• My passion is for the past 5-6 years has been to try to figure out how people in teams are consistently able to make ideas happen again and again.
• We need to be driven to our work out of our passion.
• Creativity is a double-edged sword.
• It gives us great ideas.
• It also gives us too many great ideas.
• That makes it hard for any single idea to see the idea.
• Some ideas should never happen.
• Even the greatest ideas suffer the against the odds of actually happening.
• Energy and excitement is high when a new idea strikes.
• After a few days, life catches up with us.
• We enter into the doldrums of project management.
• We want to return to the energy and idea when the idea first struck.
• We use our creativity to come with a new idea.
• It’s a repetitious cycle.
• Thee are are more half-written novels in the world than actual novels.
• We have to learn to survive the project plateau.

The Creative’s Pitfalls

1. A Love for Idea Generation.
2. The Gravitational Force of Operations.
3. A Lack of Feeling Organized.
4. A Lack of Accountability.
5. A Lack of Feedback Exchange.
6. Disorganized and Isolated Networks.

What Behance Does

• To help organize the creative word’s work.
• Created a network of creative professionals by developing a platform for them to share their ideas.
• The Behance Network is a “LinkedIn” of the creative world.
• Build a platform for creatives to get more exposure for their work.
• You can organize the creative world’s work when you have it on the same platform.
• Action Method is a method they’ve developed to help people make their ideas happen.

Genius is 1% inspirations and 99% perspiration. – Thomas Edison

• Focus on the 99%.
• There’s too much discussion of where ideas and creativity come from.
• Focus on the execution of those ideas.

How Do Some People and Teams Defy the Odds and Make Ideas Happen?

• Organization & Execution
• Communal Forces
• Leadership Capability

Organization

• We are being inundated with “stuff.”
• Emails, texts, messages, etc.
• We spend our time trying to whittle away at the collected inboxes of our lives.
• We live in an Era of Reactionary Workflow.
• We react to what’s coming at us instead of being proactive to the work that matters.
• We can be constantly reacting and never be proactive.
• We can longer rely on being forced to deep thinking.
• We need a window of non-stimulation in our day where we aren’t reacting or tuning in.
• We need to focused on a short list of 2-3 things that are important to us in the long-term.
• Think about things that are important.
• Spend energy on staying organized.
• Organization is the competitive advantage in the creative field.
• A Formula for Impact: Creativity x Organization = Impact
• You can have all of the greatest ideas and creativity but if you have no organization around them, you will never have impact.
• Spend more time organizing around your ideas.
• Organized teams and companies have a greater impact.
• Organize with a bias to action.
• The best systems for organization or made by ourselves.
• Be proud of what you are developing for yourself.

The Action Method is Just 3 Things:

1. Action Steps
2. Backburners
3. References

Action Steps

• Leave meetings focused with next steps beginning with verbs.
• “Call this person…” “Email…”

Backburners

• Things that could be actionable but aren’t ready yet.

References

• Notes, attachments, and handouts

Meetings

• Meetings are extremely expensive.
• People pull for agenda items to have
• Meetings are an arbitrary measure of time.
• We leave without anything actionable.
• When we have meetings that have no action, should they have been an email instead of a meeting?
• Have a standing meeting… knees get weak as people commentate instead of content-making.
• Have a bias towards action.
• Have a culture of capturing action steps.
• Take time at the end of the meeting going around asking people what they are going to do next. What are their actionable steps?
• Ask people, “Did you capture that?”

Backburners

• Create a backburner ritual.
• File ideas.
• Make a ritual of going through your backburner and taking a pen, editing what is actionable or crossed off the list.
• Something that came up in a meeting 6 months ago could finally be actionable.

Surround Yourself with Progess

• Show your goals and milestones in a visual way.
• The ability to come up with an idea is easy to do when you love what you do.
• The execution is difficult unless you surround yourself with progress.
• Progress is an impetus for action.

Prioritize Projects Visually

• Create an energy line focused on how much energy should be allocated for projects.
• People put too many projects on high or extreme.
• Focus on what’s almost due not on what you are most excited about.
• When teams miss deadlines it’s because you disagreed over where a project should be on the energy line.

Optimize to Surpass Your Horizon of Success

• We are always told to fix what’s not broken.
• However, to make things happen you have to build on your success.
• Success has a horizon that’s blinding.
• We tend to spend a lot of our energy on what’s not working instead of building on what’s already working.

Communal Forces

• How do you leverage your comunity to find traction for your ideas.

3 Types of People

• The Dreamers – have a tendency to come up with something new.
• The Doer – the “Debbie Downer” of the world. Constantly at odds with the dreamer.
• The Incrementalist – rotates between being a Dreamer and a Doer. They do too many things.

Regardless of who you are, you need people. Ideas don’t happen in isolation. The idea of the lone creative is a myth.

Share Ideas Liberally

• The benefits of sharing your ideas outweighs the cost.
• The community provides accountabillity.

Share Ownership of Ideas

• You have a decision to make about an idea.
• Do people work with you?
• Are you empowering others to make decisions?
• Are you willing to share ownership to engage your team.

Seek Competition

• Competition is a dirty word.
• We are all colleagues.
• The impetus to act on an idea can come from your community in the form of competition.
• Pace yourself… with other people on your team and people in your community.

Find Your Way to Breakthroughs

• There is a benefit to fighting.
• People have strong opinions about how execution should happen.
• Explore one another’s opinions.
• Unfortunately, we get heated… we care about the solution.
• Suddenly, someone will let go of the rope.
• Apathy hurts our constituents.
• Fight apathy ruthlessly.
• Care enough to battle.

Don’t Become Burdened by Consensus

• What are the sacred extremes?
• What are the 1 or 2 things that cannot be compromised.
• Don’t settle for the least common denominator.
• What will move people?
• Hold 1 or 2 things dear.

Overcome the Stigma of Self-Marketing

• Our community needs to be aware of what we’re capable of doing.
• BUT, we can’t be overly-promoting of who we are and what we are capable of doing.
• We don’t want to be overlooked.
• We have to overcome the stigma of self-marketing.
• Have a respect-based self-marketing strategy.
• Gain credibility by becoming a curator.
• Share about things that interest you.
• Build a following.
• Whenever you embark on a new project, everyone will already know.
• Care for the stream that you create for people.

Leadership Capability

• What great leaders are doing or not doing in the creative world to keep their teams engaged with projects.

Leaders Talk Last

• Silence the visionary.
• Buy engagement from your team.
• People will leave their jobs because they don’t feel fully utilized.
• They aren’t being asked first about what we should do.
• We need to listen first.
• We shouldn’t tell people what we think the plan should be.
• Engagement leads to involvement in a project through its completion.

Find and empower the “Hot Spots”

• Your contributions should outlast your stay.
• Who are the nodes that people look up to in your organization?
• It’s rarely the senior leader… it’s the assistants.
• The nodes to be kept and empowered.

Value the Team’s Immune System

• The human body has an immune system that keeps us healthy.
• It kills anything new that tries to enter into our body.
• In a creative team, the doers are the immunes system.
• The doers kill off everything that is new.
• They keep us healthy.
• During a brainstorm, the dreams are empowered and the doers are suppressed.
• You need dreamers and doers.
• Great creative teams often fail because their leader is a dreamer.
• A group of dreamers are intoxicated by ideas and have no sober monitors.

Seek Restraints

• Failure in most teams centered around the problem of not having a l
• In the creative community we shun restraints.
• Restrains are empowering for the creative process.
• When they aren’t given we need to seek them.

Be the Bureaucracy Breaker

• The best way to break it is to ask the annoying questions:
• “Why can’t we try this?”
• “Who needs to sign off on this?”
• “Why do we have to wait?”
• As stewards of ideas, we need to ask our bosses to make decisions.
• Ask difficult and annoying questions to keep things moving.
• They pierce with annoying questions.

Push People Into the Intersection

• Successful people live in the intersection of their Interests, Skills, and Opportunities.
• How can we make sure we are working in our overlap?
• How can we push people into working from their overlap?
• Give people opportunities that match their passions and skills.

Gain Confidence From Doubt

• The more people doubt you the more you are probably onto something.
• Society is hypocritical.
• We shun people before we celebrate them.
• Gain confidence from being doubted.
• Nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means.

See Yourself As the Steward of Your Ideas

• Responsibility > Opportunity
• Are you a prototypical creative mind?
• Where does the responsibility lie?
• See your creativity not as an opportunity but as a responsibility.
• Make your ideas happen.
• Embrace the practices that push ideas to fruition.
• That’s what moves the world forward.
• Ideas are greater than ourselves.