Market7

On Monday at SxSW I watched Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson from Adaptive Path discuss the 10 tips for managing in a creative environment. This post focuses only on two tips. Don’t worry, At the end of this, I will list the other eight tips for those of you who absolutely MUST look under the bandage.

What I love about the adaptive path research was how they took a cross disciplinary slice. They spent time studying diverse, creative groups including restaurants, theater troupes, and professional writers among others.

Tip #1: Actively turn the corner

This diagram is of the creative process:

The first half of creating anything involves a divergence of ideas. You start with a single idea and then everyone starts throwing in different ideas that diverge from the original. No idea is eliminated at this stage and often experiments and mini-models are created. Then you turn the corner. At some explicitly defined point, you stop taking in new ideas and start converging towards a single point by eliminating what is unnecessary. This reduces scope creep, release slippage and the dreaded moving target. Eliminated ideas aren’t trashed, simply put into a “future creation/release” bucket.

Tip #2: Kill your darlings

Eliminate the ideas you LOVE that don’t get you closer to the goal first. Don’t eliminate the low hanging fruit or easy choices first. Choose instead to go after eliminating the tough choices from the beginning. By biting the bullet and eliminating the difficult choices first, the low-hanging fruit (those ideas to which you are not attached) becomes easy.

The eight other tips:
3. Cross-train the entire team
4. Rotate leadership
5. Know your roles
6. Practice, practice practice
7. Make the mission explicit to the entire team
8. Leadership is a service
9. Generate the creative projects around the group’s interests
10. Remember the audience
BONUS: Celebrate Failure (after all, it’s part of the creative process)

In any exploration there needs to be focus and attention on the right details. We speak of the bigger picture, but very often the bigger picture is obfuscated by our own tendency to identify. The challenge that comes out of identity is using it as the right tool in the right context.

Through-out the software development process, identity shifts both on an individual basis and on the basis of perspective. In order to approach the Elephant our practice of learning and exploring as professionals must move back towards understanding the bigger picture.

Appreciating the bigger picture in the agile process is about respecting how much massive potential exists in the world and how limited our resources are.

It is about creating and publishing humanistic software.

It is about simplification and refinement of our own understanding. Understanding the external and internal models that limit our operation in both the world of software and the world at large.

Most Importantly, it is about transforming the conceptual into the concrete. Just as people cannot eat the sound of toast, our users cannot interact with ideas, they need widgets and buttons and text_fields  (oh my!)

At Market7 we are approaching the collaboration elephant, come join us.