The Creativity Project

I heard about Best Buy’s Results Only Work Environment last year when I was searching for ways to make a work environment more entrepreneurial and engaging. It seems like a such a simple concept - focus on results only, treat people as adults and let them get their work done however they see best - without any mandatory schedules or meetings.

You might think that this would lead to utter chaos. But apparently in practice, people not only achieve better results (otherwise they’ll get fired), but they do so on their own terms, so they enjoy their work more, and it seems to be give people incentives to maximize their personal and company effectiveness - because now they own their time.

The team that inspired this change at Best Buy has broken off and formed CultureRx to assist in leading a cultural revolution to spread this highly effective practice.

I read an article today on the dark side of cliques - it speaks about how cliques in the workplace can have a negative effect on overall performance. A good approach to break them down is to take them head on, and facilitate open discussions, so people aren’t excluding their co-workers, talking behind their back or leading a negative charge.

I heard recently the one of the top reasons people leave their job is a lack of a friend at work, or a bad relationship with their boss. No wonder it is important to make everyone feel included.

I keep trying to make sense of what happens in my life, as if it ought to. For some reason, it just doesn’t. Reminds me of a quote from Dan Millman’s Peaceful Warrior, where he describes life with three aspects: Paradox, Humor, and Change.

• Paradox: Life is a mystery; don’t waste time figuring it out.
• Humor: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure.
• Change: Know that nothing stays the same.

Stuck trying to figure everything out? Perhaps the answer is to stop trying, and just act in life along the path that comes naturally.

I have been feeling stuck with my usual sources of internet news. In an attempt to broaden horizons beyond the usual RSS feeds, Digg and Reddit here are some sites with cutting-edge creative content…

10 New Interesting News Announcers

1. Hacker News
2. Arts & Letters Daily
3. The Register
4. Give me something to read
5. Delicious: popular
6. MetaFilter
7. PostRank
8. Stuff.co.nz
9. Feedmil
10. Science Daily

Where do you go to find new news?

Apparently Humor at the Office is Serious Business, so much that it is not just about “… clowning around and having fun. It has meaningful impact on cohesiveness in the workplace and communication quality among workers. The ability to appreciate humor, the ability to laugh and make other people laugh actually has physiological effects on the body that cause people to become more bonded.”

Of course, humor in writing research articles is still strictly taboo. But, go ahead, laugh in the office. When you boss frowns, just smile and wave, and tell you’re helping him with his bottom line.

My 21 day commitment of turning off my laptop by 9pm is an interesting project. After the first two weeks, I am finding:

• It forces me to concentrate. Watching the clock tick down, I get things done quickly and efficiently before 9pm.
• I send more e-mails: I don’t stress over making detailed and comprehensive responses, and am learning to effectively communicating my message with less.
• The time after 9pm is a great stress relief. Being able to let go in the evening creates space that I don’t fill with the pressure to get things done.
• On the down side - my posting has disappeared in the last week.

Strangely though, I feel out-of-balance. My previous 21-day stretches incorporating exercise, meditation and the creativity project have vanished.

Prof. Srikumar Rao, in his course, Creativity & Personal Mastery, states that anytime you are trying to change your behavior through an act of will, you are doing harm to yourself - instead you should focus on who you are being, and let the change happen naturally through you. In a way, these 21-day commitments are an attempt to force myself to change - and perhaps not the most effective way to bring about change.

Over the weekend, a colleague in the in open space retreat I attended suggested a method for communicating project status across a team without long, inefficient update meetings.

At the begining of each day, the project team (say 20 people) get together, and in the space of 15 minutes, everyone gives a brief update of what they’re working on and any problems they are encountering - while standing - no sitting allowed. People speak up if they are able to help, but no solutions are offered in the meeting.

Results: Everyone is informed about what others are worked upon, and connections form automatically to bring people together without wasting everyone’s time.

Somewhere, I heard it takes 21 days to develop a habit. So, I started giving myself 21-day commitments to help create change in my life.

I believe true change comes naturally when your beliefs change, and the way to change your beliefs is through awareness. The experience of being committed and doing something non-negotiable for 21 days provides awareness of what commitment means. And, it is much easier for me to say, I must do this today, for the next 3 weeks, then I must do this today, for the rest of my life.

Lifehack.org had a piece yesterday on How to Create a Non-Optional Mindset which examined the problem of seeing items we want to accomplish in our life as optional:

Because we haven’t made the relevant body-changing habits non-negotiables in our life. On some level we still consider optimal eating and consistent exercise to be optional. Of course we do, otherwise we’d never have the start-stop problem.

Tool: 21 Day Commitment

I have just started my third 21-day commitment, the objectives of first two were:

• Round 1: Minimum 15 minutes of meditation + 15 minutes of exercise per day.
• Round 2: In addition to above, taking the time to recall my dreams in the morning, and posting to the creativity project each day.

Learnings: 21 Day Commitment

Round 1 Results: Success. Making sure I had time each day for meditation and exercise, even if it was only for 15 minutes, was not as hard as I thought. I find even these 30 minutes are giving me more energy and clarity during the day.

Round 2 Results: Failed. Trying to commit to 4 things in a day, was too much. I started doing the minimum exercise and meditation each day, and cutting out my sleep to get things done, which made my energy and clarity worse.

–

Round 3 Objective: 9 pm rule

I have just started round 3 with the 9 pm rule. The rule is no laptop after 9pm. No e-mail, no writing, no nothing, except if I choose to watch a movie. (Although, I never watch movies, so I don’t expect this to occur).

This was a suggestion by my friend Olivia Fox Cabane as a way to improve my lack-of-sleep and walking around in a daze. If I can eliminate the word “sleepyhead” from my girlfriend’s vocabulary, I will consider it a victory.

Seth Godin explores a new standard for meetings and conferences and how to justify the increasing cost and time commitment of travel. Face-to-face contact is much more effective than internet-related conferencing tools and Seth hits an important point that we need to address this effectively.

One powerful method Seth missed in his analysis is Open Space Technology.

This weekend, I attended a retreat in Open Space format. The format was developed by Harrison Owen after spending a year organizing a conference, and the feedback he received was, “Nice conference. The speakers were okay, but what we really liked were the coffee breaks.” His solution? To hold a conference comprised entirely of coffee breaks.

From this idea, he developed a powerful style of holding conferences where attendees were responsible for devising and convening sessions at the start of the conference. People then are required to go to sessions they feel drawn to with the understanding that they will leave as soon as they are no longer contributing or receiving any value. The results skyrocketed past anyone’s expectations - a magical environment was created where everyone was engaged.

In a day when effective collaboration is a necessity to justify the cost - Open Space is an alternative I suspect we will be seeing much more of in the future.

Where does creativity come from?

1. The brain
2. The yet un-manifested realm of possibility
3. Action taken to create something new
4. Random chance
5. Edward de Bono
6. Hard work
7. TPS reports