track.
Watching the Christmas Day Strictly Come Dancing highlights show I saw two pieces of facilitation gold, which are a lesson in what to do when things go wrong and how to put them right again.
Today I’m preparing for a session I’m giving at the University of Cambridge tomorrow on how to sell ideas. To help prepare, I’m going back through old posts to gather materials on the art of selling. Here is the best of what I have found.
Asking what if. It’s my go-to technique for stimulating rapid idea generation in groups. In this post, the latest in my series on creative thinking tools for projects, I am sharing another tool for Turning the Kalideascope. In other words, mixing up what we know about a project to help find new ideas. In this post I explain the thinking and then I share a method for facilitating this approach in groups.
We move now in my series of posts on tools for creative thinking from gathering inputs to stimulating new connections. This is what I call ‘Turning the Kalideacope‘. The first technique is called ‘Use your Professional Palette’, and it builds on a technique for Filling the Kalideascope we discussed yesterday. It also provides a bridge from gathering inputs to processing them. First, let’s talk about the pre-requisites.
There are some inputs to our creative process that we build up over time so that we are ready to draw on them whenever we work on a new project. In this next post in my series on creative thinking tools for projects, I will share with you another source of inputs for the Kalideacope. I call it the ‘preparing the colours for your Professional Palette. These are the set of colours from which you paint your ideas. The image this phrase conjures up for me is of the Impressionist painter spending time in their workshop in Paris getting their paints ready before they get on a train from the Gare St. Lazare, head out into the Normandy countryside and paint a landscape. You have to do the prep in the workshop before you can go out and paint. But how does this apply to us?
We need creative thinking tools in our project toolkit to get the most out the opportunities that a new project offers. Projects provide a setting in which people can come together. They provide a focus point for joint attention. They can lead to outcomes that are probably far greater than what we could achieve on our own. In organisations we rightly focus effort on achieving project goals within project constraints – this is project management. But what I think gets neglected is investing in the creative thinking will help define those goals and help reach them in new ways.
The need for creative thinking in setting goals and figuring out how to achieve them is greater than ever before. The climate and ecological emergencies show us that the usual ways of thinking have failed us. We need new thinking. We need creative thinking.
I have spent much of the last five years researching, developing and teaching practical creative thinking tools. People use these tools to help develop their personal and team-level creativity in projects. Based on feedback from workshops with hundreds of engineers and other professionals, I have developed a shortlist of tools and techniques that have the most impact: either in terms of how they help people understand creativity; or how they empower people to be creative with more confidence.
I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when online meetings are getting really dull, I gaze at the globe on my desk and search for islands. My eye lazily drifts across the curving expanses of ocean and every so often something spikes my attention. Usually it is no more than spec, and when I lean in I see, in microscopic print, the name of an islands or an archipelago. Before long I’m on the good ship Wikipedia (I’m a supporter – are you?) setting imaginary sail for these distant lands. Recent places I have made landfall include:
Today engineers completed work on a major new irrigation channel to bring drinking water to a major new coastal development on Sand Bay, near Weston-Super-Mare. The 60-metre-long new canal brings water that rises from the coarse sand at the back of the beach across the inter-tidal zone to the new fortified town, which looks north-westwards across the Bristol Channel towards Cardiff.
In a bold vision, the water supply has two functions: potable water supply for the imaginary people living in the turret in the middle of the island; and also to ensure the defensive moat is always full. Anglo-French design and build contractors Eiffelover and Co. have a long track record in delivering civil and environmental projects in coastal settings.
Off-topic, but I feel we rarely capture and talk about moments of grief. Between facilitation sessions today I listened to the final episode of Radio 3’s year-long Composer of the Week series on Beethoven, the episode in which he dies. And now I am streaming tears: because it is a sad story, yes; because he wrote music that can make you cry, also yes. But more so because I really, really miss the all-encompassing world of live music. To hear that full orchestral sound now would be such a joy. I miss going to see my Dad play in an orchestra. I miss the joy of giving shared attention to creative spectacles, be they small or large. I can stream whatever music I want, but I want to see human beings playing, making the noise. That’s all.
Together, the people around you know so much more than you do. In my last post for now on Filling the Kalideacope – gathering inputs for the creative process – I am suggesting that you tap into the vast resource of information and insight that is the people around you. Ask them about the context, the setting of the brief. Ask them if they have done anything similar themselves. Ask them what ideas the brief inspires in them. How does the project make them feel?
And then they speak, listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t pitch in with your idea. See where the train of thought takes them and go along with them on the ride.
Humans tend be to attracted to novelty – Oo, the shiny new thing – but sometimes what we need is in what we know already. This post is another in a my series on ‘Filling the Kalideascope‘ – gathering inputs to the creative process. Today’s input is your previous project work.
