“the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness.”
Most of us link creativy with art or those guys in marketing but it’s far more wide than that. More importantly it’s not something the lucky ones have and most of us are condemned to live without any.
Creativity doesn’t need to be about creating something original necessarily, but it’s about to link different ideas, experimenting and see what happens. Sometimes a creative idea might result out of a mistake on a different idea (e.g. like the well known case of the post-its).
But why does creativy matter? Well it’s about transforming what we have around us and improve things. If we always do the same things again and again we would never evolve and that’s how we have been moving forward. Evolution would not have happened without creativy.
How can you foster creativy?
Very simply put I would say is try something new. Go out with the kids and play with them, imerse in their way to see the world and maybe those playful explorations in the weekend might result in a productive idea during the following week in the office.
Learn a new instrument or a new hobby or just revive an old one. Go for a walk and appreciate the nature around you.
Another important layer to creative is to surround yourself with people with different ideas than yours. If your workplace is not diverse enough, then find ways where you can interact with people from different backgrounds and different experiences than yours. For instance attend an event of a topic you wouldn’t normally listen to. You might be surprise with what you find.
How can you apply creative ideas at work?
If you work in marketing or any creative related job I guess you will be by default more used to this concept. For those of us that do not, it might be about applying the most crazy simple idea that pops in your mind to address a problem. You will only be able to generate those ideas if you apply the points above. If you do the same thing for weeks, months and years this will be harder and harder to achieve. Like milking a cow that has no milk left to give.
My own examples
First of all let’s just say I don’t consider myself a creative person, even though I like to draw, write and photography. But those juicy ideas don’t come to me naturally. However, I tend to be good at finding workarounds for problems and probably that comes from different expiriences I had over time and because I have been lucky to work in international environments and completely different people.
(Warning: project jargon ahead)
When we started to work in Agile back in 2017 most of my team was struggling to understand how to apply agile into building a new feed from system A to B because by nature those tend to be waterfall, you need someone to write the perfect requirements, then someone to write the perfect specification that maps out those requirements into something the technical team could then code. No way you could do that into “sprints” of 2 weeks.
Agile was all very new for us, so the idea that popped into my head was to use Lego. Yap, so I explained that a feed could be seen as a lego house, but a house needs to be build from the foundations. So we could break the work in blocks first, initially make the foundations (in the case of building the feed, mapping source A to destination B), then you could build the inner walls (e.g. how the data would be loaded in the target system after being mapped out), and then the furniture (e.g. work on the automation and any key controls), finally you could work in the bells and wistles (e.g. additional controls and reporting).
Would you even think this is a creative example as such? Probably not, but by thinking of layering a concept everyone understood (lego and building houses) into something new (Agile) helped people to get a better picture on how this could be done.
Why does it matter for companies?
Well I hope this part is obvious. Unless companies embrace creatiivity and promote an environment which allows everyone to have a moment to reflect to get those juicy ideas flowing, they won’t move forward with new products and services or even better ways to deliver value. The risk is competition will!
If companies want to continue to be at the top of the game and contiuing growing they really need to ensure evolution continues to happen. The consumers for sure will, at a pace higher and higher than never. Either leaders think ahead or they stay behind.
Inspired by the change of seasons, was thinking about when it’s time to move on. Most people just think that moving on means that what we had before was bad, like a failed relationship and time to move on, a tiny house? time to move on. But does it really have to be just about leaving bad things behind? Well, not always.
Thinking of my own career, I have been quite lucky over the years that I never left because I was in a bad place or a in a bad team, but mostly because another opportunity popped up. This is certainly true for the biggest changes I had:
Was contacted by a London company when I was still in my home country and the first question that popped in my mind was: well, why not? So I’ve packed my bags and just moved. Was it easy? No way! Not to mention it was quite expensive to move. All the savings I had accummulated up until that moment were simply gone with paying hotel rooms, deposit for the house, flights and other moving expenses. Also my other half moved with me without having a job. It was really hard but honestely the best decision I ever did.
Then I moved because a friend sent my cv as he was hoping I would be flying less, working from London more and working less hours. I did stop flying indeed but not really the travel. I will confess I did regret this move quite a lot. I really liked where I was but looking back I knew I was in a breaking point. It was a matter of time, I had to change.
The last time I moved, and it’s almost been 4 years now, was because on my first day back from my maternity leave I did a coffee stop to chat with my to be new boss. This was the moment I’ve said goodbye to consultancy firms and went to industry instead.
So indeed for me there was always a pattern which was always about opportunities popping up and me saying yes. This is a very priviledged position to be in, I have to recognize that. However it got me thinking a lot about the topic.
What is the point you start to feel comfortable in your seat? I mean we all like to be cozy and know the people you work with, it brings a sense of belonging and stability but sometimes from a career perspective it means you are no longer doing new stuff which is key to your own development.
Maybe worth saying I’m writing this with the view of personal development and not necessarily thinking about the career growth. Following from the previous post, this is a different angle of exploring Ikigai, Where else could you be thinking about using your skills to bring you a new angle into your work life (and maybe even personal) and where you could also bring a fresh mind to a different team?
Recently in a coffee chat, one of our senior leaders said that she was trying to speak with different people (at her peer level) working in completely different teams to have a better view of what else is done within the organization and for herself to have a better view of what she could be doing and what else she could learn. And I thought, this is actually a really good idea!
I do remember when I was still graduating from uni and I had no idea what I wanted to do. My first internship was at the HR department but because I was good with technology I’ve ended up helping to implement the internal sharepoint. At the time I really wanted to explore marketing and I applied for a few positions, but where I’ve landed was in customer relationship development in a huge technology firm. My boss back then told me I would be a great fit for consultancy, so that’s what I did. I’ve sent my cv to one of the big 4 to see where it would take me. Given my past background in technology I ended up in the technology arm of the firm. Even there, on my first year I was helping the team to produce user guides for all the different areas, as part of that I’ve ended up doing testing and ultimately it gave me a good view within that area of what I could be doing. I think I was the only one of my peer group who ended up having a choice of what I wanted to do next! After that I’ve managed to never do the same thing twice and I guess that’s why I never really abandoned consultancy because each project is different.
But now I’m missing back the days where I could just experiment completely different things to have a better sense of what I wanted to do. I’ll be totally honest, I still don’t know! Yes that’s right, because I know there are so many things I haven’t yet tried I don’t know what else is out there I can try and maybe end up liking.
So really the question you should be asking yourself, maybe for a smaller step, is what are other teams doing in your company? Is there anything you could try? Could even be as simple as speaking with your line manager and find a few hours to help a completely different team so you can grow a particular skillset. I keep on telling my own team, if there’s anything you want to try just let me know and we’ll work together to ensure you get a few hours so you can do it. I don’t think they take me seriously though. But if you don’t try how do you know? I just seriously can’t understand people that stay 20 years or more doing exactly the same day after day. Yes, it’s comfortable I know, so is my sofa and I don’t spend 24h there.
Just because the office is the office, it doesn’t mean you can’t make it fun for you, and surely learning something new and prooving you can do it is a good healthy challenge. If it goes wrong you can always go back to what you were doing before.
First let me start by saying I’m a huge fan of Japanese culture, from Kaizen (continuous improvement), to the great sense of community where everyone feels proud of what they do because it’s all important to the community (not just yourself). If I’m feeling stressed out I always try to close my eyes and return to the place I felt most at peace, and that was a Zen garden in the outskirts of Kyoto.
There have been many trends and inspirations from Japandi to japanese food and Marie Kondo. I was chatting with my team this week and I’ve said a few times that I believe the western world has lost a sense of purpose and even mastery (and my mastery I mean purposefully wanting to continue to improve a particular skillset). Do you wonder why the japanese people live for so long? A possible explanation (along with lifestyle choices) is related to Ikigai.
I first discovered Ikigai 1 or 2 years ago (I completely lose track of time these days) through the book below.
This book is available at Amazon here, at Watersontes here and at Foyles here
The book mainly focus on how they apply Ikigai – or one’s purpose – to live better and longer and the more I think about it the more I believe this is very relevant for the our office live as well. Not just for us as human beings but for the organization as a whole.
Because I’m a firm believe a picture is better than words (and same as the kids I focus on the pictures first and if I don’t get it I will read the text after) see below.
In summary Ikigai is about finding that sweet spot on what you love, you are good at (or with some training and mastery you can improve) and that the world needs. It’s all about what makes you wake up in the morning and feel this is what you want to be doing because it has a purpose, not just for you but as a contribution to society. It’s what would make you love Mondays (if such a thing is possible).
Most people – and again please note I’m contextualizing people working in offices – go to work to get money. Let’s face it, we need it. But when is the point where we say I have what I need, I’m contended therefore I can focus on what I trully enjoy doing and maybe dedicating some of my time contributing to a bigger purpose. We get carried away that we need more money to buy more stuff, because stuff gives us status and likes, but once you get them you have to work get harder to get more, more and more. How do you end up? Most of us, just plain miserable.
See this concept of me me me, look at me I’m a special snow flake is recently new and very western. We evolved by being part of a group and I think that’s where the magic of Ikigai begins.
How do you believe that, if you as an individual worked out what you’re good and can do, but also thought about how you and your team can continue to evolve together to make things better for everyone? It could be organizing everyone to tackle a small charitable project (e.g. painting a local school, arranging a garden outside) and then applying your learnings back into the office? You would feel more connected, you would feel you have a purpose, that the company you work for genuinely wants to make things better. Wouldn’t that be better? Would you feel less moody on a Monday morning?
What we get is this sense that you and you alone have to work harder to be noticed, to then get promotion and then it doesn’t even matter if you feel it has a purpose, as the purpose if to fulfill your own ego. I can’t believe for a second that in the end this is even beneficial for the organization. Soon enough people burn out and at some point they leave and with every person that leaves is a small portion of the companies reputation that gets damaged. As I’ve written a few times, one day you are the employee next day you might be the client.
The question we should all be asking is do you want to wait until retirement to be doing the things you love doing and that make you smile? Is there anything you can do right now in the role you have at your company to make life easier for you and those around you? If you are totally miserable with your job, I would seriously consider living and reassess why you’ve stayed for so long and I would sit down and try to find what else you could do to reuse the skills you have and find a new job where you will be able to continue to pay your bills but do something more fulfilling.
No company will ever benefit from an employee who’s miserable, this person cannot be at their best no matter how many hours you put on. No company will benefit from an environment where everyone is stabbing each other to grow up in the hierarchy.
And no, not advocating everyone to resign right here right now because I’m sure there are things you can implement now. For instance I take a great sense of fulfillment by ensuring my team enjoys working together and that everyone feels respected and that their voice is being listen to. I enjoy when I am able to share my own personal experiences to someone more junior than me so they can relate and take their own lessons out of it (some would call it mentoring). If you are into sports then why not create a sports team in your group? Arts? Same thing. Don’t restrict what your work is to the deliverables you have to achieve day in and day out or what your oulook tells you that you need to be doing. Find what you can implement right now to make you part of something bigger where all of you will benefit from it, find your own ikigai.
Please raise your hand if you find that you’re having too many meetings? All hands raised? Yap, in fact I have both of my hands up. It’s just feels like meetingeddon.
You start your day with a few meetings to wake up, you go for lunch and there you go, more meetings!
I was once reading a book and stumbled upont the quote below. I shared it with the team and we ended up printing it up and posting it in our wall:
First of all, why are meetings bad?
In my view, meetings are neither good nor bad but they are avoidable. Yes, that’s right. A meeting should be just a quick catch up to formalize a common agreement. To make meetings efficient it means that all the relevant parties need to make their homework, prepare, have the right discussions and then just present them at the relevant meeting and close the topic.
If you have too many meetings how will you get the chance to get the work done? By half listening to one of the meetings so you can reply to emails or get any work done while in a meeting – a lot easier now given we’re all working from home. But we all know multitasking is a lie, so why are you in that meeting anyway? One (or a few meetings) can be efficient and sometimes are totally necessary, however the problem is when meetings get in the way of getting meaningful work done. How can you be productive if you use your most productive slots to do meetings rather than work?
This is one of the reasons why I would wake up at 05h20 to be at work at 07. Not because I’ve read it somewhere that all successful people wake up really early but because I hated rush hour and even worst, hated to arrive in the office and go straight to meetings. If for any reason that would happen I felt like punching people and only a bit of coffee would hold me back from doing so.
And don’t get me started in those meetings where someone would arrive to the room having printed a pack for each participant, twenty first century hello? I have no doubt in my mind that this meeting overflow is one of the key culprits for people feeling so low and tired these days. After we all had to work from home, most of us just endeding up commuting time to plug in even more meetings in our calendars.
So what can you do? Before I dive into my own ideas, I have to admit that theory is amazing, problem is always putting them in practice. However, having shared these with some people at work and receiving some positive feedback that they were helpful decided to write them here too.
How do you show to your calendar who’s the boss?
I’m a firm believer in organization. Clutter and mess just give me anxiety, likewise a mad calendar will do too. The tips below work for both office life as well as any personal to do’s.
1 – Time Blocking
This is the most important tip of them all. It’s all about rulling your calendar before your calendar rules you. How do you do this?
First block in your personal breaks – we all need them, be it lunch, a 30m job outside, breakfast, a bath, a slot to help the kids do homework, whatever you need. Then block in the slots to do critical work – e.g. to achieve your number one priority of the day which should fit in on when you feel most productive. Ideally this would be a slot of 2h where you should remain undisturbed. At tne end of the day you should reserve a slot to recap on your achievements of the day and plan the day ahead of you. If you need to review a document next day, find a slot in your calendar and block it. All other available slots then can be used for the different meetings you need to organize yourself or attend.
For the different blocks I really like to use colour coding because it does help it become more visual. Here’s the colours I use:
Green – My personal breaks (breakfast, take my daughter to school, lunch, a quick walk outside)
Purple – This would be anything where it’s either a doctors appointment or any commitments related to my daughter
Orange – Working slots (including prep for next day)
Yellow – Important meetings
Blue – All other meetings
Edit: I know use different colours per project so it’s easier to spot how much time I have allocated to each of them
Choose your own colours and have fun with it! I Also apply the same rules on my own personal calendar, where I have reminders for key birthdays and key things I need to prepare for next day. I also do a meal planning to remove that stress from my week. As I’m writing I just finished my meal planning and online weekly shopping where I buy what I need for the meals I have added into the menu for the week ahead.
Finally don’t forget to leave some contingency for the unexpected because that’s life. It quite well be an emergency deliverable or one of the kids falling sick and you have to pick them from school. If you have tackled your critical work at the start of your day (assuming that’s when you feel more productive) you will feel a lot better than if you’ve left it for the end.
2 – Tips to reduce the number of meetings
Below sharing my own rules for trying to reduce the number of meetings that pop up in my calendar:
Reject meetings without any agenda – Go and check what you have in your calendar. I’m pretty sure you are going to find meetings with a ton of people invite where any clue regarding on what the meeting is about is a vague subject. Reject, reject, reject! If the meeting doesn’t have a clear goal it’s likely to run with the wind and just waste your time and your team’s as well. No regrets, just reject it.
Reject meetings where you don’t feel you don’t had value – I have to remind my own team of this one too because they tend to believe that the person inviting them had a reason for it. You want to know what? Many times they don’t! So just check the agenda and if you are unsure about why you have been invite and have a quick chat with the organizer. It’s quite likely that you will find that someone else from your team should join instead.
Reject meetings which are not critical and would be in the way of achieving your (or your team’s) priorities for the day – Maybe the meeting has a valid agenda and a goal, maybe you can even add value to it, but it’s not the most critical topic right now and you need that slot to get critical work done. Reject it. Just have a quick chat with the organizer and challenge if the meeting can be moved to a later date or just suggest someone else to go in your place
Think about what you can let burn right now – This is a lesson my boss told me and goes hand in hand with the previous one. Sometimes you need to let a little fire to start to avoid a big one to burn everything down. This will be the case where neither you nor anyone in your team can really make to a certain meeting but you know if you don’t attend it will be just a little controlled fire which you can deal with at a later stage.
Reject meetings which conflict with personal slots – I have received in the past meeting requests from really senior people which would clash with my slot to take my daughter to school. Having judged that the meeting wasn’t critical I just politely declined them and proposed an alternative slot. So it’s up to you to determine what’s non negotiable and protect it with all your might because no one else will!
So the key here is don’t be afraid to challenge what you get in your calendar and not be afraid to say no. You might be surprised with what you will find.
3 – If you’re the one who needs to organize a lot of meetings
I totally fall in this category. And there’s nothing that frustrates me the most as having to organize meeting with 2 people that could well just chat together without your intervention. True story! So here’s some tips you can practice if you need to organize a meeting.
First start by defining the meeting purpose: what is the outcome you want to achieve? Who do you need to achieve it? What’s the format that will most likely enable you and the attendees to achieve it? How long do you need to get there, 30m? 1h? As per rules above you need to ensure the meeting has a clear agenda and goal and if you can timebox it.
Try to keep the attendees to the minimum – I would love to see how much money companies burn in meetings. Except townhalls which are meant to provide information to a complete department, I have seen meetings running for a couple of hours with more than 20 people on them and I always wondered what’s the cost for the organization. More than it should be spent I’m sure. So if you are organizing a meeting just think of the key people you really need to achieve your goal and try to stick with just those. The less people you are, the more likely is you’ll have a productive discussion.
Think of the type of meeting you need – If you have a big topic maybe you would be better off with a quick 15m meeting to explain what needs to be achieved, communicate the goals to the wither audiance, let them do the investigation and the homework and agree the slot where you’ll review it together. You might need to break it into smaller working groups before the group can get together again. By all means avoid having more than 10 people for hours in a single meeting. A meeting should always be the last resort and should be able to achieve a specific goal.
If the meeting is going of topic – No matter how well you organize this can well happen. If it does try to intervene as soon as you can and ackwoldge the point needs to be discussed further and park it in the backlog (this should be included in the summary of the meeting) and ensure you go back to the next agenda item.
Do you need to organize it? – Maybe I should have started with this one, but do you really need to organize the meeting yourself and run it? Ask someone else in your team (who knows about the topic) to go and arrange it directly with the people that need to be involved and ensure there is a clear agenda and a documented outcome of the meeting. See, you saved yourself 1 or 2 extra meetings in your calendar.
Close the meeting with the summary of what was discussed, key actions, owners and timelines and agree when the group needs to meet together again (if required).
Document the outcomes of the meeting – No joke, but in the past we had to repeat meetings at a later stage because people will easily forget what had been already agreed in a previous meeting. So it always felt like those tv series where more than half is about the previous episode “in the previous episode”. So go ahead and document it. I’m not talking about those lengthy Minutes of the meeting documents but something with the key bullet points with either actions, owner, due dates and key decisions. If you can, while people are talking just draft those on your computer during the meeting itself so you only need a few minutes to send it back to the attendees after the meeting.
Meeting etiquete
All calendars provide you the option to accept / reject your meeting, so use it! It’s extremely rude to receive a calendar invite and not accept or reject. If you can’t make it just reject it, or if you want to attend it and the slot doesn’t work just propose an alternative slot. Not replying to an invite it’s an equivalent of not saying thank you when someone offers you something. So stop being rude!
If you are the meeting organizer please check the invitees calendars. A lot of people even fail to acklowledge other people work in a completely different timezone or use a slot that is already taken simply because they didn’t bother to check. If you have a lot of attendees it will be hard to find a slot that fits all, so think about who are the key people that need to be there and work around them. You can always talk to them to see what they could move instead.
Arrive on time – I’m obsessed with arriving on time for anything in life (this is a lesson I’ve got from my own dad. In my own culture people feel proud of arriving late because everyone else does!). I hate waiting therefore I don’t like to make people wait for me either. Sometimes I end up late from a previous meeting, so a courtesy I will send a note to the people in my next meeting saying I’m running out late and I expect to join in 5 to 15m (whatever the delay is). If I am the organizer this will allow the rest of the attendees of getting a refreshment as opposed to continuing to wait for you.
Mute your microphone if you’re not talking – This feels like meeting 101, but seriously a lot of people in this day and age still don’t know how to mute themselves when they are not talking so you end up with echo or a ton of background noise that just disturbs everyone else in the meeting. A computer headset is uber cheap these days, so get one that works and practice a few times and avoid all the meeting cliches.
Priorizite
Finally just prioritize everything. Many times you don’t need a lengthy meeting, all you need is a daily priority meeting (e.g. scrum) with your team (this works for project as well as Business As Usual). There are really cool tools out there these days which allow you to make it interactive and fun.
Sample tools you can use (depending what’s available in your company)
Mural – This is my favourite because it’s a post it based approach and the whole team can participate and provide updates at the same time in the meeting (or even after). You can make your own templates (I’m a huge fan)
Sli.Do – This is really good if you have a few objective questions you would like to get answered (e.g. vote on specific ideas) or get a sense of how the team is feeling. This is a really interactive tool. Also really good at allowing people to post their own questions anonymously, so if you want people to propose their ideas on what they want to see improved or what is worrying them this is great for that.
Pretty much all the tools above are Agile related, however I do believe agile concepts and tools can be applied everywhere these days. I am a huge advocate to a daily 15m meeting within the teams to ensure everyone is aligned on the priorities, goals and challenges the team is facing then off they are to do undisturbed work.
Would love to know your own ideas on how to reduce the meetings or how you can manage them more efficiently.
FYI, you're TBB 