#67 - Apex Creativity Requires You To Talk Entirely Too Much About A Topic
A different point of view about getting to the "right" answer
Hey folks! Been a while. New Dad life + Homegrown has been all-consuming, and I have a backlog of Exonomist topics to write about. I’m currently on a plane to South America and find myself with an extra hour to write a raw, maybe-meandering letter. Hope you enjoy!
Tl;dr — To better solve problems & achieve outcomes, people should embrace talking about the same topics over and over again to uncover previously unseen angles. If you have the patience to circle around the same topic over and over and over again across multiple conversations, there’s a good chance you’ll find a better way forward. And this better way is the key to achieving more.
How many times have you heard the words, “we’ve already talked about this…” with the somewhat-unspoken insinuation that you should stop talking about this topic? I feel like I have consistently been in this position at least once per month for the last decade. Oftentimes we acquiesce to the social pressure of the group at the expense of that nagging feeling inside our brains that says, “….argh this was worth talking about.”
Have you thought about what happens when you don’t bring up something that is important to you? Let’s work through an example now, but first a definition on how I think about solving problems & achieving outcomes.
How to structure a creative process:
No need to read everything. Just read the bolded text to get the main points.
Consulting gave me many many good habits and power skills, and one of them comes from a group I worked in for a couple of years called Doblin. Doblin was/is an innovation consulting firm that basically productized the entrepreneurial process. One of the most significant brain upgrades I ever experienced was onboarding for Doblin projects, which introduced me to this lifecycle of creation they called the Innovation Process (or something like that);
First, Frame the Problem
Then, Discover as much as you can about problem space
Then, Create concepts that might solve the problem
Then, Design what these concepts look and feel like
Then, Develop the thing you designed
Then, Test the thing with actual users
Then, Launch a minimum viable version of the thing you developed and tested, and finally
Then, Scale, first to a small set of users, then to a larger group, then to a larger group, etc. etc.
The power of this framework isn’t in following the steps so academically; it’s in spending an inordinate amount of time on the first two steps. When you take time to frame and discover more about a problem, you’ll see more of its contours.
Here’s an example of how to see more from something, using one of my favorite literary devices: the automobile. Here are two ways of looking at an automobile:
Approach 1: it’s a car. It gets you from point A to point B. It works. Cool.
Approach 2: this car is a vehicle with a cabin and a powertrain and thousands of parts that all come together to enable me to move faster than I ever could on my own two feet. A typical car has many different sub-systems that come together to operate a larger overall system that we call a Car. These sub-systems are many, and include things like: tire system, steering system, stabilization system, propulsion / engine system, exhaust (if applicable) system, temperature control system, brake system, emergency response safety systems, etc. Each of these systems must interact with one another, and we use technology to manage these interactions.
Wow, so many sub-systems. I’m going to now go research each system, how it works, why it isn’t 100% efficient.
I’m also going to go talk to 2-3 experts in each sub-system
Then I’m going to talk to potential consumers of this entire system and ask them 20 questions about cars — what they look for, why they buy, why they don’t buy, what they enjoy, what annoys them, etc.
Approach 2 takes way takes way more time to get through, but undoubtedly you will learn more from taking this path as opposed to the first.
I’m not suggesting that people only operate in Approach 1 or Approach 2 mode, but that there’s a spectrum between these two extremes, and that more people should spend time deploying characteristics of Approach 2.
OK, let’s pull back up to the prior topic of why it’s important to use more of Approach 2 whenever working through a problem / topic that’s important to you.
What happens when you don’t listen to that voice inside of your brain that wants to keep bringing something up?
A few things can happen:
You can feel stifled. Suffocated. Like you can’t express the thing you want to
You might fail to contribute a valuable point of view to the conversational mix, which could mean that
You might not find that beautiful, elegant path forward that was almost certainly there. It was so close, and a reason you didn’t discover it was because you gave up in the search, which could lead to…
Your ability to bring up challenging or contrarian points of view to atrophy, which
Can lead you to become a “yes” person who doesn’t contribute anything new or valuable to conversations
Imagine the cost of letting this happen? Think about the costs for your teams, for your relationships? Maybe for you the cost actually isn’t that high, but in my brain this is one of the highest costs to be paid.
…But to create consistent space to bring up almost anything, you need to be in a culture that promotes it
And this takes work. It takes work to reassure the people around you that uncomfortable conversations are GOOD, and that they are a sign of progress. And that progress feels so freaking messy sometimes, and that we humans don’t tend to love messes. Just like you work to learn a language, you need to work to learn how to create safe spaces around you, and the work is never done. The work continues on infinitely. You’re never done creating your culture, whether it’s at home or at work.
To find the better way, you must be prepared to talk a lot — “you just have to talk a lot.”
One of my co-founders, Dave Payne, is a bit of a startup legend in his own right in Atlanta. He has all sorts of unique ways of thinking and working that are wonderful, and one of the things we’ve been talking about a lot over the last few months is the importance of talking entirely too f*cking much about topics of importance to you.
We have this app, Voxer, that we use to communicate as a team. It’s an old-school app where you leave sometimes-very-long voice messages, and then respond to said messages over time. It allows us to basically communicate without being interrupted and without responding to all the social cues that you would get by talking about something live —> which promotes more authentic, independent thinking that is less influenced by in-conversation social pressures. Here’s an example of what our conversations look lik
We don’t just talk on vox. We are texting about the same set of topics almost all the time. We’re talking about them on unscheduled phone calls. We’re talking to each other in person. We’re sharing memos we write, graphics we draw. We’re talking to other people about these ideas, and we’re doing a metric ton of research to sharpen our points of view. We are embracing the fact that we have different views and opinions and channeling the merits of everyone’s ideas into the creative process. It’s intense. It’s what some might consider excessive, and it works.
When we invest this time to talk way too much, we’re finding new contours of ideas and those contours become the foundations of new things we build together. It’s a messy process, where emotions can (and should!) run high at times, but it undoubtedly leads to a better outcome than, “we talked about this already, it’s done, let’s move on.” At least that’s our experience.
End Points
The thing you should avoid is prematurely shutting down discussion of a topic when there’s probably more left to uncover about it
At no time ever in history does any one person know everything. At all times your point of view is broken or undeveloped in some way, and your mission should be to find the ways that it is, so that you can rebuild yourself to shore up / improve what might be broken
And lastly, things change. Maybe you did talk about the company’s new product positioning a month ago, and maybe marketing is already moving on creating campaigns for it, but maybe something happened in the last month that makes all the outputs marketing is doing a waste of time
And when time is all that we have, don’t you want to spend it well? If you’re already putting 500 hours into a project, why not make that 540 hours to make sure you’ve spent more time exploring the entirety of an ecosystem around a topic?
One question I’ll write about later: what I’ve described could easily be labeled “strategy spin” where people talk and talk and talk and never do anything. I’m aware of the critique and will come back to it at some point soon
I will admit, this is probably overkill for most people. Totally get that, and maybe you have a better way to get to what I will call “Apex Creativity” but I’m increasingly convinced that the way of thinking and collaborating that I’ve written about in this letter is probably the way for most people creating new things and/or pursuing an increasingly meaningful relationship on the personal sides of their lives