Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my visualization design creativity.
As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativity. The one that works best for me is visualization coupled with self-talk.
Visualization is so important to help yourself & others conceptualize ideas. It’s why I always work hard to find images for my blog posts & why all of my keynote presentations are visual rather than bullet points with words.
What exactly is visualization?
It is exactly as it sounds. The process of visualization is literally imagining or seeing things in your mind. When I need to give a speech and I’m writing a slide for my deck, I think up the story in my mind that I’m going to tell for this slide. I literally imagine myself on stage saying the words. I think about how the audience might react and whether if I were in the audience I would be intrigued.
It’s why before every speech I call the organizer and drill them about who will be in the audience. I want to know how many people, their level of tech sophistication, their age, and their interests. I look carefully at who is speaking before me. In order to visualize how an audience will receive my presentation I have to be able to imagine the whole situation.
When I write a blog post I often see the words before I write them. If I know I have a topic I’m interested in writing about many times I’ll literally think of whole sentences in my mind as a test drive before I ever sit at the computer and type.
Strange, I know. But for many people, the most important driver of innovation is this kind of visualization & self-talk. Yet it almost sounds too strange or mystical and as a result, I seldom hear leaders talk about it. So I thought I would.
Creativity in our business lives
The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring/firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing/branding, and on and on. I hear very little discussion ever about how to be more creative.
It’s ironic because I believe creativity is the most important success criterion for a startup. And if we’re reflective, it’s also one of the most important success criteria for investors, senior executives, tech writers, and virtually anybody involved in business leadership. Yet most startups seem to constrain creativity to product design. That’s a shame.
Creativity is what helps us think of our ideas in the first place. It’s what helps us imagine what feature sets would be most appealing. It’s how we package our company story and drive our press coverage. As a VC it’s how I think through which markets will be attractive in the future, which ones I want to be in now, and how the technology & business world will likely evolve. Without creativity I’d simply invest in the trends I’m seeing on TechCrunch which I inherently believe means I would be investing in what has already happened rather than imagining what could be.
When I make important phone calls I literally play out the start of the call in my mind’s eye before I ever pick up the phone. I imagine myself saying my opening line and putting myself in the shoes of the receiver to think about how they’ll react.
There is not a single important business function I do that doesn’t involve creativity. And whether I’m preparing to attend a board meeting, I’m planning to lead a strategic discussion with an executive team, or whether I’m preparing for a TV interview – I use the same process.
The creative process
Whenever I need to do any task that requires insight I have to be able to visualize – to literally SEE the decision framework. Many people are visual thinkers. I often start with a blank piece of paper & a pen and start doodling. I try to visually deconstruct the problem with boxes, arrows, circles & other shapes. I add words & ideas. I try to figure out the structure of the component parts. I start to build in metaphors for what I’m thinking about. I roll up metaphors into a narrative or theme that has coherence.
I know this sounds abstract so let me give you an example from this week.
I recently invested in a company in the media & entertainment sector (this will be announced in a couple of months) so I’ve been thinking a lot about how the industry works, why the structure has evolved the way it did, why the company I invested in has had so much success and what this all implies for the future. I had to do all of this in order to get comfortable that the company had a scalable & sustainable advantage and to think through the threats I thought they would encounter.
I started to build this into a media & entertainment value chain that broke down the components of the industry into discrete parts. I put my definitions on them because I didn’t want my thinking to be constrained by industry-defined boundaries or definitions. From left to right I wrote in boxes: talent discovery, content development, production, post-production, distribution, & marketing. Underpinning it all I wrote: sales, asset management, analytics & talent management.
I used these boxes to imagine what existing film, tv, radio & print media companies did in each of these areas. Were they vertically integrated? If so, why? Did they dominate one or two areas? How did they come to do so? Why do cable & satellite companies force us to take content “bundles” that cost more than we want and have content we don’t watch? Why? Who else is complicit and equally bound by The Innovator’s Dilemma? Will this hold in the future?
Where do the new entrants like YouTube, Pandora, iTunes, Huffington Post, Boxee, Netflix, Demand Media, and other disruptive offerings fit into that equation and how is it changing? How much power does Google have due to search? How does social media on Facebook & Twitter change things?
If the past required us to watch a linear, time-based TV show that favored a grid-like TV Guide or electronic programming guides (EPGs), how will we find & discover content in the world of over-abundance? Can the market support new entrants like Clicker or will it favor the old guard like Rovi? If this appointment television had a 22-minute structure, is there a reason to expect that time allotment in the future? Why?
I wrote my initial conclusions in a post on The Future of Television & The Digital Living Room. If you read the post you’ll literally see the dissection of the topic in the way I saw it in my head.
But as I contemplate the future world I asked myself this new set of questions and I literally thought about each topic in my head and I scribbled notes onto my page. I moved the boxes around, I changed where the arrows went, and drew bullet points underneath each box. I rewrote pages 7-10 times. Writing it & re-writing it is not a problem – it is part of the creative process for me.
By having thought through the issues I can now begin the process of talking with industry people about this topic and why it works and how it works. I can ask for feedback in a focused way rather than a vague way. ”In which situations do you start with talent and built content that matches their talents and in which situation do you write the storyline first?” My framework gives me a deeper understanding of the sector.