Zumba: Create Your Own [Alternative Dance] World
Learning from “Let it move you”
Advertising’s great advantage is making images that dismiss the real baggage real people carry into the real world. And that’s why we buy the product: we want to be that person so in the zone we don’t realize we’ve been dancing on the conference table in the middle of a budget meeting.
[Click to play at Creativity]
But is “dismissing real baggage real people carry into the real world” really so far-fetched? I’m starting to think not. We’re all marching toward some image of life that we’ve created or someone has created for us.
What are you marching toward?
What could you be dancing toward?
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Via Creativity
Your Office Needs More “Yes, and…” Men and Women
How to Grow Collaborators 1-2-3
- Share your first thoughts as if they were dumb sketches.
- Wait for—look for—and welcome reactions.
- Then say “Yes, and ….”
- Rinse & repeat.
Clear a space for your team.
You model commitment to collaboration by sharing your first thoughts. This dumb sketch approach to life makes you vulnerable and open to criticism. And there will be criticism. But vulnerability + time creates serious ballast around the notion of getting full engagement from all those around.
Your “Yes, and…” is the other shoe that drops to indicate you are also taking your colleagues seriously. It doesn’t matter whether your colleagues are bosses or employees, “Yes, and…” works up and down the corporate food chain. “Yes, and…” is your go-to reaction to ideas. People will gradually come to understand you think the world needs more ideas with legs and feet, ideas that accomplish stuff.
As kids we taunted each other with how sticks and stones break bones but words, well…you know. But it turns out words have a more complicated existence. In many respects, words have far more power than we ever guessed. And in this growing of collaborators, our words can make stuff happen out in the world (a “speech-act,” one might say). It only takes one committed collaborant (I think I just made up a word or re-purposed a French word) to begin to clear a safe space for collaboration. That space will invite collaborators, who become a nucleus to change a team, a group, an organization—and more.
How will you encourage collaboration today?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Do your best ideas come in two stages?
Maybe that’s where collaboration fits: between.
A story: In second grade we all had to talk about what we did over the summer. I wrote a story that included lots of driving to far-away parts of the U.S. I wrote about camping and swimming and mountains and lakes and trees.
When finished, I read it to myself and thought, “This is boring.”
So I went back at it and remembered mishaps along the way. Flat tires and people falling into lakes and instances of poor judgment from my brothers. Especially instances of poor judgment from my brothers. Then I started inserting instances of poor judgment all over the story and it got very, very interesting.
When I gave my speech to my second grade class, the instances of poor judgment got the biggest laughs.
Share that raw thought with a clear-eyed friend.
Today I write stuff for a living, so I think in terms of drafts: There’s the rough draft, with all its heartache, hollering and hoopla just to wrestle a topic onto my screen. There’s the review with a stakeholder/client/colleague. Then there is the excellent revision. The goal is the excellent revision. But few people can begin with the good stuff that came out of the revision.
But you need not write stuff to realize that first ideas can often be improved by a clear-eyed, objective second glance. And often that clear-eyed glance, especially from someone hearing it for the first time, can tell you a lot about where the idea needs to go next. What your reviewer sees or doesn’t see, what causes them to pause, what causes them to guffaw, what causes them to restate or reread—all this is grist for the revision. And revisions are potent parts of the process.
With my clients I am very up front about wanting them to review a draft on the way to the final. And that is how I present it—I’ll write this thing and then you’ll look at it and give me your scathing criticism. And together we’ll move toward what we wanted all along. And the final will be that much better.
That’s what collaboration looks like to me: at least a two-stage process.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
We Landed a Medtech Account—Now What? 3 Understandings
Bollixed and castrated and then we begin
Advertising agencies and marketing firms are eager to land medical device accounts. These prestigious accounts are much desired and would seem to enlarge the status of an agency because of the exacting, rigorous work that helps the human condition. It doesn’t hurt that they seem to pay on time. But having worked with a number of ad agencies once they land such an account, there are a few common threads that surprise principals and employees:
- You’ll need experts: people who know how to work within a regulatory framework (“Claim this.” “Never claim that.”). People who know the words that soothe lawyers while still making sense to humans. And especially people who know their sinus node rhythm from their rhythm method. You will stay on message and every claim must be neatly tied to an article from a respected (first or second-tier) journal.
- Your creatives are (already) wringing their hands. That’s because creative solutions lie on the other side of a legal/regulatory/corporate culture grinder.
- Yes: the company has come to you for creative solutions.
- No: they cannot/will not back-off their own internal legal/regulatory controls. Their own internal machinery will bind and castrate many of those solutions you have used in the past. What a great beginning point!
- There will be rounds of changes. Many rounds. Way more than you are used to. Far more than you can reasonably put in your bid. They will seem…unmanageable. Taming revisions will take your best customer service manners and may take you deep into the internal relationship structure of the firm. But that is exactly the kind of partnering that is needed
If your agency can come to grips with these three understandings without imploding or driving sane people mad, you’ll begin to build a reservoir of expertise.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Let there be cheerleaders everywhere.
Thank you, SNL, for introducing these irrepressible characters into our cultural conversation.
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Year Without Pants: What’s Your Conversation Prompt?
Must Hierarchy Always Trump Collaboration?
In the excellent Year Without Pants (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013), Scott Berkun detailed his efforts to direct a team of programmers working for Automattic/Wordpress. This team was distributed around the world and gathered only occasionally. Most of their collaboration was mediated through computer screens and telephone lines. Curiously, email was not a major player. Instead, in-house blogs contained most of the collaborative communication (~75%), along with IRC (Internet Relay Chat), Skype and then e-mail (~1%). Blogs had the advantage of being entirely public (to the other players) and displaying the entire conversation. So potential collaborators could get up to speed as needed by simply reading/re-reading what had been said. And others could ignore the whole thing (which is the way of blogs).
Does your conversation prompt work?
Berkun found the prompt at the top of the collaborative blog was largely ignored—so common it was invisible (much like Twitter’s “What’s happening?”). It started with,
What’s on your mind?
and then
How can Team Social help you?
migrating eventually to:
Hi Scott: Do you know where your pants are?
That changing prompt became a way to wake up the conversation. It also demonstrated the playful nature of the team—a key factor in all Automattic/Wordpress collaborations. The prompt also turned into a good book title.
Berkun’s conversation prompt gives me hope that hierarchy need not trump collaboration. In my most collaborative projects, there was always a sense of fun/playful/silly/ridiculous that settled like a bubble over team meetings. In contrast, my more onerous jobs and projects carried a sense of duty and chain-gang attention to a boss hammering out a beat.
Creating that collaborative environment requires a light touch, a willingness to explore liminal spaces, record results and allow others access to the longer conversation. Creating collaboration also involves attention to conversation that results in replies, rather than monologue that begets numb pseudo-attention.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Do Not Click on this Pornographic Website
You may not recover. You have been warned.
“Porn” is a term we reserve for the depiction of erotic behavior designed to cause sexual excitement.
Everyone knows this.
But does the depiction of erotic behavior ever extend beyond sexual? I say “Yes” and note that it routinely presents as normal life. Lots of advertising aims for this lustful, must-own tone. Bathtubs, kitchens, lake homes. Cars. Bicycles. Camera lenses. Ice cream sandwiches. Apple is the pre-eminent, undisputed master of desire-manipulation designed to cause ownership lust, as witnessed in yesterday’s watch announcement. It’s a winning persuasion technique that bypasses reason as it reduces the unaware to a quivering mass of…longing.
you sexy thing
Really anything can be pornographic—even book ownership. More and more I see piles of books in Tumblrs along with a statement about how reading changes you. Which is true. But so does conversation. So does work. So does life. And so does experience. It’s curious because books seem to be moving to the level of a totem, where we hold them up as having a kind of magic power for wisdom. And all this as more and more of us read less and less. When I teach writing classes, I routinely say that even a paragraph is too much copy (too many words) for many of us.
I’m all for books. And I’m especially fond of reading them. But I’d like to see ads for owning the contents of books. I’d like to see ads that move people toward the deep reading Mortimer Adler defended in How to read a book. Ads that make it sexy to know something and to engage in a conversation about it.
But there’s no money to be made in that.
Maybe book lust is one of the OK-lusts. But I would hope we could grow up to the kind of deep knowing that brings book contents into our daily conversations.
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Image credit: Loome Theological Booksellers: “Largest secondhand dealer of theological books in the world.”
How LinkedIn Helps Before You Are Between Jobs
Generate The Thing Between
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for connection. But lots of people, once they land the job, put connection on the back burner. Some take it off the stove entirely—and that is a mistake, especially in this economy. I know this because many friends and colleagues are on radio silence most of the time. Until rumors of layoff float by. Then it’s connections galore.
Don’t let connections go dormant.
Connection is something that happens long before you have a need or want to generate a sale. In fact, connection is not about the need or the sale, it is something entirely different. And we make LinkedIn frenemies when we mistake connection for a sale.
For those who understand the importance of connections outside immediate work and building relationships widely, there is a great joy in getting to know people and simply seeing what might happen. It’s not even an introvert/extrovert thing. It is a possibility thing. Maybe it is a thing for dreamers, but I think not. It is for anyone who starts to wonder what is possible outside the structure that encases their days.
This openness to others—this beckoning to others, this waving them close—is the early move toward collaboration. It is the ordinary conversation that starts to generate new things between you, seemingly by magic. It is the beginning of finding common ground that eventually leads to “Wait—what could we do together?”
Curiously, openness to others has a way of working backward into our present job so that we start to see new ways of working, collaborating and connecting.
When teaching college students about professional writing, I try to help them understand that the best jobs are the ones not advertised. The best jobs open and shut before ever posted on a web page or printed as a classified ad. Those jobs are available only to connections. Those jobs are almost incidental to the connection: friends see what you do, how fun you are to work with. Their synapses fire and they say to themselves, “She might be perfect for this need we have.”
Maintaining and growing connection is not for a someday need or someday sale. It is a piece of being human and carries a glory all its own.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
What Did You Forget Today?
Welcome to Monday—what brings you here?
On your way to work—whether by train, plane or automobile (or stairs)—your mind raced ahead to anticipate the tasks needing attention. You passed by and through spaces not dedicated to the work you do: the incidental scenery along the way. Liminal spaces. Preoccupied with your onerous task (the meeting to conduct, the performance review, the estimate/report/files due by 11am), you may not have noticed those places. Anyway: aren’t they just the ugly, industrial infrastructure or detritus required to make the big commerce machine run?
Not really worth attention.
But those spaces have a way of releasing you and possibly preparing you for the very work you are doing just now. Those spaces—so regularly ignored as to become invisible—help your mind and body make the leap to the world of productivity. Moving forward through those spaces you shed thoughts and instincts from the weekend so you can adhere to hierarchy and care again about what your company cares about. Maybe those quickly-passing-spaces even erase the resolve and wonder built up over the weekend.
And welcome to Monday.
But it’s not good to forget lessons learned from the quiet of the weekend. Even hard-partying readers—I hope—found margin for reflection. Don’t leave those reflections and fresh understandings at home on the kitchen table. Bring them with you.
For me, a long conversation with this poet/psalmist has created a specific resolve that I hope will flow through this week. A boat-ride in the September sun and a story about a daughter in a far-away land cooking a Minnesota meal for the nationals—all these have a sort of sustaining power.
I’m eager to bring these with me into the week, right through the liminal spaces of my transit. In fact, now I wonder if the liminal spaces of experience are the very stuff of a full life.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Italian Telecom Wind: Engage + Remind – Shill
Still selling, of course. But they pulled me in.
Lots of great “dad” moments in here.
What about those decades-long conversations we have with the people in our lives?
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conversation is an engine 