Author: Scott Berkun

How to become a motivational speaker

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

I get asked about this often. Most of the news here isn’t good.

There is a stigma around the phrase “motivational speaker”. The stereotype is a preacher or a snake oil salesman, all promises and slickness, delivering little substance. Or infomercials that promise if you just read this book, or follow this program, you’ll get everything you heart desires.

I did a simple poll yesterday and the results match my assumptions. Of course, readers of this blog might share my biases and a survey done to a wider audience might return different results (Also, we could compare the results here with the results for “public speaker”).

In practice, when I speak, I’m trying to motivate, but that’s true of all  teachers and speakers. I don’t know any demotivational speakers (although some bosses have this ability, intentionally or not). If you see a teacher or speaker on any subject, everyone knows his or her goal is to give you insights or inspiration to do something. All speakers of all kinds have the intent to motivate.

To motivate someone in the abstract, which is what a “motivational speaker” is asked to do, is odd. George Carlin also found it strange. To paraphrase him: “if you have the motivation to go to a seminar, why not use that motivation to go do the thing the seminar is telling you to do instead of sitting there listening?” No one can give you real motivation: you have to generate it yourself. The inspiration you feel because of someone else won’t last long after they leave: you need to cultivate your own motivation to achieve what you want in life. (Wait, do I sound like a motivational speaker now?). Whenever I’m asked to be motivational, I’m sure to address this paradox.

I’m a good and inspiring speaker, but I know the limitations. A great lecture can only do so much. Unfortunately, many “motivational speakers” make claims as if they don’t, promising much to many people with real problems, earning a negative and cheesy stigma (See I live in a van down by the river). Perhaps motivational speakers aren’t the problem, it’s the impossible promises some of them make.

Folks like Tony Robins, largely taking up the can-do attitude of Dale Carnegie, do often offer good advice and genuinely seems to care about helping people. But that’s not always the case. And somehow its people who are interested in being motivational speakers who don’t seem to be aware of the stigma around that moniker.

Overall, when people say “I want to do motivational speaking” they just mean “speaking”. They want to be hired to go places and talk about things.

Here is the advice I have:

1. There is a demand problem, not a supply problem. The world is filled with people who believe they have a good story to tell and can motivate others. This means the market is a demand market, not a supply market. Unless your particular story has great appeal, say perhaps because you won five gold medals at a recent Olympics , or you’ve been on a spate of talk shows lately, there is no demand for you. Your primary problem is to find audiences where there is some demand. This is likely in your profession, your neighborhood, or anywhere that you particular story makes you credible and interesting. You don’t instantly generate demand. You grow demand, starting with a niche where you are known and respected, and grow from there. This also means you won’t be paid for awhile. Pay comes with demand.

2. Demand is based on perception, not talent. Motivational speakers are typically hired because of their story, not because of their speaking or storytelling ability. This is counterintuitive, as it means people are hired not for the skill itself, but for people’s perception. It’s perhaps unfair, but we are not a rational species. More people will come to hear Lady-Ga-Ga give a talk about the life story of Scott Berkun, than will ever come to hear Scott Berkun talk about Scott Berkun.

3. There is a road but it’s slow and filled with work. There is no singular speaking circuit. The way to get asked to speak at places is to be seen speaking in other places and do a good job. Or get a video of yourself doing a good job, and make sure that organizers of other events get to see it. Many would-be speakers see books as the way to get credibility for speaking, which is both true and odd. If you write a good book that becomes popular, it can help you generate demand and credibility, but most people writing books for purposes other than writing books don’t write good books.

4. You will be hired for expertise first. The first speaking engagements you get will be in fields or about specific skills. If you were a sports star, you’ll find it easier to get asked to speak to high school athletes. If you’re a journalist, you’ll find it easier to speak to journalists or people studying journalism. Look for events about an expertise you have and start there. You’ll have more credibility with audiences that share, or at least respect, your specific background.

5. The good news: earning credibility for talented hard working people is easier than ever. And building an audience is easier than ever in history. Between a blog (free), a youtube account (free),  facebook and twitter feeds (free) and cell phone with a video camera (free-ish as you already have one), you can start right now showing your abilities and building interest in your ideas and talents. But there is no shortcut and there are many people in the race. It takes time to build a following, and to earn a reputation sufficiently good to have people come looking for you. Your best advantage is your community and network, who if properly motivated (ha ha) can help you spread word of your talents.

For more on the business of public speaking, read Why Speakers earn $30,000 an hour, a free excerpt from my bestseller, Confessions of a Public Speaker.

On Writing vs. Speaking

Posted on in Public Speaking, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Paul Graham wrote recently on his perspectives on the written vs. spoken word.

Graham admits he’s more confident as a writer than a speaker. This biases his comparisons and his essay. He’d have benefited from talking to people who he thinks are both good speakers and good thinkers (and perhaps good writers) as they’d have the balanced perspective he admits he does not have. He writes:

Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you’re talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you’ll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it’s the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.

Most writers are unable to write in plain words or unable to find good ideas. Why? I don’t know, but it’s harder than Graham suggests for most people. Graham has ideas and does write well in a simple style, but he’s assuming most people can do it because he can. Read the web for an hour: this is not the case. It’s splitting hairs to argue over whether there is more bad writing or bad speaking on planet earth since there is so much of both.

Speaking is harder in many ways than writing because it is performance. You have to do it live. Some people who do not like to perform try to do what Graham does: they try to memorize their way through it, which doesn’t work. You tend to fail when using a method for one form in another form. Performance means there is no undo and no revision, which is a huge part of the appeal of seeing bands and people do things live and in person. It’s why I’m paid more as a speaker than I am as a writer:  the same was true for Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and even David Sedaris or Malcolm Gladwell.

Writing is harder in some ways than speaking. Writing must be self contained: there is no body language or vocal emphasis as everything must be in the words themselves. But the ability to revise and edit dozens of times narrows the gap. With enough work you can revise your way into competence. Yet speaking is performance: there is no revision of an event. You can perform it again to improve on mistakes, but each instance must be done every time. When you finish an essay, it is done forever.

Graham writes:

With speaking it’s the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker. I first noticed this at a conference several years ago. There was another speaker who was much better than me. He had all of us roaring with laughter. I seemed awkward and halting by comparison. Afterward I put my talk online like I usually do. As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other guy’s talk would be like, and it was only then I realized he hadn’t said very much.

This confuses entertainment with expression. Popular writing can be similarly hijacked – look at twitter and the web – all media has this problem. There are different tricks to use in each form, but an essay can make you laugh, or make you angry, or make you hit the Facebook like button, despite not saying much, or anything at all.

I do agree with Graham that some speakers and “thinkers” are popular solely because they are likable and entertain, or infuriate and inflame. But this is a failing of all mediums, including writing.

Graham continues:

 A few years later I heard a talk by someone who was not merely a better speaker than me, but a famous speaker. Boy was he good. So I decided I’d pay close attention to what he said, to learn how he did it. After about ten sentences I found myself thinking “I don’t want to be a good speaker.” Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction.

Wow.

Emerson, Gandhi, Churchill, MLK, Jesus, Socrates, Lincoln, Mandela. These are a handful of great thinkers who used speaking as a primary medium of expression.

It’s true that much of what some of them spoke was heavily written before it was spoken, but the world experienced these ideas first as spoken words.

I have to stop here to acknowledge that the history of thinking was spoken. The Ancient Greeks, where many of our big ideas still come from, talked. Writing as a primary way to express ideas wouldn’t arrive for 1500 years. Talking and thinking have a much older relationship than writing and thinking. That doesn’t mean speaking is better – writing has many advantages – but to sweep speaking aside is foolish, and reflects Graham’s bias more than his wisdom.  Many ideas at many startups are discovered, shared and developed through spoken words. Pitch meetings, arguments at whiteboards, late night hacking sessions, discussions over lunch: it’s heavily spoken word. Life is mostly spoken, not written.

Graham continues:

The way to get the attention of an audience is to give them your full attention, and when you’re delivering a prewritten talk your attention is always divided between the audience and the talk—even if you’ve memorized it. If you want to engage an audience it’s better start with no more than an outline of what you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences.

This is where Graham, whose work I admire, makes a big mistake. He has admitted he’s not a good speaker and doesn’t like the form. Why then does he feel qualified to give advice on how to do it well?

In my bestseller The Confessions of a Public Speaker I carefully explain audience attention depends on answering questions they came to hear. The majority of speakers fail at this, focusing on what they themselves wish to speak about, or what their slides will look like, rather than their audience. Speaking, like writing, is an ego trap. It’s not about you, it’s about them: what questions do they want answered? What stories did they come to hear? If you understand why your audience showed up at all, and deliver on it, you will keep their attention. Graham’s advice is all about the speaker, but that’s the common tragedy – it’s not about speaker. A speaker who studies the audience and puts together content that addresses their interests will always do well. They’re rare.

 Before I give a talk I can usually be found sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out on paper, trying to rehearse it in my head. But I always end up spending most of the time rewriting it instead.

I would never do this. I stay up late the night before, if needed, to finish preparing. I practice the talk several times, revising if needed, until I’m comfortable. This comfort allows me to be fully present with an audience and not worried about my knowledge of my own material. This is also how I ad-lib or change directions based on a live audience. My preparation gives me the confidence to make adjustments.  An hour before my talk I’m not thinking much about my talk at all.

I do agree with Graham in some ways. I do prefer writing at times. But unlike Graham, I love both forms. I know I become a better writer every time I speak, and become a better speaker every time I write.

—————————

Related: An open letter to speakers, which gives specific practical advice on speaking.

On Truth, Daisey and This American Life

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

The news: Mike Daisey presented a story from his one man show about Apple’s labor practices as journalistic fact to This American Life (TAL). It was a mistake. Daisy has apologized and This American Life spent an hour this week explaining what happened and why.

One popular and superficial response is: truth is binary and lies were told, and everyone should be ashamed. This is a convenient but empty answer. It dodges the tough, sloppy truth about truth lurking in this story about stories.

In the Coen brothers film Fargo, the opening titles say “Based on a True Story”. This is not true.

In the move Apollo 13, based on an actual true story, Gene Kranz, the actual flight director, is shown in the film saying “Failure is not an option”. He never actually said this.

While we know movies are entertainment, how much of the world do you know mostly from movies at TV shows you have seen? You know it’s Hollywood, but yet much of what you think about history, or life in general, might very well come from entertainment, rather than truth. I’d guess most adults consume more works of fiction than non-fiction across all media in their lifetimes. If so, do we base most of our lives on fiction? Is that good? Bad? Neither?

Look at your resume. Is it true? Is it the same truth your coworkers and bosses would write about your work history? Do you gloss over things? Combine facts from different events? Leave important events that don’t fit the story you want to tell out? Sure, you are not a journalist, but what ethical responsibility do you have in your own writing about your own life to a potential employer?

I’m not advocating lying. What Daisy did on This American Life (and apparently on other shows) is wrong. He had every chance to express what license he took as a performer in his storytelling, and to make a clear distinction between art and reporting.

Instead I’m saying most of what we offer each other as truth is only partially true, and partially untrue, since we don’t include all of the truth. If your resume included all of the truth in an accurate and unmanipulated form, it would be infinitely long. We look to the skill of storytelling as a tool to compress and shape the truth to effectively convey something. In studying the history of history, or the history of facts, its clear what defines a fact is messy. There’s never a singular truth. Like the film Rashomon, truth is like a diamond with many facets and angles, each true in its own way:  American history reads very differently if written from the perspective of the native Americans. The history of the enlightened ancient Greeks reads differently if told by their slaves.

Journalists have stricter rules about truth than filmmakers and artists, but they fall victim to similar challenges. They want their stories to be read and books to be sold. The headlines they use on websites or covers of magazines are sensational more than truthful. And even if profit were not a motive, no person is objective. Before the most noble journalist in the world takes on a story, they have their own hidden biases and points of view that are impossible to eliminate. The line of ethics is when a journalist knowingly denies due diligence on checking facts and betrays the reader’s trust – or discovers after the fact a betrayal has been made and fails to work to correct the mistake.

Many journalists, organizations and bloggers bury these mistakes. They report them days later in minutia and footnotes. Or they never bother to look for or report them at all.

This American Life’s entire episode documenting the problems with their own reporting should be commended for making clear the errors that were made and accounting for them. I can’t think of the last time a major network, newspaper, or TV show spent an entire episode explaining how they messed up. This American Life should, of course, also be criticized for making the mistakes in the first place. But shock and outrage about it are naive  – it wouldn’t be hard to find similar errors of fact in stories reported every day, as CNN, FOX, MSNBC. blogs and twitter report stories so fast that fact checking is impossible. Skepticism of all news is warranted, especially news reported as fast as technology allows – it will unavoidably contain errors, both intentional and not.

Mike Daisey identified his primary mistake – he should never have expressed his story as journalism. And This American Life should never have accepted it as such.

In the end 3 things were true before this, and are true now:

  1. Mike Daisey is a fantastic performer and his shows are moving, powerful and good works of art.
  2. Apple is a great company that has had well documented labor issues.
  3. This American Life is an excellent program that for years has set a high standard for amazing, quality works of reporting, non-fiction storytelling and journalism.

The recent scandal changes none of these things. Yes, Daisy’s and TAL’s reputation are worse and Apple’s is better, but not significantly. Not to a skeptic.

Writing and reporting of any kind have risks. The best lesson here is to remind us all as readers and consumers to always ask questions of what is true, regardless of the source.

 

 

Upcoming speaking events

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

The spring / summer calendar is shaping up. Here are the public events I’ll be speaking at over the next few months:

If you’re a local in any of these places, and might have a venue I can speak at while I’m in the neighborhood, let me know.

 

Are societies more against individuals than ever?

Posted on in Mindfire, Philosophy, politics, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

Imran Farouk, one of my kickstarter supporters for Mindfire, had this request for a blog post:

Q: How has de-individualization impacted society in the recent years and will it grow or can it be stopped?

This is one of those fun but messy questions that is so loaded with assumptions there’s no way to answer it without taking it apart first.

Which societies are we talking about? There isn’t some annual meeting of nations where they all decide collectively whether this year they’re going to be more or less against individuals than last year. Each has its own trajectory and action. Some are more hostile than others, some less. Some are improving, some are getting worse. And some are getting better in some ways, and getting worse in others.

I’d say in general, around the world, freedom has progressed, but not in a straight line and not for everyone. According to wikipedia, in 1972 there were 40 democracies in the world, and 123 in 2007.  The use of the word democracy has wide variance, but even so, this suggests the general trend is positive. If people can vote, and their votes influence the government, a certain kind of individualism is allowed.

The next distinction is between society and government. If we are talking government, the question becomes is the government a non-corrupt republic, where the citizens are represented effectively in the government. If everyone votes to elect representatives who limit individual rights, then that is, by proxy, the will of the people. They can choose next time to elect people who extend more rights to individuals or not.

I don’t know that a society can be against individuals, since a society is composed of individuals. If they collectively agree to restrict certain behaviors, than the individuals involved are making those choices: how can you be against yourself?  All cultures allow and restrict behavior based on their shared values, and one shared value is tolerance (or not) for people who have different values.  While I’m be free to a NY Yankee Fan in South Boston, the culture there would likely beat me to a pulp regularly for choosing to express allegiance to that sports tribe openly. Alternatively, if I chose to be a NY Yankee Fan in Jakarta, where few people might know what a Yankee is, I might be free to be as big a fan as I like.

If people aren’t free to move to a different society (say, a more or less conservative town in their country) then the question is less about individualism and more about mobility. They are related, as your ability to be an individual depends on your ability to find a town that accepts the you that you want to be, but mobility and individualism are not the same thing.

Freedom of expression is one way to think about individualism. The rights of free press and assembly are two good measures to look at. I couldn’t find an index value over time for this, but did find that Reporters without Borders does rank nations annually in their freedom of press (The U.S. ranks 47th this year, Finland #1).  However, you could define individualism as property rights or other specific freedoms, which would change what data you’d look at answer the question.

What does individualism mean to you? And how would you measure whether a city or nation is making it easier or harder to be an individual?

 

Quote of the day: Woody Guthrie / Born Naked

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

Quote of the day:

“I see worlds and worlds of rooms and desks where men and women are gathered around in robes, coats, suits and dresses to say what I shall write speak talk and sing. And they tell me that I am locked and barred from singing the true feelings of my nakedest skin. You are gathered here this morning to burn my finest papers. You are here in this room, at this very hour, to tell me that there is something ugly, vile, vulgar about me somewhere, somehow, some way. I excuse your ignorance. I am not ashamed of me nor ashamed of myself. My body is naked now and it was born naked.”  —Woody Guthrie

 

Mindfire #33 book on Kindle for Philosophy

Posted on in Mindfireby Scott Berkun

Thanks to all your support and word spreading, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds is the #33 book on philosophy on Kindle.

Cheers to everyone who has helped make this self-published effort such a success. And for you kickstarter folks, another update is coming soon.

If you haven’t checked out the book yet, now is a great time. How high can we help the book go? You can even gift it to a friend who has a kindle: all you need is their email address (Click the give as gift button on the right side of the page for Mindfire).

Free Book Giveaway: the first 20 people who leave a comment saying “My mind is cold, I NEED the Mindfire!” will get a free copy of the kindle edition (sent to the email address in your comment).

Glass & Glass on creativity

Posted on in art, Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Ira Glass, of This American Life, interviewed his cousin, the famous composer Phillip Glass. Here are some excerpts on creativity and process I transcribed (full interview):

Ira: In 1964 you moved to Paris and studied with [famed composer] Nadia Boulanger. Could I ask you to talk about what she was like?

Phillip: I always get into trouble when I talk about her because she wasn’t a very nice person. She was a wonderful teacher. She was the great master of music technique. Of counterpoint, of harmony. And she was extremely… demanding. From the first moment you walked in. For example if you arrived at her class and were a minute late it was better just to go home. Because if you came in late you got such an abuse, you were critcized on every level of your being and character and basically if the Metro were slow that day, you just went home”

I: Do you believe there is a pedagoical efficiency to terror?

P: It was at that moment that I understood what she was teaching me. I realized she was teaching the relationship between technique and style. Lets put the question another way. If you listen to a measure of Rachmonanov and measure of Bach you know which is which. You know immediately. The question is why do you know that? They both are following the same rules… but you have in the course of your listening you have recognized that Rachmononv will always solve a certain problem in specific way. You may not say that to yourself but your ear will tell you that… you’re hearing the prediciction of the composer to resolve certain problems in a highly personal way.

How hard is to define your personal way of resolving problems?

In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with. In other words, when I say that style is a special case of technique, you have to have the technique — you have to have a place to make the choices from. If you don’t have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don’t have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.

Looking at your career, one thing that’s striking is the # of colalborators you’ve worked with. 

When you find yourself in a place of total ignorance, that’s where you can begin again. Learn again. The difficulty with anybody in any ordinary life is how you continue to learn. Everybody has this problem. We get what we call our training and education at a certain point and we spend the rest of our life changing our gears in the same way… The real issue isn’t finding your voice, it’s how to get rid of it. It’s getting rid of the damn thing. Because once you’ve got the voice you’re kind of stuck with it.

You said to Terry Gross, she asked do you ever try to compose to not sound like you…

I do it all the tme and I fail all the time. I learned that the only hope of shaking free of your own description of music was to place yourself in such an untenable situation that you had to figure out something new. That happened with Ravi Shankar in 1964. And I repeated that experience. I do it whenever I can. It means  constantly finding new people to work with. The humbling thing is despite how often I’ve tried to do it, how rarely I’ve actually suceeded. It’s very humbling actually when you realize how hard it is to break out of your own training. It’s very very difficult.

How do you feel about that?

If I look at the body of work, over the last 30 years about 30 CDs… it takes about 10 years because the changes are so incremental.

One of the things that strikes me as a listener about the newer pieces is they seem much more romantic and melodic.

Exactly. It depends where you start. Had I stared with romantic music, I’d end up writing minimalist music. But I started writing romatinc music. Basically what point I started from, I left that point.

You can listen to the full interview here.

The problem with The New Groupthink

Posted on in architecture (real), Creative Thinking, Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

I’m an introvert. I like being an introvert. I’m glad someone is clarifying what introverts are or are not, which is part of what Susan Cain does in her New York Times Article, The rise of the new Groupthink. However she’s careless in how she makes her case (even though I agree with some of it).

For starters to say “I’m an intro/extrovert” is an overstatement. We all behave differently in different situations and can be more or less extroverted for many different reasons. Many people think I’m an extrovert because I give lectures, like fun debate over beers,  and can be a big part of a conversation or a party. But often I’m not that way, and can sit a corner and happily observe or read for hours. I’m the same person in both cases, just in a different mood, situation or atmosphere. It’s a false dichotomy to assume because I am introverted in one situation that I am introverted in all. The main factor is if I’m around people I know and like or not, which speaks volumes about coworkers and shared workspaces.

She writes:

Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

Groupthink is a term coined in 1972 by Irving Janis. He described it as: “A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action”.

First, you’ll find his definition and Cain’s diverge. He focused on crisises caused by groupthink (especially military ones, like Pearl Harbor and The Bay of Pigs Invasion), rather than the passive negative effects it has on a culture at large (which is what Cain is after). But this passive cultural notion is what has become the popular use of the term for a long time.

However, I don’t recall there being a time between 1972 and 2012, or possibly ever, when the culture in the business world had swung heavily towards radical individualism.  The was no period of “Solothink”, where we went too far towards individual isolated creativity, and are now trending back the other way to a “New Groupthink”.  Staking claims of big trends is self-aggrandizing and is a good way to get attention for selling books or getting web traffic, but that’s about it. Collectivism is a natural consequence of being social creatures that lived for eons in tribes.

Second, lone geniuses have never been “in”. Not in science. Not in art. Not anywhere. Lone geniuses have always had a hard time because they were loners, and for any idea to gain traction requires other people to want to listen to you, listening being something we more easily grant to people we know and like. Lone geniuses have always been more prone to being outcasts since great ideas force change, and most cultures, and the powerful people in those cultures, naturally want status quo. The lone geniuses whose names we know had teachers, partners, agents and supporters who made their work known: even the most introverted loner genius we know of was not truly alone.

Cain writes:

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist.In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as “A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”)

Newton was never hit by an apple, and likely most of the apple story is false. But that’s fine, as many people don’t know the truth there.

But I couldn’t find the Csikszentmihalyi study she mentions (no specific reference is offered). Having read some of his work, I know he has found many creatives show both introverted and extroverted tendencies, just as most people do. But to her main point, she is overstating her claims. It’s definitely true some people are more creative when they are alone. But everyone is different. Many great creators were collaborators, and had their most famous ideas in the presence of their partners. For many it’s the back and forth of time alone, and time with others, that fuels most creative fires.

She presents another false dichotomy. There is no reason a person can’t have both solitude and interaction with others in balance. It’s not one or the other, ever. Or even as Alan Cooper has suggested, simply split the difference and work on creative projects in pairs.

She mentions Mr. Wozniak’s invention of the Apple computer, and his advice:

“the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

This is an anecdote from someone who prefers to work alone. I have no idea how much he has considered other people might be different from him or not, or which artists he’s talked to or studied. Artists in unavoidably collaborative fields like music and film would disagree with him.

There is a long and rich history of artists working together in shared spaces. Artist communes, artists retreats, artist studios. Edison’s Menlo park lab was filled with people much like Wozniak, and for most of them it was the most productive and creative period of their entire lives. Pick any garage based startup company in the history of Silicon Valley, and you’ll find a story of people working together, in confined spaces. I’m sure many of them needed more solitude at times than others, but to cast it as a binary  choice, either work alone and be a genius, or work in an office and fail, isn’t based on any reasonable accouting of the history of invention or of art.

Anyone can go outside, or for a walk, or find some of their solitude on their own time. Better bosses wisely give employees control over environment (e.g. work from home, which is done by more U.S. employees now than ever before)  and hours if it makes them more productive (including creative production), but good bosses of any kind are rare. I wouldn’t call this the rise of “The New Bossthink” epidemic, but there are some basic certainties undercutting her core premise.

And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

It has not “overtaken our workplaces or schools”. Throughout the history of the U.S. high school class sizes in major urban areas have likely never averaged less than 20 people in this half century. By sheer logistics of the number of students, or employees, we have always been housed together in small spaces. She doesn’t cite her sources for office size, and the trend may be for the worse, but the basic notion we share space with other people is quite stable and old. Colleges, universities, and cities like NYC are so dense with people it’s very hard to find solitude relative to most of the planet. But all three are well known environments for  creative cultures. Exactly how much solitude qualifies? Is it a coffeeshop? A table at the library? Or is a good pair of headphones, great tunes, and a comfortable chair sufficient for some people to achieve it? Solitude is personal, and that’s the problem with all the studies. They try to take an averaging of everyone, but there is no average person.

They might be a minority, but there are many examples of very creative output from companies that work in shared, open spaces. Valve, the game company known for Portal and Half-Life, has teams work in large shared rooms (video of their office here). Menlo park, Google, Facebook, Hewlett Packard, all worked in cramped group spaces, at least at first. Since there are some examples, the physical environment can’t be the only variable. What is it about Valve or other successful places that allows them to thrive independent of all the research Cain offers? I have my ideas, but I wish Cain offered hers.

The New Groupthink also shapes some of our most influential religious institutions. Many mega-churches feature extracurricular groups organized around every conceivable activity, from parenting to skateboarding to real estate, and expect worshipers to join in.

Churches and religious institutions are odd examples of independent thinking. People join churches to explicitly participate in group thinking, with shared beliefs and codes. They may be even more tightly controlled today, but the core basis for the church in the first place is a fundamental interest to share well defined and old thoughts/beliefs with others.

It’s been a bad month for Brainstorming consultants, as Susan Cain takes a page from Lerhrer, with big swings at Osborn and brainstorming:

But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

She doesn’t cite a specific study. At least Lehrer named the authors and the publication year for the studies he based his argument on. If a writer refers to a study, they should be obligated to allow the reader to follow their tracks (A name, a university, a year. Something). If they don’t want to bother then they can offer their own opinion, which would be fine. But to say “decades of research says” and give no references is problematic. Perhaps her book offers more support.

She ends with a moderate and balanced position which I can agree with:

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Quote of the day

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

Here’s a good one from Grohl’s Grammy award acceptance speech:

“To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human elements of making music is what’s most important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do. It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer. It’s about what goes on in here (points to heart) and it’s about what  goes on in here (points to head).”

David Grohl

In Defense of Brainstorming

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Periodically popular articles arise decrying brainstorming as flawed (Jonah Lehrer’s article in the New Yorker, Groupthink: the brainstorming myth, is a popular one). Most of these articles miscast what brainstorming was designed to do, how ideas in workplaces are actually developed and what was actually observed in research studies.

Here are 4 key things often mentioned which shatter the typical headline and conclusion of these articles:

  • Brainstorming is designed for idea volume, not depth or quality. The term brainstorming is loosely used today, but it’s origins by Alex Osborn had a very specific set of rules and intentions. His primary goal was to help groups create a long list of ideas in a short amount of time. The assumption was that later a smaller group would review, critique, improve, later on. Finding great ideas was never the intent. He believed most work cultures are repressive, not open to ideas, and the primary thing needed was a safe zone, where the culture could be different. He believed if the session was lead well, a positive and supportive attitude helped make a larger list of ideas. Obsorn believed critique and criticism were critical, but there should be a (limited) period of time where critique is postponed. Other methods may generate more ideas than brainstorming, or better ones, but that doesn’t mean brainstorming fails at its goals.
  • The person leading an idea generation session matters.  Using a technique is only as good as the person leading it. In Nemeth’s research study, cited in Lehrer’s article, there was no leader (which is often true in academic research studies on creativity, or participants are asked to be creative alone). Undergraduates were given a short list of instructions: that was the entirety of their training. Doing a “brainstorm” run by a fool, or a smart person who has no skill at it, will disappoint. This is not a scientific evaluation of a method. Its like saying “brain surgery is a sham, it doesn’t work”, based not on using trained surgeons, but instead undergraduates who were placed behind the operating table for the first time [See Isaksen & Gaulin 2005]
  • Generating ideas is a small part of the process. The hard part in creative work isn’t idea generation. It’s making the hundreds of decisions needed to bring an idea to fruition as a product or thing. Brainstorming is an idea generation technique, and nothing more. No project ends when a brainstorming session ends, it’s just beginning. Lehrer assumes better idea generation guarantees better output of breakthrough ideas, but this is far from true. Many organizations have dozens of great ideas, but fail to bring any of them into active projects (too risky/scary), or to bring those active projects successfully into the market. Generating good ideas that can gain organizational support perhaps have more value in most contexts. 
  • Team chemistry and creative ability matters.  Most creativity studies are run on teams of people who do not know each other. It’s harder to do anything well as a group with people you do not know. One critical step in a real world brainstorming session is picking who will participate (based on intelligence, group chemistry, diversity, etc ). No method can instantly make morons smart, the dull creative, or acquaintances intimate. The people in Nemeth’s research study, the one heavily referenced by Lehrer, had never met each other before and were chosen at random. A very different environment than any workplace.
  • Studies often measure trivial creativity.  To simplify the collection of research data, many studies use trivial kinds of creativity, like inventing product names for made up products. The focus is on being unique in an absolute context. What relationship does this have to the more complex kinds of creativity most people pursue in the real world (solving problems, finding new approaches, discovering new ways to approach a domain, etc.) new ideas for organizing work, etc.)? No one knows and these research studies often don’t mention this important distinction. An idea does not have to be unique to be a great solution to a real world problem. [Added 11/27/2020]

1. Understanding Idea Divergence vs. Convergence

Lehrer writes:

“While the instruction ‘Do not criticize; is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.”

The intention of brainstorming is not to eliminate critique, but simply to postpone it. Workplaces are notorious for killing ideas quickly with phrases like “We tried that already” or “that won’t work here” or even “that’s too crazy” (List of familiar idea killers heard regularly in workplaces). Great ideas often seem crazy or weird at first and if they are discarded or criticized before given time to breathe they’re lost before they had a chance to show their merit.

In ordinary life when people face big decisions, like where to go on vacation, it’s common to come up with a big list of ideas, only adding items for a time. And then once the list seems reasonably long, only then does critique and debate start. This is known as divergence / convergence. You explore and add (diverge) and then cull and refine (converge). Most creative people, and processes, shift back and forth between divergence (seeking, exploring, experimenting) and converging (eliminating choices, simplifying, deciding). Brainstorming and nearly all idea generation techniques are divergence acts. And need to be paired with a separate activity that converges.

Simply put, there is an assumption in most research about creativity that only a singular method is ever used. This is wrong. Most successful creative teams use a combination of methods. Sometimes people work alone, sometimes in groups. Sometimes there is a formal activity, sometimes not. Sometimes the goal is to diverge, sometimes the goal is to converge. Their effectiveness is the combination of all of these activities over the course of a project. But most research assumes there is only one event for creativity that ever happens, and seeks to find the ideal event, which is absurd. I understand the focus on a single activity simplifies research, but it also limits the application of that research.

In Osborn’s best book on the brainstorming method, Applied Imagination, he wrote on page 197:

“Although creative imagination is essential… judgement must play an even larger part.”

And he details several processes for evaluating, critiquing, and reporting on ideas. On page 200 he states:

“A list of tentative ideas [e.g. the output of a brainstorming session] should be considered solely as a springboard for future action… as a pool of ideas to be screened, evaluated and further developed before solutions can be arrived at.”

2. Reading the 2003 Brainstorming Study

The primary thrust of Lehrer’s critique is based on a 2003 study by Nemeth (PDF), where students were divided into groups and given 3 different sets of instructions.  In one group, no instruction was given (‘Minimal’). In the second group, basic brainstorming rules were given (‘Brainstorming’). In the last, brainstorming rules were given, plus students were allowed to critique each others ideas (‘Debate’). But no group was trained in how to brainstorm, nor given an example of effective brainstorming to watch.

Is the debate group brainstorming, or not? They were given the same instructions, plus one additional one (‘it’s ok to criticize’). The results do show that the group that could critique generated more ideas: but not many more. For all the participants, it was a difference of ~4 ideas. 28.4 ideas for the “debate” group and 24.5 for the “brainstorming” group. About 14%. In the U.S. this number was much higher, closer to 30%.

But these columns are mislabeled. The debate groups was given brainstorming instructions, as well as an instruction to debate. It should be labeled “Brainstorming with debate“. If the only instruction they were given was to debate, it’d be a fair comparison. But it isn’t.

3. Is Brainstorming Useless?

Lehrer’s writes:

“But if brainstorming is useless, the question still remains: What’s the best template for group creativity?”

He’s wrong. The data from Nemeth claims brainstorming (Column 2 in the table above) is more effective than giving people no advice at all, but not as effective as brainstorming where criticizing is allowed. I don’t agree with Nemeth’s conclusions, but Lehrer does, and assuming he’d read the study he’d have seen the table above which show brainstorming generated more ideas than the control group.

More importantly, he’s asking the wrong question. There is no singular best template for group creativity. When I’m hired to advise teams, the first thing I do is study the culture of the team. My advice will be based on who they are and what will work for them, not on an abstract set of principles. Just as there isn’t a best template for group morale, or teamwork, or group anything. Is there a singular best template for good writing? For being a good person? A singular template denies how divergent individuals, teams and cultures are. Nemeth’s data shows a wide disparity between French and American success at brainstorming: clearly culture does matter.

Lehrer assumes there is a universal principle that, if discovered, would make everyone more creative. This works against the very idea of creativity: which is that each person sees the world in a different way, and it’s through exploring those differences, rather than avoiding them, than new and different ideas can be found. For groups, this means each group has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and what will help or hurt their creative output will differ. Some teams are too freewheeling, others not enough.

4. Anecdotes, Data and MIT’s mythical building 20

Lehrer goes on to discuss the legendary building 20 at MIT’s Cambridge campus. He writes:

“Building 20 and brainstorming came into being at almost exactly the same time. In the sixty years since then, if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing – or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own. Building 20 though, ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people.  Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as the magical incubator.”

MIT is one of the greatest concentrations of brilliant people in the history of the world. The campus is filled with buildings where great things were invented. Lehrer offers no data about the number of inventions discovered in Building 20 vs. Building 19 or E15 (where the famed Media Lab resides). He mentions Building 20 “ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time”, but there is no actual ranking. If you wanted to measure the magic of building 20 scientifically, you’d perhaps replicate the building in the middle of an empty field in Kansas, and fill it with average people. Does magic happen? More magic than other kinds of buildings in the same place? Nehmer’s brainstorming studies were done with random college undergraduates who had just met. If you want to compare brainstorming to Building 20, you’d need to try to place some fair comparisons, which Lehrer does not do.

I agree environment matters, but there’s plenty of evidence great things happen independent of environment. There was nothing magical about the buildings used for the Manhattan project. Nor for the NASA engineers who worked on the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. The car garage is the prototypical silicon valley environment for innovation, and many ideas that drive our tech-sector came from garages and cubicles. How does the legend of Building 20 compare with these other buildings? What shared lessons can be learned that incorporates these diverse examples of environment? Lehrer doesn’t say. In building 20, what idea generation techniques did they use (and was brainstorming one of them?), or did they all just meet randomly in corridors? He also doesn’t say. Did they work together at blackboards? At the cafe? I’m sure they used many different methods, and the combination of those methods matters.

5. The only lessons I can derive

The best lesson I can pull from Lehrer’s mess of an article is this: creativity is personal. Building 20 was built cheaply and seen as a failure, which made it easier for motivated creatives to rearrange and redesign the environment. There were fewer rules than your typical building. They were allowed to take control over how they worked.  The diversity of people forced people to hear different points of view. And the highly empowered and competitive pool of makers ensured things would ship, and not languish in bureaucracy or self-doubt.

If you want more creativity, hire people who demonstrate creativity. Do not expect to magically graft it onto people you hired for their rigid conservatism. Then give them resources and get out of their way. Let them decide what methods to use or not. If you want to know how to generate ideas in groups, go find a creative group and watch what they do. You’ll learn more from observing that experience than Lehrer’s article.

Related:

Edison vs. Tesla: two approaches to problem solving

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Two heroes in the pantheon of inventors are Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Of their many contrasts (ethics being among them) an often overlooked one is their divergent approaches for how to solve problems. The book Empire of Light is a fantastic telling of the entire story of American electricity, and Edison and Tesla’s initial partnership and later rivalry, but it also touches on the attitudes about invention.

Edison is famous for his affirmations of hard work as a key ingredient in invention:

  • “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration”
  • “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work”

It’s good advice. Finding the idea for something is rarely the hardest part in bringing it into the world. Instead, it’s the willingness to work on the long list of little issues that must be solved to bring an idea to fruition (or the marketplace). In problem solving lingo, this kind of approach is called brute-force. You apply great energy to try out many alternatives, cheaply and quickly if you can.

Tesla had a different approach. His intuitive understanding of the principles of science allowed him to think about problems in ways Edison either could not, or did not want to. Tesla wrote:

  • “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once… to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”

With the rise in popularity of Tesla as a mythic hero, and Steve Jobs as a latter day Edison, it’s easy to want to take sides. But when it comes to problem solving, both of them were right. There is rarely one mother of invention – there are always many possible ones.

The best approach to problem solving is synthetic: to use the synthesis of both ways of thinking to serve you. You should be willing to apply brute-force, but also be willing to do thinking in advance to make solving a problem easier.

Decades ago, in my computer science classes, there was a clear divide among my programmer peers. When given a new assignment,  some would jump right in to writing code. I’d call them little Edisons. Others would put the keyboard away, and think for a while on paper. They’d sketch things out, and perhaps ask a question or two online. These were the little Teslas.

Which one do you tend to be more like in how you approach problems?

edison-tesla

Livestream 9am PST: Creative thinking hacks

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’m speaking today at Creative Mornings Seattle on Creative Thinking Hacks.

I just learned there will be a livestream. You can tune in at 9am PST to watch/listen.

Description: Scott will simultaneously demystify creative thinking, provide tips and tricks for finding ideas, provoke wild opinions and comical rants, and explore how to become more powerful at the creative aspects of your work and life. 20 minutes + 20 minutes Q&A.

Livestream here (at 9am): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/seattle-creative-mornings 

(At the moment this video is still live: skip to 54:00 to get to the start of the talk. A proper edited video will be available soon)

 

The 5 best books on Innovation EVER

Posted on in Books, Creative Thinking, Innovation, Myths of Innovationby Scott Berkun

Before I share the list of the 5 best books on innovation, here’s a list of 5 things you need to know before reading that list. It’s worth it. I promise.

  1. There are 100s of books on innovation and most are terrifyingly (and ironically) boring. They’re bought to be placed, unread, on office shelves so people can pretend they’re smart. These books are cliché in the worst way, cherry picking trendy examples and building worlds of junk theories around them, theories the heroes in the cherry picked examples didn’t even use. Innovation is a junk word, and there are many junk books.
  2. It’s not clear why anyone should read a book about innovation. There’s little evidence people we’d call creative got that way by reading a particular book. Most skills in life are only acquired by work, and to be more creative means to create and learn, rather than merely read.
  3. I carefully studied over 60 books, related to creativity, invention and managing creativity in others during research for my bestseller, The Myths of Innovation (research that included teaching a course on creativity at the University of Washington – syllabus). And I’ve read more books before and after that project. I even organized the books I studied in an innovative way for readers. I’ve been studying creativity in many forms for a long time and my list reflects wide and deep reading.
  4. People looking for a book on innovation often make the mistake of compressing the many sloppy uses of the word into a single thing, and expect one book to excel at teaching people how to: 1) Generate ideas and invent things 2) Design and ship good products 3) Run a successful entrepreneurial business 4) navigate an organizational bureaucracy. These are very different skills, possibly even different subjects.
  5. These four skills are rare. It’s insanely rare for one person to have two, much less three of them. It’s improbable any book could single-handedly give you one of these skills, much less all three.  Any book claiming to do any of this is lying to you.

There. All done.

I can confidently say if you only read 5 books these are the ones to read and re-read:

  1. Innovation and Entrepreneurship, by Peter Drucker.  Drucker is profound, clear, concise and memorable. He puts modern business writers to shame with his clarity. This short books encapsulates all of the theory you need to think about starting a business, and what it will take to find, develop, launch and grow product ideas. (Also see,  The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki, and if you work in the tech-sector, Founders at Work is a must-read)
  2. Thinkertoys,  Michael Michalko. There are many books with exhaustive lists of methods for generating ideas. This is one of them. The misconception is that idea generation is the hard part, which it rarely is. But for those looking for games, tactics and methods to generate ideas this is a great place to start. (Also see, Are your Lights on?, by Gause and Weinberg).
  3. Dear Theo, By Vincent Van Gogh (& Irving Stone).  Before you dismiss this one, consider this: what we call passion in the business world, is passion for profit. What if there was no profit motive? How much passion would our heroes, like Edison and Jobs, have had for the ideas alone? To learn about the deepest commitment to ideas you have to study artists. There are no better stories of passion than great artists pursuing their creative visions against all odds and Van Gogh’s letters are a fantastic encapsulation of commitment, vision, dedication, brilliance, work ethic and madness, all traits any creator or entrepreneur should understand. (Also see, The Agony and the Ecstasy, for a similar book about Michelangelo).
  4.  They all laughed, Ira Flatow. History is biased in that we retroactively inject purpose and narrative structure into stories of invention, so that they make more sense to us in the present. But the real history of invention and discovery is messy, weird, frustrating and surprising. This book documents how frustrating it usually is to have a great idea in a mediocre world. (Also see, Connections, by James Burke – all episodes of the documentary based on the book are free online).
  5. Brain Rules, John Medina. I’ve read many books about intelligence and neuroscience – they’re mostly pseudo-fluff, filled with the latest theories and shocking claims, but lead to no tangible improvement in how you use what’s between your ears. Brain Rules is the book to read about how to use your brain to better use your brain. While it’s not strictly about creativity, show me a creative person who didn’t use their brain well (See my full review of Brain Rules here).

There. Have fun.

Most of these books are old. Well guess what? Innovation and creativity are old too. The best advice is not necessarily the newest, despite our compulsive neophilia. Just be glad I didn’t recommend Vitruvius’ ten books on architecture (which happens to be one of the only sources for the story of Archimedes and ‘Eureka‘).

But I implore you to do more than read. Like learning to play guitar, you can only learn so much from books. You must get to work yourself. It doesn’t matter what you make, but go make something. And when you finish, think about how to make it better and try again. This is the only thing that will make you more creative: the practice of making things. And only then can what you learn from books matter.

The top mistakes UX designers make

Posted on in design, usabilityby Scott Berkun

Last week I spoke at the Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting. Since it’s a group of designers and user researchers, I let them participate in picking the topic, and top mistakes won by a wide-margin. I didn’t use any slides – instead I led an interactive talk, summarized below. Rather than talk about tactical mistakes, such as prototyping or running studies, I focused on the ones we overlook the most, about attitude and culture.

  • Not credible in the culture.  Most designers and researchers are specialists, making them minorities in the places they work. Most training UX people get assumes they are working alone, which is rarely true. This means their values and attitudes likely don’t match the work culture of most companies. The burden to fit in, or to recognize what the culture value’s and provide it, is on the specialist. If you are the best designer alive, but work in a place ignorant of design, your lack of credibility in the culture renders your design ability useless. Being a specialist means you will always be explaining what you do, your entire career, including translating your value  into a language your coworkers can understand.
  • Never make it easy. The first users you have are your co-workers. How easy is it to follow your advice? As a specialist, its easy to become the UX police, scolding and scowling your way through meetings. No one likes the police. Generally, people do what is easiest to do. If your work creates more work for them, they will naturally want to avoid you. Specialists often scowl from ivory towers, where they provide advice that is hard to follow, or sometimes, hard to understand as it’s not in the language of the culture.
  • Forget your coworkers are meta-users. Unless you write production code, you are not actually building the product customers use. You make things, specs, mockups, or reports, that are given to others who must convert your work into the actual product. This means you must design both for you actual customers, and for your coworkers, who are the first consumers of your ideas. Usability reports are often tragically hard to use. Mockups and design specs often forget details developers need such as sizes in pixels, and hex colors.
  • Never get dirty. In many tech cultures there is plenty of dirty work to do: mainly finding bugs and reporting bugs. Anyone can do it, but no one wants to do it, and everyone avoids it. Often there are bug bashes or engineering team events to find and deal with bugs. As a specialist, its easy to go home early while the development team stays late to do the dirty work. If you’re part of the culture, you’d stay and help when there is dirty work to be done. But if you’re a consultant, you’d go home. How do you want to be perceived? For people who don’t know what you do, helping out with the dirty work may be the first way to earn a positive reputation, or to make that first friend or two.
  • Pretending you have power.  Most specialists play advisory roles. They give advice. There is nothing wrong with being an advice giver. The challenge in being an advice giver means the critical skill for success is persuasion and sales. You need to be an expert at selling your ideas. To pretend that you don’t need to sell your ideas, is to pretend you have power. Advice givers should be evaluated heavily on how much of their advice is followed. Giving advice is easy. Getting people to follow it is where your value is.
  • Ignore possible allies. Among your co-workers, one of them loves you the most (or hates you the least). If you are not enlisting them to support your requests, or give you feedback you’re ignoring your possible allies.
  • Vulcan pretension. There are deeply embedded value systems among designers and researchers that are self destructive. For research, its Vulcan: “I research, analyze, and produce data. I do not offer my own opinion ever.” But everyone else does give opinions, and in many cases the opinion of a researcher is more valuable.  Researchers should say feel comfortable saying “This is not based on data, but I think…” which protects the integrity of data, but allows them to offer opinions just as everyone else does.
  • Dionysian pretension. For designers, its the dreamer mentality as an excuse for not having to do the thinking required to make an idea real. “I just come up with ideas for things, its not my job to figure out how to make it work.” This is related to never getting your hands dirty, as all ideas have dirty work required to make them real that must be done, and if the person coming up with an idea does not participate in the process, it demotivates everyone else from wanting to follow that idea.
  • Don’t know the business.  Everyone should know why they have a job. Who decided to hire a UX person instead of another developer? What argument did they make? Find out. Find out how the company makes money and which kinds of decisions are likely to make profits grow.  Having a better UX doesn’t guarantee anything: many market leading products are UX disasters. How can this be? If you don’t know how that’s possible, then you don’t understand how many other factors beyond  UX are involved in your business.

Advice Summary

  • Earn credibility in your culture on your culture’s terms.
  • Make it easy / fun to follow your advice.
  • Design for your developers/managers, as they are the first users of your work.
  • Have something at stake
  • Consider switching to a role with power
  • Seek powerful allies
  • Get out of your office and drop your ego
  • Follow the money

Notes from the Q&A after my talk

Thanks to Emily Cunningham  (@emahlee), here are some questions and answers from the audience.

How do you become credible? (Audience question)

  • Ask your best ally (who is not in your job role) that question.
  • Don’t always change the conversation in meetings to ask the same question you always ask. You’ve become a UX robot, always saying one of the same 3 things.
  • Saying the same things over again and again, but not affecting change isn’t helping anyone.
  • Know and be aware of “what conversation are we having?” for each meeting (tip from audience)

Good Project Managers empower the people in their team. But good project managers are rare.

How do we educate our co-workers of our value?

  • Start on their terms. How do you solve a problem they need solved? (Ideally using your special skills, but being useful at all is a better start than being non-useful but a “design expert”)
  • Most people have no idea what you do. Part of your job will always be to give the intro talk about your profession.
  • You can’t do it en masse so divide and conquer:
    • Ask your co-worker, “I’d like to talk to you about what I do so I can get your feedback on what I’m doing.” The next meeting you’ll have one more person (hopefully) on board and who understands what you do.

People want data (observation from audience member)

  • Data gives you credibility.
  • Video clips give you credibility.
  • Anyone can go capture video of the product being used.

Pay attention to how decisions get made:

  • What data works? Is it numbers? Stories? Who yells the loudest?
  • Are you sure decisions are made in meetings, and not in private discussions?
  • Does the VP always make the decisions? Who do you know who has the ear of the decision maker?
  • Seek informal channels – Conversation at people’s desks, or over coffee.

Another Mistake: Never Make It Easy

  • Designers have multiple users along the way, for instance, developers who get our wireframes, with color codes, pixel sizes, or CSS they can reuse, are happy developers.
  • Developers are always busy juggling 9 things they need to get done.
  • Set it up so the devs get some reward every time they work on your design. What positive reinforcement of the behaviors you want do you provide?

Film analogy and design decisions

  • Film has hundreds of people working on it. But there are only a few people who have enormous power.  Out of 500 people, maybe six or seven people have power over the creative direction of the film.
  • Amazon and Microsoft’s designs are an “averaging out” of many people’s input.  (This goes back to the earlier point that design expertise is weighted less than dev expertise).

When there are smart, confident people working on things they are passionate about, there’s going to be unavoidable messiness. There is no ideal team where everything goes smoothly and every decision is contention free.

Inspire people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

  • There’s a thin line between being inspiring and being a jerk. One person’s inspiration is another person’s annoyance. The most inspiring thing a person can do is to work hard on problems they care about that align with what the team cares about, share that work with others, gracefully take feedback, and continually produce.

Related Posts:

What do you think we missed? Leave a comment.

Is speaking easier than writing? Some advice

Posted on in Public Speaking, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

I get many emails asking about writing, in response to the popular posts I’ve written about writing. Recently Shawnee M. Deck wrote in asking about writing ones life story.

I was immediately appalled by my lack of ability to put down on paper the words that seem to make everyone laugh whenever I tell my stories.

This is common. Spoken language and written language work differently. The skills needed to tell a good story in one do not necessarily transfer to the other.  Our ears are more forgiving than our eyes. When listening, we can use people’s tone, pace and volume to get more information about what they are saying. When reading, we get none of that information. The words have to stand alone. It takes more skill to keep people’s attention in writing than in speaking.

Some writers do voice to text transcriptions, talking into a microphone and having software convert it to text. Give it a try. If that works for you as a way to get a draft down, go with it. But know that it will need heavy revising to appear like good writing to a reader.

Should I leave a lot of the grammar errors to my editor? What should I expect from my editor in general?

The more you know the better, but yes, any copyeditor should be your grammar expert. Editors come in two flavors: copyeditors and development editors. The former will correct your grammar and give you feedback on sentences, paragraphs and low level writing. The later, which is harder to find, is someone who can give you guidance on the overall direction, approach and voice of the book. Sometimes you can find one person who does both. Publishers sometimes have a third kind called acquisitions editors who find and negotiate with authors to sign book deals, but are often less involved in the process afterwards.

What format would you most suggest? Organized by subjects categorically? Organized chronologically?  For now, I’m just getting the chapters down based on my outline.

There’s no right answer. A good book can use any of these methods, provided the writer uses the one they choose well. For now, I’d agree – it doesn’t matter. Just get your stories down. When you have a complete first draft, you can come back and change your mind about how it’s organized. If you plan for a second and third draft, which you should, you can happily postpone sorting out questions of form or structure. An outline helps get the first draft down, but there’s no law requiring your second draft uses the same outline.

Should I buy a lot of books (other than yours) and spend a lot of time researching how to write “memoirs” or should I spend a lot more time just writing.

The answer is both. You need to write and get feedback, and read and take notes (What worked in a book? What didn’t? Why?). You can also read many more hours a day than you can write (even pro writers don’t spent more than a handful of hours a day creating new work). If  you read books related to what you are writing about, or in the same style,  it will inform you of what you want to aim for, as well as avoid. As far as memoirs, check out Joan Didion, Ted Conover, Annie Dillard, Loren Eisley or any book in the Best American Essays series (there’s one for each year for at least the last decade). Most of the essays are memoirs or non-fiction, giving you a sampler pack of writers you might want to study.

 

On Insecurity and Writing

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

A good friend mentioned he’d write more often if he dealt with his insecurities about writing.

I look at this differently.

All writers are insecure: they have doubts and fears that never go away. Kafka didn’t want any of his books published, and lived with perennial doubts about his talents. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both despaired about the quality of their current projects, whatever they were, afraid their new works wouldn’t measure up to their last (despite feeling this way about their previous works too).  Talk to any creator while they are creating and insecurity is everywhere. Will this work? Is this the right choice? Should I cut this or make it bigger? Insecurity is part of the deal, as the act of making something means you have to find your way as you go.

Anyone who creates anything has an endless game of ping pong between confidence and fear going on in their minds. And although one might score an ace or a slam, neither ever wins, it’s an endless game. Complete confidence creates shitty work, and complete insecurity ends work altogether. Both confidence and fear are needed and must be lived with, not eliminated. Experience with creativity means familiarity with this process, not an avoidance of it. Fear is an asset if you use it as fuel for your fire, rather than a way to smother it, or as an excuse for never starting it in the first place.

Writing is hard. Painting is hard. Competing at sports is hard. Everything interesting is hard. The risk of failure is what makes the challenge interesting. Take away any chance for failure, which you’d need in order to feel completely secure, and you take away motivation.

I say choose to do it anyway. So what if it’s bad? So what if no one likes it? So what if you read it and don’t like it yourself? So what so what so what so what.  SO WHAT. At least you will have done it and can decide not to do it again. But to spend hour after hour just thinking and talking and torturing yourself about something you don’t do, while pretending, based on little study of the craft, that there is a magic way to avoid all the hard parts no other productive maker has ever avoided, is beyond arrogant – it’s mad.

It’s okay to be insecure. Just be insecure about something you are actively making, instead of being insecure about some imagined reality that will never exist if you don’t sit down, shut up and get to work.

Related: