Friction versus Conviction

It’s the 29th… tricksy February… and that gives us another opportunity for a chat.

A friend asked me the other day, “When is the right time to have doubts, and when is the right time to have conviction?” There’s an obvious, short-hand answer to this. Read on! – but read with scepticism.

Have doubts when you’re deciding, planning or creating. When the time comes for action, act with conviction.

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Hmmm.... okay. That’s a broad brushstroke, and it’s not a bad generalisation. The truth is always more grey. I’m going to talk about two reasons which complicate the above suggestion.

Friction

First, there are processes which benefit from friction (such as deliberating on a big decision) and processes which should be frictionless (like taking action).

I’m using the word “friction” here to indicate those things which frustrate, delay, or complicate things. They’re uncomfortable, annoying, and at certain points, very necessary. Doubt isn't a pleasant emotion. Questioning your assumptions, getting contrasting viewpoints from people with different agendas, plotting out possible consequences…. all of these things are friction, and they all improve the quality of decisions, the depth of creative projects, and the possibility of coming up with truly new ideas.

Why do big cities work? They shouldn’t. They need more infrastructure than small towns, things are more expensive (like rent) but big cities just keep growing. 85% of Australians live in big cities. The truth is that living shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of other people forces you to look at the world in different ways. The pace of living is faster – and while it’s intoxicating, it is also frustrating.

Frustration encourages people to come up with novelty.

Frictionless processes are streamlined, smooth and pleasant. Distractions and interruptions are minimised, the IT equipment works, and everyone is working towards the same clear goal. It’s useful to remove friction from tasks which are basic, frequent, irrelevant to the job, or those that could be dangerous. To put it another way, your employees shouldn’t have to struggle to find a car park or a first aid kit.

Squinting through the keyhole

Have you ever needed to take decisive action when you’re not 100% sure, either of the facts, or of how you feel about the decision? I'm sure that anyone who has ever painted a house or booked a holiday has felt this way. You may find it uncomfortable (or you may be one of those remarkable people who relish it.)

Perfect knowledge is unattainable, partly because we haven’t got all day for it to come in, and partly because working out The Final Truth is like trying to work out what’s in the next room by squinting through the keyhole.* We only ever see a part of the real world - and we still need to make decisions and take definite action. That’s okay, as long as you acknowledge that you could be wrong, and you’re ready to jump to Plan B when it turns out that you were. It can be really hard to let go of Plan A, especially when it’s beautiful and clever; but if coming up with a beautiful plan takes genius, being willing to let it go is divine. We should never criticize people for changing their minds when new information comes in.

* The keyhole can be a metaphor for a few things, but for the sake of convenience I’m going to say it’s a symbol of human limitations.

In short…

We need to be able to doubt ourselves, and we need to have confidence. If you feel that you’re too much one or the other, that’s great! You've got one of the boxes ticked. Work gradually towards the other one.

For those of you who have some agency over the projects you're involved in, are there processes that need more friction, more questioning of assumptions, more arguments? Can you throw some constructive sand into that engine? For the processes that need streamlining, is there a way to smooth them? (We've all got to fight the accumulation of unnecessary paperwork and pointless meetings!)

Good luck,

Sean

A Game of Hats

It's the end of the month, we've tasted 2016 and had plenty of time to decide whether we like it, or whether we're just going to politely push it around on our plate and make unconvincing "mmmm!" noises if people ask.

Today I'm going to talk about hats and working productively in a group. Close your eyes, and imagine the following scenario...

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Teams

Your team is working on putting together a creative project. Everyone has a slightly different idea of what the goals are, and how you should go about it. The loudest people are pushing for their ideas, someone is doodling a fairly accurate reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and you know that you'll end up doing something safe and uninteresting because it's easier than getting people to agree.

How vexing are teams? I mean, people are great, but getting greatness out of a team is a challenge: as well as solving problems and making progress towards your goal, you've got to communicate well, be available and generally avoid making anyone feel terrible. You also have to judge the right time to encourage and persuade, and the right time to simply say, “this is what’s going to happen.”

Working on a creative problem is particularly tricky. Here’s one of life’s paradoxes: Creative people don’t always like structure, but structure can free them to be more creative.

So let's look at a structure. To do that, I'm going to casually mention that Edward de Bono is an eighty-something year old Maltese psychologist and creative thinking expert, who says quirky things like “a memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen”. His best known work is his Theory of the Six Hats.

What’s this Six Hats thing?

In a nutshell, the “six hats” idea is that there are six naturally occurring phases in idea development:

WHITE is for Data: Gather the necessary facts
RED is for Emotion: Listen to your feelings on the subject
GREEN is for Creativity: Come up with a new idea
YELLOW is for Positivity: Explore the happy consequences of your idea
BLACK is for Troubleshooting: Find problems and fixing them
BLUE is for Overview: Manage and facilitate this whole process

And furthermore, if you can get everybody on the same page at the same time, you won’t have people pulling in different directions.

A very specific and common example of people working at cross-purposes is when a new idea is proposed (GREEN HAT) and it is immediately attacked and destroyed (BLACK HAT). If the first thing you hear is always criticism, why would you suggest ideas in future? New ideas are like precious green seedlings, they need at least a little nurturing.

This doesn't mean that Black Hats aren't useful – they’re very useful – but if you’re a Black Hat it’s easy to drift away from the pleasing meadow of Troubleshooting to the craggy rocks of Criticism. A symptom of the latter is saying “that’s not going to work,” instead of “I see a problem with this aspect, but we could solve it by…” or “I see a problem with this aspect, does anyone have any ideas that would help fix that?”

In this first instance, the critic comes across as being against the idea, and therefore against progress. This makes people sad.
The second way around, the troubleshooter comes across as forward-thinking and a team player. There will be high-fives.

I'm already casually using phrases like “Black Hats” with you, to mean “people who tend towards identifying problems and thinking about ways to fix them”. But no-one should think they can only wear one hat. We all wear all the hats, just at different times.

If you can get a group to agree as to which phase you’re on, you can all work together instead of arguing. For example if you’re in the White Hat phase, you would define the problem, establish the parameters (budget, time frame, space, essential elements), work out the questions you must have the answers to, and set about getting that data.

You may not agree with the theory or the way it plays out, but it certainly gives us a way of describing behaviours that we all recognize. You may also find yourself saying “but I have a delightful and productive time with teamwork!” – I hope you do! - in which case, there’s no need for hats.

Freeplay

A few years ago I was asked to facilitate a workshop on creative game design at the Freeplay Independent Game Festival in Melbourne, along with Ben McKenzie, a fellow expert in games and stories. We based our session around the Six Hats model, by setting a creative challenge which we didn't have a solution to, and then stepping the group through games and exercises which got them to engage in the various hats. After all, people like to solve problems and they like to play games.

I was delighted at how whole-heartedly the participants through themselves into the workshop, and quite blown away by the results. The example question I set was “Come up with a new group game involving no props” and some of the ideas still have me itching to play again.*

* One of my favourite of the games that were invented that day involved landing a remote control plane in a target zone by everyone yelling instructions at it. Except that the plane was a person holding their arms out to the side, making bjjjjj noises. And there was an opposing team trying to race you to the goal with their own plane-human, and if they collide then you have to start over with new planes.

The important bit

Let me leave you with two questions to ponder:

What colored hat do I usually wear when working with other people?

Can I take it off?

Sean

First, to Know Yourself

The end of a year, the beginning of something unknown… it’s just the tick of a clock, an entirely fictional concept, but New Years always gives me a sense of the thin sliver of my time against the backdrop of eternity.

Let's back off from such an immense theme, and return to one more at hand... fearlessness.

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Fearlessness

Apart from the lovely image it conjures (the staunch adventurer bravely set out, through dangers unknown and hardships unnumbered), it’s a key word for getting past a sticking point. Facing up to an uncomfortable truth, doing an unpleasant task, making a difficult decision… These all take courage.

Sometimes the courage is warranted. If the worst possible rational outcome* is a truly dreadful scenario, then you will need genuine courage to face it.

Other times, it’s not courage you need, but willpower. If you find yourself saying, “This is all too hard for me, I don’t know if I can make it through this next six weeks,” then you have two choices. You can seize the courage to change the situation – or at least talk to someone who's not so close to the situation, who could give advice or help – or you can call on your iron willpower to stick it out. After all, you are an enduring entity; you will outlast this situation; you are a rock against which the waves break, and when the foam and fury sizzles away, you will still be there, damp but impervious.

* The worst possible irrational outcome is: the audition won’t go well. They won’t cast you. And then zombies will eat your brains.**

** There are more colourful examples of worst possible irrational outcomes at Deep, Dark Fears (frankrause.tumblr.com)

Today I want to talk about one of those times when you need courage.

Last month we talked about authenticity, about finding a message that resonated with your core values and beliefs. Ensuring that your style is consistent with those values. Let’s say your core value is hope, and your style is therefore upbeat, optimistic, sunny.  Your theme will be from the “hope” category of themes (something like endurance, love, never surrendering, the triumph of good) and your message is going to depend on the context of your work, your audience, and the topic. But it will probably say something hopeful.

In order to be authentic, you have to know your core values, and own them fearlessly.

Where do values even come from?

We acquire values through innate preference. I don’t like loud noises and that has translated into a distaste of guns, sirens and balloons.

We absorb them as The Rules which governed our family when we were kids. You knew The Rules, whether they were explicitly stated, or Never Spoken.

We are inspired by the words of others, whether it's through books, films, or hearing them speak.

We reason them out while wrestling with our thoughts at 4am.

Of all of these, the ones imprinted on you by your family are probably the strongest, and also the ones which you may have purposely flipped during your rebellious teenage years, so that now you are as firmly anti whatever-it-is as you were once staunchly for it.

I have two simple tests which tell me my core values.

1. “Love me, love MacGyver.”
When a friend transgresses one of my core values, I think, “Right. That’s it. You’re dead to me now.“ I'm a flexible, easy-going person. But these core values are a line drawn in the sand.

2. ”I will put down my comic book for you, core value.”
When I see someone abusing one of my core values, I'm already across the room, doing something about it, before I have even stopped to think about how tired/busy/none-of-my-business I am.

The reason I cite courage as a requirement for knowing and owning your core values is that sometimes we tell ourselves that we have a core value because we think we should, or because others expect it, or because we’re pretending to have it in order to sell something. Because we’re human.

It takes courage to look yourself in the eye and say, “What do I stand for? And can I stand for that, even when other people are pressuring me to say or be something different?”

Your core value could be a word, or a phrase, or a whole sentence. It may be a crisply defined ideal that you live by, or it may be a fuzzy group of related ideas, with tendrils of meaning that branch out into other concepts. What fun to look through that lens at each problem you encounter, each piece of work you do. I believe in X. How does this problem connect to X?

When you connect your core value to the message that you’re delivering, you are at your most confident, articulate, passionate… in a word, authentic.

But... marketing?

Shouldn't you adjust your work to fit what your client wants? Of course. You have to meet your clients' needs. Even so, you can stay true to your core values without becoming rigid or uncompromising: your suit of values should not be so tight a fit that they constrain every choice you make.... just the big ones. 

I'm now heading off somewhere I can be simultaneously fearless, and kind to animals.

Cheerio!
Sean