A lot has been written about the state of flow — those moments when an individual is so engaged in a task that the world disappears. Less is known about what enables teams or organizations to experience this same kind of productive, immersive experience. This post explores how creative thinking can provide this necessary ingredient— the salt that lets the pasta water boil at a lower temperature.
My friend and mentor, Gregg Vesonder, commented on how I think during a recent visit to Stevens Institute of Technology. Putting his credibility as a PhD in Cognitive Psychology on the line (jk!), Gregg said, “Research environments need your input because you think differently,” and he quickly added, “but you need us too.”
This prompted me to consider how creative thinking impacts the physical state of the lab experience.
On every team I’ve worked with, there are builders [“solids”] and there are the dreams and visions they have set their sights on [“gases”]. For simplicity sake, Solids are brilliant, gritty, serotonin-rich doers, who work tirelessly to bring something meaningful, and often extraordinary, into the world. Gases are subject to the winds of the upper atmosphere: corporate whim, market pivots, investor appetite, platform evolution and revolution.
These states can live in peaceful equilibrium.
But for an organization to experience flow they need to be stirred up. This is where creative thinkers make a difference — adding different amounts of salt to the fluid state that exists between the solids and gases.
In some environments, creative thinking simply sprinkles “play” where it is needed, loosening up molecules and providing researchers with more flexibility to collaborate and explore alternative outcomes…
In other environments, more vigorous creative engagement is invited — facilitating surprise, insuring user needs are met, pain points addressed, vision communicated, markets targeted…
Design thinking tools are ubiquitous: persona modeling, concept sketches, journey maps, storyboards… But it is how digestible they are and how they align them with the passion of researchers, and that gives them their ability to unleash flow.
Achieving organizational flow also requires embracing a certain lack of focus. Within AT&T Labs, I was a self-described “Principal Non-technical Staff Cartoonist.” In these environments, enabling teams to see with beginner’s mind helped unlock imagination and possibility. Vagueness blurs the line around the problem set, making the boundaries between different forms of discovery diffuse. As result, planes of thought — scientific, aesthetic, humorous — intersect with greater frequency to generate a larger set of inventive ideas.
In this semi-fluid zone between the built and imagined, small twists of thought can have a big impact. They can mean the difference between uncovering new ways to treat wounds (Aha!) or designing a novel water feature for a hotel (Ah!). They can entertain with a book that teaches cats French (Ha ha!), or trigger ideas for a language learning tool for autistic children (aww!). If just the right amount of salt is added to the the water, the energy is created, exciting new things can be discovered, and the optimal conditions for organizational flow can exist.
Gregg helped coalesce my way of thinking and work into a “Strategic Design” discipline — one that helps generate meaningful products for users and value for the parent company.
His comment that “you need us too” is spot on. To do my thing, I need to mix it up with solids and gases. Otherwise I’m just another beaker of salty water :-)
