Embracing agile creativity, Part 2: how process can enable greater creativity
Let’s explore how process can help individuals and teams to be more creative.
How to use process to be more successful with creative projects
It would seem that process and creativity are at odds with one another. How, for instance, could a rigid set of rules help inspire great design, great experiences, or new approaches to challenges? In fact, the two can not only co-exist, but work together to create better results and enable teams to be more creative and productive.
Let’s explore this a bit, in the second article in this series.
How can process help me be more creative?
While there are many people more expert than myself in the subject, I happen to know a little bit about ballroom dancing. Aside from a girlfriend in college strongly...encouraging... me to join her in lessons, I shot a documentary on the subject almost two decades ago. Long story, and no, you can’t watch it. That being said, much is made over the creative approach to dancing, but these performances would be nothing without the underlying process and structure.
For instance, the waltz has a basic “formula” of steps, and usually requires music to be played in ¾ timing. Tango, on the other hand, has a different set of steps and requires 4/4 time. All of the interpretation and creativity in dancers following either of those comes out of a strict adherence to the time signature, the foot placement, and even the emphasis of where the feet and body are placed at different points in measure.
What in the world does this have to do with a customer experience initiative, a marketing campaign, or an enterprise web redesign? Let’s explore how process can help individuals and teams to be more creative.
Process focuses your creativity
Steve Jobs famously wore the same outfit every day. Mark Zuckerberg apparently does the same. Why do this? Because it frees up the mental real estate reserved for wardrobe choices, and allows that focus and energy to be spent on other, more important things (at least to them).
This comes down to conservation of efforts. As I described earlier about the dangers of starting each projects as if from scratch, we can look at process as a way to focus our creativity. Instead of having to solve a creative challenge in a vacuum, process can give us some constraints so we don’t need to worry ourselves with aspects of delivery, iteration, roles, and responsibilities.
Those that subscribe to design thinking, or a methodology that often has its participants question the fundamentals of a product, service, or even process, may thinking that at least on the surface there is a conflict here. I disagree with this, however. Design thinking, is itself a process, and it has its own bound to eventually deliver a tangible product.
Thus, focusing on the solution while relying on a time tested process to get you there focuses your creative energy where it counts the most.
Healthy tension is… healthy
While there is often a toxic relationship between them, there can be a “healthy tension” between process and creativity. Leadership and managers who embrace this and impart this wisdom to their team members will see an increase in productivity, and better creative results.
A common example of this is how many people, whether they consider themselves creative or not, will procrastinate while getting things started for an important project or deadline. Why would anyone do this when the outcome of the effort is sometimes the matter of keeping your job, winning something important, or potentially even more serious?
Procrastination forces us to use an impending deadline as a constraining factor. Therefore, we introduce a process of sorts (the ticking clock) in order to achieve an objective. The flow of time is not something we can control, much as a well-articulated project process or methodology can or should be altered.
While I say that healthy tension is healthy, I don’t believe that procrastination is a particularly productive process or constraint. Much better it would be to devise an iterative approach to completing something. Call it the “slow and steady wins the race” approach as opposed to one where success or failure depends on some last minute decisions or creative choices.
Learn from your mistakes
Finally, having a baseline process that is consistently followed allows you to truly learn from bad choices, missed opportunities, and other mistakes. If you are continually reinventing the wheel when it comes to how you arrive at your finished products, you can always blame things like disorganization, lack of communication, lack of clarity, or any number of process-related items.
However, if you have consistency in how things are created, you can focus your learning more on how to create better deliverables themselves, not on what processes or communication steps would be needed to do so. This helps creatives to hone their craft better, and it helps teams focus on the work and not simply the delivery.
What not to do
As you can probably tell by reading this, I’m a strong believer in agile principles, and obviously believe that process and methodology can coexist within a highly creative and innovative environment, but we should always keep in mind what the priorities should be.
Thus, the Agile Manifesto itself makes an important point that the priority of our work should be “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”
Don’t hide behind process
You’ve created a great process, gotten your team to buy in, and can’t wait to see some great collaborations and deliverables on their way. Don’t create a process that you can ‘hide behind’ to justify substandard results if things don’t work out quite as well as you hoped the first or second times you implement it.
Remember, people come first, and if you are requiring something in your processes and expectations that don’t work for your team, embrace the opportunity to improve things. No process is perfect, either, and you should be open to making adjustments over time. Having the steps well-documented means that you can learn more easily, and not fall into a trap of changing something one time, then changing it back the next.
Don’t lose sight of the end goal
Clear guidelines, roles and responsibilities, and steps within a process can help teams achieve amazing results. Sometimes, however, the goal becomes simply to get deliverables to the next step in the process and then it becomes someone else’s issue to deal with. Don’t let your team lose sight of the big picture. Poorly implemented processes can break things down into such granular pieces that you lose the ability to think holistically and more creatively.
One way to solve for this is to have review meetings that re-align expectations and keep everyone focused on the bigger picture. The agile methodology does this well by having sprint review meetings where everyone comes together as a team and shares successes, ways to improve, and failures. This is a great opportunity to ensure everyone remains focused on the high-level objectives, while spending time talking about the details in between.
In the next part in this series, I’ll discuss how process can actually help individuals and teams be more creative.