Last week I came across a Fast Company interview with Ryan Reynolds — the actor/producer, serial entrepreneur, and general lottery-of-life winner — about his approaches to creativity and innovation. When asked what he looks for in a potential investment, he answered that he looks for a story to tell. This is an approach we can all embrace as leaders, and a topic we previously wrote about.
On the topic of his approach to creativity, he talked about the importance of constraints for prompting asymmetrical thinking and finding inspiration in unexpected places. “The enemy of all creativity,” he reflected, “is too much time and too much money.” These ideas have me thinking about how, as business leaders, we can create the right conditions for identifying the larger stories we aim to tell and creating new stories that will be worth telling.
The value of perspective vs. productivity
We’ve previously written about the importance of deep work, and will revisit a similar theme here. The fact is that it takes time and focus to recognize a story worth telling and to make the deliberate decisions that lead to writing a great new one.
Consider this metaphor from leadership expert Ronald Heifetz: to gain proper perspective, leaders need to get off the “dance floor” and seek out a “balcony perspective.”
I love this image because it perfectly captures the downshift in frenetic productivity-focused energy required to gain this much-needed perspective. On the dance floor, we’re reacting without much conscious thought. But up on the balcony, we have space and time for thoughtful action.
Many organizations winning today have chosen to defy the prevailing narrative around productivity and prioritize time for deep thinking and creative problem solving. Research from the productivity software maker Asana found that 60% of knowledge workers’ time is “spent on coordination rather than the skilled, strategic jobs they were hired to do.” We’ll revisit this issue in more depth in our next dispatch. But for now, suffice to say that leaders who set an example that deep, creative work is a priority will best position their organizations to produce ideas that win in the marketplace. Or, to make it even more succinct if a bit more personal, in the words of author Cal Newport, “A deep life is a good life.”
So how can we ensure we are engineering the proper restraints in our own work lives — particularly around time, budgets, and energy — to lead our organizations into stories worth telling?
Exiting the dance floor
A natural starting point is to better understand our use of time and to build time constraints we can use to our advantage. If possible, this should start with tracking how our time is spent in order to understand the often surprising breakdown (an important story in itself). We are all probably spending much more time on the dance floor than we think we are.
Next, while most of us rely appropriately on lists, we can take it a step further by mapping our lists onto our available time. What good is it to have a daily to-do list equal to 25 hours of activity when we only have 24 hours available? Be careful to avoid the planning fallacy in this exercise — humankind’s perpetual underestimation of the time things take because of our cognitive bias towards optimistic scenarios.
This important alignment allows us to accurately carve out time for retreating to “the balcony” while lowering the constant risk of this critical time being encroached upon because we haven’t accurately allocated time to our priorities.
Using constraints to spark creativity
Next we should identify the constraints and limitations particular to the issue we are working through. And in cases where there are few intrinsic limitations, it can be useful to impose a series of hypothetical ones as a way to prompt asymmetrical thinking and out-of-the-box problem solving that could lead to a novel approach.
For example, we may ask ourselves, “if we had to complete this year-long project in one month, how would we approach it?” Interestingly, we will sometimes find that the answer to questions like this — while likely not cutting our timeline down to one month — can sometimes spark ideas which allow the project to be completed in six months… and at half the initial budget. The business world is full of stories of founders longing for the scrappy early days when seemingly-onerous constraints led them to more innovative thinking. There’s no reason we can’t manufacture these conditions as thought experiments.
It’s useful to compile a list of regular “constraint questions” that can be revisited and applied to the issue of the day in order to broaden our thinking.
The founder of Motown Records, Berry Gordy, used to confront his team with a powerful constraint question when they were evaluating which records to release and promote: “If you were hungry and only had a dollar, would you buy a sandwich or this record?”
Not only can constraints spark creativity, but they can very quickly help us prioritize what’s important and what’s not.
Writing a new chapter
Ultimately, these strategies don’t matter if we aren’t able to recognize the importance of getting off the dance floor from time to time. Caught up in the rhythm and energy of the music, we’ll move fast, act instinctively, and often follow the path of least resistance.
In truth, there is a discernible pattern to successful leadership — one that revolves around our ability to recognize when it’s time to retreat for a bird’s-eye view. Crucially, this is when we find the clarity to set the direction for our organization and establish clear objectives.
In other words — and at the risk of stretching this metaphor to its breaking point — this is where we choose the songs we’ll all be dancing to. And of course, we want to choose songs that inspire us, that tell the stories we want to tell, and that keep everyone inspired to keep dancing.
So ask yourself:
- Am I planning for balcony time? Am I actually putting it on my calendar?
- When I update my organization about its current state and future plans, am I doing it through compelling and meaningful stories?
- When I plan projects, am I using the valuable tool of constraints to focus my team and draw out new ideas?
If we’re willing to pull ourselves away from the action from time to time, and to pair a higher perspective with tools that allow us to see issues from new angles, we will be able to see the larger arc of our organization’s story and be well-equipped to write exciting new chapters.