Make creativity today’s priority; don’t waste time building a plan to address it later.
North Americans spend about fifty-five percent of their working hours on meetings, administrative tasks, and other “interruptions” from their primary responsibilities.80
I came from a company that spent a lot of time in meetings — planning meetings, to be more specific. The company encouraged a high level of involvement in internal meetings to better the organization.
I was responsible for a team of managers who were tasked with creativity. They needed to bring together new and innovative ideas on a daily basis. I often received complaints from my team about a lack of focus time, which made it difficult to come up with good ideas and create new things. They felt like they were spending all their time planning the next project or catching up on existing ones. To stay on top of things, many of them had to do their ideation outside of working hours.
I asked my team to write down all the meetings they had with their own teams and to provide me with the list. I wanted to see the extent of the problem. The list confirmed that we certainly had a problem. The managers spent about fifteen hours a week on internal meetings.
Why is it we often feel we need to do our best creative work outside the nine-to-five workday? Why are those hours so much more productive, so much more creative? The truth is they’re not. We’ve trained our brains to no longer see these beautiful eight-hour stretches of time as a chance to do anything meaningful.
Instead, we see our days as cesspools of interruptions and meetings. We pack our calendars with redundancy — meetings where we kick a project down the road or talk about what we’ve got to do next.
I believe there are a few reasons why teams meet so much, and none of them are good:
Imagine if you took all that wasted time and turned it into creative thinking and action instead. If I told you that you could have eight hours of time today, all to yourself to think, create, and innovate, it would probably be a dream come true.
Unproductive or prolonged meetings can become a virus that affects an entire organization. It infects the organizational culture and becomes especially difficult to overcome in large companies.
Ironically, advances in technology have arguably made meetings harder to avoid in the contemporary workplace. We can theoretically be contacted 24/7 by local and international colleagues and clients. And we can attend meetings remotely using our smartphones and video conferencing technology.
Being out of the office or traveling in another time zone are no longer convenient excuses to skip meetings. The modern employee can waste time from anywhere.
Some organizations (and some staff members) can become so used to a meeting culture that they believe their company cannot function without regular meetings. If this is the philosophy of the senior management of an organization, it can become impossible to shift the mindset of the staff.
If you or your team are constantly distracted by this type of bureaucracy, your creativity will inevitably suffer.
You need to truly value your time and the time of your team. Not in a financial sense, but using the economic principle of opportunity cost. In other words, any time that you waste in unnecessary or prolonged meetings is time that you could potentially spend doing more creative and productive tasks at work.
Completing important tasks outside of work hours is not a viable alternative. While the after-hours approach might enable you or your team to temporarily stay on top of workload, it isn’t sustainable for creativity and innovation over the long term. Your creativity will drop. Or you’ll burn out. Or both of those things will happen.
I remember sitting in a meeting to discuss a campaign strategy that the creative and accounts team were going to be putting together. The meeting had been called by one of our accounts people, who scheduled 60 minutes for a group of six of people.
We spent the first twenty minutes talking about the tasks that needed to get done. It took the equivalent of two hours of combined brain time.
We figured out what we needed to hold a 30-minute, deep-dive session into a client strategy, and then come up with a solution for the client’s challenge.
Then we started to plan our next meeting to do the deep-dive session. I was thrown for a loop. Our one-hour meeting had started at 2 p.m. It was now 2:25 p.m. Instead of cracking the whip and using the remaining thirty-five minutes to do the deep dive, we were planning to schedule another thirty-minute meeting to solve the problem later!
At this point, I spoke up. I asked the group, a) What the heck? And, b) Why were we doing what we were doing? The response I got suggested that, at the core, we were procrastinating.
I am not saying I don’t procrastinate. And, I am not saying meetings don’t have a place in creativity. They absolutely do. They can be amazing tools for planning, brainstorming together, and getting a team on the same page. But they need to lead to action. They can’t allow people to talk in circles and waste time. Unfortunately, in most companies, that’s often what happens. Meetings delay progress.
The importance of a “doing philosophy” is summed up perfectly in this quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of the greatest creative minds of all time, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
We kick creativity down the road when we schedule a meeting, bring a group together, talk about projects goals, and then schedule another meeting to brainstorm ways to achieve those goals. If you’re an in-house marketer, does your annual calendar look like this?
Chances are probably good that you populated this calendar during an annual meeting to plan the marketing year. As marketers, we tend to kick creativity down the road. We create a calendar with small boxes of time and opportunity, and when the scheduled brainstorm rolls around, we force our ideas to fit into the box we created months earlier.
How would your marketing year change if you used that annual meeting to brainstorm bold new ideas for your brand or product? If you could pursue any idea — not just the one that fit into the predefined box — could you create more effective campaigns? We bet you could.
We need to shift our mindset to one where we make brainstorming great ideas our first priority. Planning to execute those ideas can come second.
A large company that’s managed to consistently unlock innovation is Shutterstock, one of the world’s leading stock photography, video footage, and music providers. Since it was founded by entrepreneur and CEO Jon Oringer in 2003, Shutterstock has cultivated a culture of “intrapreneurship” within its organization. That means it allows its staff to act like entrepreneurs within the company.
Shutterstock staff members have the freedom to pursue innovative opportunities, just like Oringer himself did to establish the company. This approach helps to keep Shutterstock at the forefront of digital innovation. It also increases the job satisfaction of its creative staff, making it less likely that they will leave to establish their own start-ups or go to work for a competitor.
In the early 2000s, Oringer realized that there was a gap in the digital photography market. It was difficult to find royalty-free images online that you could subsequently use in your own creative commercial work. So, he began taking as many photos as he could, and eventually uploaded more than 30,000 of his own images to start Shutterstock. Advertisers were the bulk of his early customers, paying yearly subscriptions to download multiple images.
Shutterstock needed to quickly reach a critical mass of both subscribers and images to make its service viable. When it did, its need for innovation couldn’t stop there. Continuous innovation is essential in the fast-paced and highly competitive digital industry in which Shutterstock competes. Oringer himself recognizes this challenge: “As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?”81
This intrapreneurial philosophy makes it easier for Shutterstock to both attract and retain the talented people the company needs to survive and thrive. The company’s leaders believe that they need to create an environment where innovative ideas can quickly come to the surface, without being stifled.
Since 2011, the company has hosted annual twenty-four-hour hackathons.82 These events are held to encourage staff to pursue any creative ideas they have that could improve Shutterstock’s products and/or give its customers a better experience. The innovative ideas don’t have to be technical. For example, they can be marketing campaigns or recruitment initiatives.
Staff form teams to collaborate and work on ideas they are passionate about, with many literally working around the clock. All the organizers really need to do is to make sure there is plenty of food, caffeine, and energy drinks on hand for the hackathon event. The goal is for Shutterstock staff to develop ideas or quickly build rough products (hacks). Giant twenty-four-hour countdown clocks are projected onto the walls to add to the atmosphere. The theory is that this time pressure encourages creativity and decision making.
All Shutterstock staff can participate in the hackathons. Teams must include members from at least three different organizational departments as well as people who may not normally work closely together. The philosophy is that a good idea can potentially come from anywhere. Oringer is a big supporter of the hackathon concept:
We have hackathons, which are pretty fun. A lot of people get really excited about them, and they can build whatever they want for the company — it could be crazy, practical, whatever. We actually wind up implementing a lot of those things throughout the year. It pushes a lot of thinking. It’s pretty amazing what people can get done in twenty-four hours. Sometimes we talk about a new product feature, and it can take three months to build. Then someone will prototype it overnight. Sometimes as a company you tend to overthink things. If you just sit down and try to do it, it turns out to maybe be easier than setting up meeting after meeting to get it done. So it’s a good reset point for us every year to remind us, ‘Yeah, we can just get things done quickly.’83
At the end of each hackathon, each team makes a short presentation to reveal its idea to the rest of their Shutterstock peers. The best ideas win prizes and receive further exploration in subsequent months to determine if they can become a viable new product or service offering for Shutterstock.
Engineer Dave Kozma has been part of a team that won the major prize during a Shutterstock hackathon. He has three tips for success during these types of events84:
Kozma explains, “You can create the coolest thing in the world; however, if you don’t explain the benefits in a way that your audience understands, it won’t matter.”
Early hackathon ideas that ultimately became successful include a tool that lets customers download Shutterstock video clips in any file format, and another that translates the site into forty different languages.85 The “Suggested Images” feature on Shutterstock’s site also had its genesis during a hackathon.86 All these ideas helped to create the type of user experience that gives Shutterstock a competitive advantage.
One brilliant hackathon idea was Spectrum, a tool that allows Shutterstock users to search its photo library using color. This search tool is perfect for designers who may not be able to articulate exactly what they are looking for using keywords, but who need to make use of color to create compelling designs. It has proved very popular since it was launched in March 2013.
Shutterstock staff ideas also led to the development of Offset, an important start-up business within the company. Offset was launched in 2013 and provides high-end, artistic imagery that serves a target segment outside of Shutterstock’s core market. After identifying this opportunity, Shutterstock assembled an internal team of product developers, designers, and engineers to make this product offering a reality. It provides premium-quality images for billboards, book covers, and signage, and for the customer, it’s quite a bit cheaper than organizing a photo shoot and hiring talent.
Offset images are captured by award-winning artists, and they are significantly more expensive than Shutterstock images. Offset deliberately created a premium marketplace for high-end photographers. Unlike the standard Shutterstock marketplace where any person can apply to submit their photos for display and potential user download, Offset only accepts photos from a handpicked list of photographers. That helps Offset maintain its premium quality differentiation.
Offset developed as a start-up with the full backing and support of Shutterstock, broadening the company’s range of products and its market appeal.
In 2014, the year after the release of the Spectrum tool and the launch of Offset, the company’s revenue increased by thirty-nine percent on the previous year.87
There have been other hackathon success stories since — like Sequence, an easy-to-use in-browser video editor developed for Shutterstock’s website. This innovation won the overall hackathon prize when it was first whiteboarded. The company subsequently gave the staff who came up with the idea time to fully develop it, and the Sequence product was created. It allows users to conveniently search and edit video files within Shutterstock’s huge collection, without needing to upload them into a different program. Many users like to mix Shutterstock video with their own footage to create exactly what they want. Sequence allows them to experiment with different Shutterstock clips before making their purchase decisions.
Today, Shutterstock has more than 169 million royalty-free images, video clips, and music tracks available for download, and an annual revenue of $494.3 million.88 Its success can be attributed to a large extent to the culture it has created that encourages staff innovation and creativity.
If you want to create the kind of workplace where creativity and innovation can happen quickly, and not after twenty hours of planning meetings, try these exercises.
Stop for a minute and think about how many planning meetings you had in the last year. Think about every single one. The internal meetings, the huddles, the touch-bases, the check-ins, the come-by-my-desks, the operations meetings, the team meetings, and meetings about the other kinds of meetings you should have had.
Now, do your best to kill as many of those meetings as possible. If you were responsible for calling some of them, killing those ones should be easy. You’re probably part of the problem for your team!
Explain to your team why you’re killing the number of meetings. The goal is to liberate them and give them the time to do what they do best: think and create ideas, rather than talking about them ad nauseam. Invite team members to scrutinize their own internal meetings and ditch any that can be replaced with action.
For the other meetings on your kill list that someone else in your organization regularly calls, think about whether you or your team really need to attend. Are you just going out of habit or to be polite? If you are, stop going. Or at least go less regularly. Read the meeting minutes afterward instead and take any necessary action then.
You can also try and tactfully suggest how those meetings could be more productive for you and your team. You’ll probably find that others in your organization feel the same way.
If you want to squeeze more productivity from every meeting, try this: Allot half of your meeting time to planning and the other half to doing small tasks that team members can knock off before they leave the meeting room.
The planning half: Quickly start the meeting by briefing team members on the project and assigning tasks and deadlines to each person. If it’s a progress meeting, get each team member to provide an update on the specific tasks they completed since the last meeting. Providing regular progress updates will kick the procrastination habit — individuals will have to work at a steady pace if they want to avoid disappointing (or irritating) their teammates.
The doing half: Many people can sense the end of a meeting as it nears. They’ll gather their belongings and scoot to the edge of their seats. Their minds have already switched from the present meeting to the next tasks that need their attention. When they get around to working on your project again, they’ll ask themselves, “What did I commit to doing, again?” They’ll need to spend extra time reviewing meeting notes and refreshing their memories.
Don’t let team members leave the meeting room once the progress updates are complete. Use the remaining meeting time to tackle the next set of tasks. Team members who need to meet in smaller groups can do so; people who need to phone clients or vendors can do so; people who need to source products can do so. It’s amazing what you can get done in fifteen minutes when everyone is completely focused on one project.
While hackathons trace their origins to the computer programming industry, many creative organizations are now using the model so participants can create a viable concept within twenty-four hours. If you’re going to hold a hackathon at your organization, laser-like focus and incentives are key to success. Follow these tips:
Following the hackathon, choose the best ideas and develop them further during regular work hours.
Leo Babauta writes the Zen Habits blog, which has twice been named one of the top twenty-five blogs by Time magazine. We admire Babauta because he has uncopyrighted his entire body of work, and he doesn’t believe in limiting distribution to protect profits.
The follow tips were adapted from Babauta’s “Ten Steps to Take Action and Eliminate Bureaucracy” blog post.90
Paperwork (even if it’s in electronic form) is necessary for many things. But you’ll often find that a lot of organizational paperwork is unnecessary and that it slows the creativity of you and your team down. Evaluate what paperwork you do and don’t need for your creative projects, and make sure that any forms are streamlined.
If there are steps or approval processes that are slowing you or your creative team down, can they be eliminated or at least reduced? Processes often become routines in organizations that outlive their usefulness over time.
If you’re leading a team of creatives, don’t be a decision-making bottleneck. If you’ve hired or chosen good people for your team, give them the freedom to do what they do best. Give them clear guidelines, but allow them to work independently as much as you can.
When you’re recruiting your creative team, look for people with a track record of getting things done. Give them a trial and see if they tend to focus on actions and decision, or processes and paperwork. Hire and reward action-oriented people. This habit will reinforce that action is your priority.