like to share today is something that I've been kind of exploring and working on for

quite a while, but it's recently kinda come to a new catalyzing point. And I noticed some

of my other colleagues in this so-called "rock block" mentioned the thing you need to know

about me. And I guess if there's one thing you need to know about me, it's that I'm a

wonderer. I wonder a lot. I design. I drive. I do other human, regular things, but I actually

do wonder, and I look up at the clouds, and I kind of think about things. I wonder about

big things, like where's technology going, and is that interaction gonna work for the

customers that we're designing it for. And I wonder about little things, like where I

put my keys. But part of it is I wonder about creativity, and I wonder about the activity

of having ideas, both as individuals and as part of a community of practice. And in the

field that we're in, that's increasingly the skill that we need to be able to make sure

is we're always on our game. And I like to think about ideas, and having ideas is like

breathing, right? You start with questions. You breathe the questions in, and then somehow

you breathe those ideas out. And it's kind of an iterative process, and it goes back

and forth, and ideas and questions come in all different shapes and sizes. But it's that

process of breathing and being really good at it that I think is part of an exchange

with the world. And working in creative teams, how we can facilitate our own creative exchanges,

I think is part of what it means to be in an organization that can learn, that can advance,

that can solve hard problems when they come up, and that can constantly be thinking about

new ways to approach the problems that as Cameron said earlier in the talk, the new

problems that come up every day. So I also like to think about ideas a little bit like

sex, right? So you wanna have a lot of 'em, and you want 'em to be really awesome every

time, and you wanna have 'em with great people. So with that kind of as our foundation, I

thought we could structure the time today a little bit as breathing in and breathing

out. So for the first half of the day or our session together, I'll be breathing out and

telling you some things. And in the second half, you'll be breathing out, and we'll be

sharing things together, like capturing some of our own knowledge and what we do in our

own organizations to foster a creative culture. So speaking of wondering, this was a catalyzing

event. I was about to get on a plane, and I was in the bookstore. And I love Harvard

Business Review, and with a title like Harvard Business Review on Breakthrough Thinking,

how can you go wrong? So I bought this book, and I was reading it on the plane, and this

one article really stood out. This was an article called "How to Kill Creativity." That's

just a buzzkill right there. But it was fascinating, and this is written in 1998. The Harvard Business

Review imprint is kind of a collection, a curatorial collection of past articles that

have been published in the mag. And Dr. Teresa Amabile is a researcher who's been working

on organizational creativity for over 35 years. So she has this ginormous body of really interesting

work about organizational and personal creativity. And as I was reading it, not only is her work

very well founded, a lot of anecdotal but also empirical evidence from organizations,

but it also had this really beautiful structure to it, and I just couldn't get it out of my

mind. And I had to put it down there because I thought, "You know, if this was in some

kind of visual framework kind of form, I wonder if I could use this to be more knowledgeable

and thoughtful about the kind of everyday practices we do at Adaptive Path, and get

better at them, make sure we don't lose anything with some of our activities, that we enforce

the creative culture, and fill in some of the gaps that I know we have." So into this

thing. So this thing is an accounting of the article, with some extensions and enhancements

based on my experience at Adaptive Path, that kinda tries to structure what's at play within

an environment of creativity, and specifically a creative culture. And the way that it's

framed is in three kinda major ways. So the idea is that this blueprint can work as kind

of a guide for creative culture, 'cause it frames it in three big chunks. One, how do

you get it? How do you initially create a creative culture? The second one is, how do

you nourish it, foster it? And the third one is, how do you support it? And those sound

like they might all be the same thing, but there's some really different interesting

principles at play with those. So after I made this framework, I went through a bunch

of our activities this is just a little bit of a side project behaviors and practices,

things we do at Adaptive Path, to see why were these things working. I don't know if

you experienced this, but occasionally there's a behavior or a meeting or an activity you

do as a company, and you think, "Oh, that feels like us. It feels right." And then someone

comes in, and they wanna change it, or your organization grows and it's not working any

longer, and you think, "Well, we can't get rid of that. That's like our heart and soul."

You can't really put your finger on why. And I found that, by using this kind of blueprint

as a framework, I could better understand why, and that meant we were okay to mix things

up and change things when they needed to be changed. There wasn't that fear of losing

something really important. So I'm just gonna walk through a little bit of the structure

of the blueprint. It's divided into three different zones. First one's they're all labeled,

but they're very teeny print, as Peter said. So the first zone is what creates a creative

culture, what feeds it,

and then the last one, what supports it. And then if you do any reading around creative

literature or kind of the nature of how ideation and new things happen in organizational structures,

you'll probably recognize things like this. So there's the second piece of the structure

of these areas, and there's nine of them. And they have these big, broad words, right?

Like "expertise," "creative thinking skills," or "motivation." There's huge bodies of work

just on these topics alone. "Challenge," "freedom," "resources," and they all sound so great,

but when you start to actually put your mind around what that means, it gets very it's

too abstract. You kinda can't connect to it. I don't know what freedom looks like at Adaptive

Path. I think I have it, but I don't really know. Especially in the organizational structure

section. So work group features. Well, we all got 'em, whether or not they're good,

right? But what does that really mean? And a lot of the literature kinda stays at this

level, and it gives you great anecdotes and examples. But it doesn't give you something

to play with, some tool or some kinda system, as BJ Fogg might reference. So the cool part

about the article and the extensions to it are, there's actually these 32 elements that

sit underneath those areas that start to give more specificity and life. These are things

like passion, which admittedly is still pretty open and broad. But there's examples. There's

little bits of that that actually help you say, "Oh, I know how I can work on that in

the organization," or "I can see that." Things like time for exploration. If I asked you,

"Harry, do you have time for exploration in your design creative practice at your work?

no. He would say no. But he'd have an answer, right? What if I said, "Do you have resources?"

Well, yeah, but that doesn't mean anything. So things like goals that don't shift, as

we all know. Card. Thank you, by the way, for the and time for exploration. Those are

things that research has shown really are important to foster a sense of creative practice,

freshness, and enlivening us. And then onto the organization section, things like mandating

information-sharing is one that occurred. And it's just one example that companies who

have essentially forced or mandated information-sharing have started to see really different responses

in how their communities of practice start to interrelate and cross-pollinate ideas.

And so using this blueprint, there's two major ways that I've been playing with it, and this

all part of a greater experiment to see how far this can go. You can use it as an assessment

tool. So you can go through, look at some of the elements that are at play, and say,

"How do we do that? Do we do that thing? Do we have time for exploration? Yes, no?" You

can use it to kinda figure out a gap analysis for yourself. Or you can also use it as an

ideation tool. What kinds of activities or practices could we do every day that can be

simple, cheap, and become part of our everyday, habitualized activity that could reinforce

or promote this activity? And then the kicker is making sure you were working at the right

level of scale, right? So activities still is pretty an open term, but things like meetings,

resources or rooms, physical space. Conferences like this would be considered an activity,

a place where you can go, get outside of your own design challenges and socialize around

ideas. Routines, behaviors, policies are also activities. And by putting these two pieces

to work, you can actually start to play with and craft your own creative culture. So I'm

gonna walk through just about three different examples, because you know it's coming, right?

I'm gonna ask you to write one of these down from your own culture, so start thinking.

And hopefully, if you had a chance to even take a glance at it, you'll already have a

little bit of a preview. But I wanna walk you through three that are part of the 57

that I've collected both from Adaptive Path, interviews with people, as well as just magazines

and articles that I've been reading. And the first so the blueprint of one of these, like,

note cards that are capturing this activity is to just write it down in as simple, basic

terms as possible. This actually isn't rocket science. There are things that we forget about

because there's so much part of our daily routine. So here's one called Five-Minute

Madness. We do this at Adaptive Path. It's a session of five minutes where you pose a

question that you think may or may not be true. And then we do this at our company meetings

once a month, and there's six slots. You sign up. And for five minutes, the group discusses

that question. But the kicker is, you have to kinda say something you don't think is

true, or might not be true, or you're not sure. So it's automatically kind of an odd

thing to be doing. After the group discusses it, five minutes, stop sign goes up, you're

done, but it's been a little bit of that getting it out there, starting to foster other conversations.

What's interesting about this is, when you start to take it and deconstruct it and put

it against the creative blueprint, some really important fundamental pieces start to emerge,

right? So departing from the status quo. You have to say something you think isn't true,

so it's a place where groupthink can't be the No. 1 it can't be the informing part of

the question. You're forced to get outta your comfort zone. It encourages diverse perspectives

in our work groups, because you're used to listening to a different perspective and point

of view. In fact, you expect it. It reinforces open communication. It says that our company

meetings, this is a place where you can say something, not be sure, but rely on the group

social aspect to help you make those ideas better. For the recipients or the listeners,

it helps you meet things with an open mind. So you hear something that "Holy crap, that's

wrong." But you're there, and you're able to actually balance in practice, not having

that gut "no" reaction, that negative bias. And honestly, without Five-Minute Madness,

I don't think I'd be standing up here doing something, an activity in a venue I've never

done before, with more people than I've ever done it before, because really, Five-Minute

Madness is about taking risks. It's kinda hard to stand up in front of your colleagues

and say, "Here's something I don't think is true." It's even worse to kinda be wrong or

think you're wrong in front of your colleagues. But, you know, if you practice, you could

get really good at it, as I have learned. So that's one of them. The second is something

that many companies do, and I hope that this will make the activity part of it feel pretty

accessible, is brown bags. Someone from either the organization or outside the organization

comes in. You have lunch. You listen to what they gotta say. Google puts theirs on video.

A lot of the other big companies down south, in Silicon Valley, have open ones the public

can come to. And, again, when you put this against some of the practices, you hear you

start to realize it's firing on different levels. So we've heard from a variety of futurists,

people doing interesting research, and what it does is it gets out of our own problem

space and helps us understand themes and trends in other problem spaces, and that's part of

that creative thinking skill set that we need to have. We also ask folks if they wanna share

their portfolio. It's like any time you join an organization. It's like that person's brand

new when they walk in and they've never done anything before, unless they insist on telling

you about it, right? But this is a chance to kinda have a little bit of a ride-along

to who they were before. That means you can get to know their skills and abilities in

a way that might not come up naturally within the course of your work together. Also ad

hoc working sessions. Just working with people that you don't always have an opportunity

to work with can smooth quite a bit of those paths when you are in a critical project and

you have to have a good working relationship based on honesty and an open mind. And then

the last one, and this is directly kind of an assault against many colleagues who feel

that meetings are essentially the death knell of any kind of productive behavior, right?

Like show up in a meeting worse yet, standing meetings. God forbid, you meet once a week

to talk to people that you work with, right? But as part of our sales consulting meeting,

we do a few things within the body of that meeting that I think are unusual. So the name

of this activity is weekly consulting sales meeting, and when we apply that against this

creative blueprint, you see that we actually have conversations around the fit between

practitioners and the nature of the creative work that's up for a possibility to work on,

from the point of Adaptive Path. We actually intentionally talk about that. We don't talk

necessarily about the approach and the fit, but we talk about how we get to a better approach

and fit. We talk philosophically about it. We also try and match people with assignments.

People are able to stand up and say, "That's interesting to me. I've done something like

that. That's a creative problem I wanna help solve." It's very hard to get that kind of

leverage and even that kind of insight or feedback in many companies. And if you make

a place for it, it'll happen, and then kinda natural collections of working teams start

to emerge. It also helps us know each other's passions. So even if you don't work on a project

that strikes at that heart of the passion, I know what it is. I can find out what Paula's

interested in, or Pam, or Peter, or any of their colleagues, because they're actually

vocal about it. They're used to stating what they expect in the world, and that makes it

more likely to happen. And that paves the way for shared excitement. When you are working

on a project, you know that when times get rough, people wake up and they say, "I signed