It was while I was typing up my thoughts in response to The Art of Innovation that I realized that, somewhere along the way, I seem to have developed an aversion to risk. When I was reading Kelley's thoughts on prototyping and product development, I kept finding myself asking "but how do you know which ideas are the ones worth expanding on?" I realized that even after finishing the book, I still didn't feel confident that I could forge ahead on some ideas and leave others behind without worrying that I'd chosen the wrong ones.
Howard Gardner's piece felt almost too on-target when I watched it soon after finishing the book. Among many other topics, he touched on the idea that the current generation is risk-averse, both in school and in life. Rather than putting ourselves out there first and gauging the response, he says, we want to know how we'll be judged and what metrics are being used to measure us. If I was worried about it in myself, and others thought that it was a growing trend, how could I combat it? How can we work against this trend in general?
The first answer I found is to look for inspiration from others - look to those people I admire, the people operating in business or in art (or both, or neither) who put themselves forward and take risks on ideas that sometimes pan out and sometimes don't. This is a list that I'll continue to build on as I move forward, and I expect I'll be looking back to it every so often as I try to build a new habit in myself of accepting risk.
- Out of every four restaurants Gordon Ramsay has opened, one of them has failed.
- Author J.K. Rowling left behind a successful YA fantasy series to publish books in adult fiction, one of them under a pseudonym.
- One of my colleagues in Advancement is leaving the office after a decade of service to the school in order to pursue her own business.
- My parents owned four different businesses over the course of their careers, one of them an outright financial failure. But they rebuilt and moved on to new opportunities.
- Steve Jobs came back to a company that had stagnated in an attempt to get it back in gear, and succeeded.
If I look to these people as inspiration when I'm hesitant to take a risk, perhaps it will help me to take the necessary leap.
What risk-takers inspire you?
Friday, June 27, 2014
Finding the Random in Everyday Life
My group was surprised by the effectiveness of random
stimuli in the creative process, but over the weeks since our class I recognized
that I should not have been: it’s been something that I’ve been depending on
for years already.
One difficulty of following a vegan diet that isn’t necessarily
obvious is the risk of falling into a rut. Veganism requires that you incorporate
a healthy variety of foods into your diet in order to get proper, balanced nutrition…
but it’s easy to get comfortable with a small variety of staple dishes and
repeat them over and over again. For me, cooking is one of my major creative
outlets, and I stumbled accidentally into the technique of
random-stimulus-to-inspire-creativity when I started to receive a farm share
order through a CSA.
When you don’t know from week to week what you’ll be cooking
with, it inspires you. If you get watermelon radishes in the box of vegetables,
and you’ve never in your life eaten them before (let alone cooked with them!)
you have to just dive in and make an effort. Maybe you can find a recipe to
start from, and maybe you can’t… but it’s watermelon radishes you have to work
with, and that’s what you’re going to eat. It’s not that different from having
rubber bands to work with, when you come right down to it.
And sometimes, you end up with a great big piles of greens and you have to find a way to keep them interesting.
Playing with the numbers
Creativity in my work is all about finding the story in a sea of numbers. I work with a group of fundraisers, taking stock of their efforts and the gifts they have brought in and reporting out to them so that they can tell how they are doing.
The difficulty of this is that numbers aren't all that exciting to many people. Particularly numbers which they see week in and week out, year after year, following the same basic patterns. Hearing that the Annual Fund made $12,348 more this month than last year may be important, but it doesn't succeed in doing either of the things that a good report should do: it doesn't give them anything specific to act upon, and it doesn't do a good job of motivating them to continue doing their work with passion.
So effective reporting requires playing with the numbers. Not changing them, of course, but poking at them and rearranging them, displaying them in new arrangements, looking for the story that they have to tell. It's not unlike the brainstorming activity that we did in class - I can't go in with the answer I want already fixed in my head, but instead I need to use the data as inspiration and continue tossing possibilities at it until some solid ideas begin to show themselves in the array of possibilities.
As often as not, it's a question of finding the right visualization for me - putting the numbers into different types of charts and grouping them by different categories until something stands out so clearly that it has an impact and a meaning that can be immediately grasped.
To take a real example of this, I was recently reporting on the progress of an annual fundraising effort, but to most of our standard reports it appeared to be performing exactly the same as it had the year before despite the fact that several things had changed dramatically - a different group was being appealed to, different events were being held, and so on. Did that mean that the changes had no effect on our population of potential donors? Or was something else going on? I began to chart the gifts in as many ways as I could, organizing the data year-to-year by type of donor, by the types of gifts they made... but when I charted the data by the circumstances of how we asked them, an important story practically leaped off the page at me: last year's events had been hugely successful, and this year's lagged far behind - but we had made up that gap entirely in personal face-to-face asks. It was a story that mattered for two reasons: first off, it was something I could show the gift officers that energized them and made them feel like their efforts had paid off. But it was important in its own right to know - our approach had changed, and it had a dramatic effect on our donors. Rather than assuming that efforts hadn't changed things, we knew that we had strengthened one area dramatically and it was time to find ways to shore up the other area that had slipped.
The difficulty of this is that numbers aren't all that exciting to many people. Particularly numbers which they see week in and week out, year after year, following the same basic patterns. Hearing that the Annual Fund made $12,348 more this month than last year may be important, but it doesn't succeed in doing either of the things that a good report should do: it doesn't give them anything specific to act upon, and it doesn't do a good job of motivating them to continue doing their work with passion.
So effective reporting requires playing with the numbers. Not changing them, of course, but poking at them and rearranging them, displaying them in new arrangements, looking for the story that they have to tell. It's not unlike the brainstorming activity that we did in class - I can't go in with the answer I want already fixed in my head, but instead I need to use the data as inspiration and continue tossing possibilities at it until some solid ideas begin to show themselves in the array of possibilities.
As often as not, it's a question of finding the right visualization for me - putting the numbers into different types of charts and grouping them by different categories until something stands out so clearly that it has an impact and a meaning that can be immediately grasped.
To take a real example of this, I was recently reporting on the progress of an annual fundraising effort, but to most of our standard reports it appeared to be performing exactly the same as it had the year before despite the fact that several things had changed dramatically - a different group was being appealed to, different events were being held, and so on. Did that mean that the changes had no effect on our population of potential donors? Or was something else going on? I began to chart the gifts in as many ways as I could, organizing the data year-to-year by type of donor, by the types of gifts they made... but when I charted the data by the circumstances of how we asked them, an important story practically leaped off the page at me: last year's events had been hugely successful, and this year's lagged far behind - but we had made up that gap entirely in personal face-to-face asks. It was a story that mattered for two reasons: first off, it was something I could show the gift officers that energized them and made them feel like their efforts had paid off. But it was important in its own right to know - our approach had changed, and it had a dramatic effect on our donors. Rather than assuming that efforts hadn't changed things, we knew that we had strengthened one area dramatically and it was time to find ways to shore up the other area that had slipped.
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