Your dreams one hour at a time

Do you have a special goal? Going on a dream vacation, writing a book, becoming a YouTuber? 

How many hours do you have a day to make your dreams come true? For most people I would say it’s about 1 hour a day, which is seven hours a week, or 15 whole days a year. 

Now, one hour does not sound like much so let me break down how I came to that number. 

Let’s take a typical day for me.

Sleep 8 hours 
Cooking/Eating 2 hours 
Work 8 hours 
Family/ Friends time 2 hours 
Admin 1 hour 
Travel 1 hours 
That is 2 hours left out of 24 hours 

That leaves you two hours a day to make it happen. Let’s round down to be realistic and absorb all the tiny, random elements of life I haven’t been able to account for in my breakdown. 

When people set a monthly budget for spending, too often they start with how much they earn rather than how much is left after all their fixed costs are accounted for. It turns out that for most regular people, that bit that’s left is not much. 

In time budgeting, what’s left over is one hour a day if nothing else goes wrong, and you don’t have to work any extra. It doesn’t seem like much. But constraints are essential for creativity. And you can let go of the guilt of thinking you haven’t spent enough time on your dream project. You only ever really had one hour each day, so you should feel great at the end of the day if you get in a solid hour of work toward your dream. 

So how do you use that one hour a day?

Try this exercise and see if it works for you. 

Divide your one hour into four fifteen-minute blocks. Now find 4 small objects, 4 dice, 4 marbles, 4 playing cards. Each one of these represents a fifteen-minute block. Place those four objects on the left side of your work desk. Now, during the course of your day, note when you do an activity that is one of your one-hour future goal activities, such as making a drawing, writing to a friend, or planning your weekend break. 

Every time you do one of these activities, move one of the small objects on your desk from the left side to the right side of the desk. At the end of the day, see how many objects now live on the right side of your desk. Two, three, four… however many, this is a way of showing that you are using your precious one hour a day in the way that you want rather than just on your fixed tasks for the day. Even if you only move one item from the left of your desk to the right of your desk, it shows progress.

There is the way you think the world is, and then there is the way the world really is. This is the ongoing battle for all of us: to live in the real world, the world where we get to choose what we want to do, even if it’s only for one hour a day. 

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Buckets of experience

You are born with an experience bucket. It's with you from your very first breath.

From that first moment, you start filling it with experiences—the first sounds you hear, your first touch, the things you see and taste. Each tiny grain of experience fills your experience bucket, otherwise known as your life.

But the one thing that you don't know is that your experience bucket has a hole in the bottom. As a child, you don't really notice the hole. Every day is full of experiences, big and small, and they are constantly filling your bucket, so you don’t hear the sound of the experiences draining away.

But after a while, as you become a teenager, you start to realize that it's harder to keep filling the bucket; you begin to forget things, and you have to start working at filling the bucket. Throughout your childhood, you might also notice that not all experiences are the same. Watching TV or scrolling through social media or webpages are very small grains of experience; they don’t stay with you, they slip right out of your bucket.

Reading books, starting a friendship, writing, and drawing seem to be more substantial pebbles of experience that don't drain away so easily. The more effort you put into something, the longer it seems to hang around, but if you stop practicing, eventually, even these pebbles will disappear down the hole in your experience bucket.

You also start to realize that if your bucket feels full, then life seems better. You might even be able to share some of the pebbles of experience with other people, and in return, they share some of their pebbles to fill your bucket even further.

On the flip side, when you feel like your bucket is getting more and more empty, life seems smaller and less fulfilling. Trying to fill your experience bucket can start to seem harder and harder, so you might just stop trying.

Luckily, some people have help filling their buckets; your parents, friends, and even a like-minded stranger can help. But that is not true of everyone. Sometimes, people empty your bucket.

You can always fill the bucket by practicing a skill, but often, your practice is in a single dimension, and you repeat things you have done in the past. This temporarily fills your bucket with small grains of experience, but that never lasts.

So what do you do? I would say that you need to think of building experiences that are multi-dimensional. In other words, one-dimensional practice leads to very small grains of experience, but multidimensional experiences lead to much larger pebbles (or even rocks) of experience, which, in some cases, will never fall out of the hole in the bottom of your experience bucket.

So, how do you create multi-dimensional experiences?
The first step is, in fact, that one-dimensional experience of practice, but the second step is to create a tool for yourself — a meeting agenda template or a plan for getting fit. Creating your own tool helps build a more robust experience in two dimensions. 

Yet, to really make something substantial, it needs to be three-dimensional. You need to share your tools and your experience with others to form a connection to build understanding. This can take the form of making something, books, movies, videos, poems, blog posts, music groups, drawings, anything that allows other people to take part in your experience. These three-dimensional experiences — these bigger pebbles and rocks — don’t so easily slip through the hole in your bucket, and if lots of people start to connect with your three-dimensional experience, then they can form movements and organizations that last the test of time. 

Filling your experience bucket is the work of a lifetime, and keeping it full can determine how much you enjoy that life. It's a never-ending process with no endpoint. The more multi-dimensional experiences you create, the less you need to fill your bucket with repetitive experiences like watching TV or scrolling through your Instagram feed, experiences that just slip through the hole in your experience bucket like so many grains of sand.

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My non-fiction books of 2024

By asking questions, I learn. Writing down what I have learned helps me explore, and some explorations become pictures. At every step, I take my time and embrace the role of randomness.

Learning to question by Paulo Freire

”I have the impression - and I don't know whether you will agree with me - that today teaching, knowledge, consists in giving answers and not asking questions.”

“Because, I repeat, knowledge begins with asking questions. And only when we begin with questions, should we go out in search of answers, and not the other way round.”

On Writing Well by Willian Zinsser

“I then said that the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke.”

“That condition was first revealed with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences—pruning and revising and reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen.”

Thinking in Pictures by Michael Blastland

“How do we do this in practice? One of the best ways is with the most simple, naive questions: 'And is that a big number?' Naive maybe, but powerful. I made half a career from asking that question, and plenty of important people looked silly trying to answer it.8
Here's £10 million for school singing lessons, says a government minister, riding the wave of a popular TV show about choirs. And is that a big number? Context: there are about ten million school kids. What's that when it's mapped? It's £1 each a year, or £30 for a teacher for one class a year, if you're lucky.”

”We tolerate complexity by failing to recognize it. That's the illusion of understanding, say Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.”

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton

“People’s willingness to engage in delicate explorations on the edge of their thinking could be easily suppressed by an atmosphere of even minimal competition and judgement.”

“Have you noticed how much easier it is for you to tell me about your failures than your successes?”

“This neural model also makes it clear why creativity favours not just a relaxed mind, but also one that is well-but not over-informed.”

“Time spent discovering things for yourself, even though someone could have simply told you the answer or given you the information, may be time well spent if the outcome is greater confidence and competence as an explorer.”

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“But there is a more severe aspect of naive empiricism. I can use data to disprove a proposition, never to prove one. I can use history to refute a conjecture, never to affirm it. For instance, the statement
The episode taught me a lot.
Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.”

“Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have.”

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Suffering is optional

"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."
This famous quote from the Dalai Lama might sound slightly harsh, yet I think that what he is saying, in part, is if you set unattainable goals, such as having the perfect job, marriage, children, or education, you will suffer the disappointment of never perfectly attaining those goals. 

So, how do you make progress in your life if your unattainable goals can cause suffering?

One popular approach is to set less challenging goals: I want a new smartphone or car. These goals avoid the suffering of disappointment but don’t help you progress because there is nothing more to do once they are attained. As Neil Postman said, "You cannot get better at watching TV."

Set a practice, not a goal.

The first step is to change your mindset, to move away from achievement and finite endpoints, and to open yourself to the idea that progress and learning are infinite. This means that you will be focused on doing new things you are not good at and practicing them daily for 15 minutes. Once you have confidence in one element of whatever skill you are practicing, move on to something else that challenges you. There is no end point; practice is forever.

Many companies have an annual ritual of getting people to set goals at the start of the year. By doing this, they enter what could be a growth opportunity with instead a finite mindset. If your goals are not attained, then everything else you did that year is a failure.

This excellent video clip from basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpoperfectly illustrates the difference between a finite and infinite mindset. "Failures are steps to success."

This year, instead of setting a goal, set a practice. If the skill you want to practice is improving how you present ideas, give yourself 30 minutes each week to give a short presentation to one of your peers. Each person will be different, and that is the challenge. Real practice involves failure, which a goal-based mindset cannot understand.

There are no shortcuts, just practice and consistency. Try to find joy in that. There is no buzz every day, but over time, a quiet confidence that allows you to know that you are capable of most things you set your mind to. Most importantly, you make suffering optional.

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Where do ideas come from?

Ideas are different from thoughts. Thoughts are everywhere and are as common as grains of sand. They are fleeting and often out of context. An idea, on the other hand, is “what exists in the mind as a representation (as of something comprehended) or as a formulation (as of a plan).” - Merriam-Webster definition. 

Ideas go beyond thoughts because they are formulated in a way that allows them to become real.

Here are some inspirations for ideas to try, read, and think about. 

• In A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young, the author outlines his method for the production of ideas, underscoring that they don’t just arrive, but must be made.
  “As I said before, what I am now about to contend is that in the production of ideas the mind follows a method which is just as definite as the method by which, say, Fords are produced.”

• There are many ways to have ideas, Creators on Creating is a great book that outlines how many of the most creative people develop their ideas.

• One practical way of creating ideas is the 9-box method. Get a piece of paper, draw a three-by-three grid of boxes, Write your problem statement at the top of the page, and then fill each box with an idea that might solve the problem you are trying to tackle. This method allows for a breadth of thinking and comparison between ideas.

• One of the best apps I have found for gathering ideas is Readwise. It allows you to highlight quotes from Kindle or other online readers and organize those ideas to act as a springboard for your own ideas.

• Musician Brian Eno is famous for being an ideas person. He believes in a concept called Scenius, which means that ideas are not just generated by individuals but by groups of people all thinking independently and then coming together to make an idea.

• I will leave you with this thought about ideas from the excellent book Hare Brain Tortoise Mind.
  “One of the strongest forces that prevents the discovery of these new avenues may be the habit of thinking fast: of taking your first intuitive assessment of the situation for granted, and not bothering to stop and check.”

A question…
How do you come up with ideas? Please take a moment to share your thoughts on what works for you.

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Listening is the first step

“Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.” - Carl Rogers

This quote inspired me to create a design exercise with my team. How can you practice active listening? What is active listening?

For me, it’s the ability to let go of your thoughts and feelings and formulate questions about what you hear. In other words, to be actively curious. This means going from a passive state of absorbing knowledge to an active state of thinking about what you heard and formulating questions based on that new knowledge—a practice driven not by self-interest but by curiosity.

This unlocks a whole new world where you can move beyond your thoughts into someone else’s ideas.

The exercise I devised for my team was to watch three videos and, after each video, spend 5 minutes writing down the questions that arose for each of them from watching each video.

Here are the three videos I used.

Andy Goldsworthy on the work of art
Lewis Hamilton on teamwork
Brian Eno on culture and creativity

After 30 minutes of this exercise, we generated over 60 questions as a group. This started a wide range of conversations among the team. For me, this is a victory for listening and curiosity, two vital skills for creativity to thrive.

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Teaching critique

A critique session is often a moment to teach. But what does it mean to teach?

I found this quote recently, which resonated.

“It means that your students can look at the work and make similar decisions without you being there.” - Dr Samuel Holtzman

Not only do we need to offer criticism, but we need to provide tools to help people critique their own work.

To that end, I wrote this article, “Design proofreading.” It offers a tool to help you understand how I critique UX design work. I hope it proves helpful to you as you work through your next project. There are no magic solutions to making great designs, no secret methods other than spending time understanding the problem, trying out a variety of ideas to see what fits, and then critiquing those ideas.

Every critique teaches you something, and the trick is to be open, to listen, to let go of your preconceived ideas, and to be ready to move on to the next idea.

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Fear is the motivation-killer

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” - Frank Herbert, Dune.

In today’s culture, we are constantly afraid. What will be the next disaster for yourself or your community? Cybercrime, subway muggings, bridge collapses, wars, and global pandemics. 24-hour news coverage of all these fearful events is constant. Ẽven observing them from the edges, it would be reasonable to feel fear. I certainly do.

The problem is that this fear robs us of our agency. If you allow it to overwhelm your mind, you become passive, waiting for the next disaster rather than living your life. So, how do you fight this? How do you find the motivation? How do you face your fear and permit it to pass over and through you?

One approach is to change the rules of the game. Right now, there are more sources of news and information than ever before in human history. In previous eras, people didn't know what they should be afraid of because they didn't know about events on the other side of the city, let alone the globe. Now, you can access everything immediately through your magic rectangle, always within arm’s reach.

But what if you changed the rules of the game? What if you went from being a passive information sponge to diving deeper into the ideas that speak to you? Rather than feeling fear, you pick the type of information and make it work for you instead of against you, providing you with a source of courage and motivation.

Find your people
Have you ever felt deeply connected with an idea you have read, watched, or listened to? An author or artist that you could not stop thinking about? What if we thought of that person as part of your “team for life” — a group of people who would help inspire and motivate you for the rest of your life?

It's fine to have a small team to start, and your team might change over your lifetime as you discover new people and ideas and as you yourself change. You might say, but I’ve read that book and listened to that music a thousand times. How do I keep getting motivation from that one person? This is where the internet in that magic rectangle can instead come to the rescue. We live in a time when a large part of human creation is accessible (or at least a large part of human knowledge). If you like a particular person, chances are so do a lot of other people. Those other people might have written a book, conducted an interview, or made a movie about your inspirational person. Luckily for you, all of that stuff is now only one click away. Apple podcasts or YouTube are excellent starting points.

Everyone’s “team for life” is unique to them. So it’s easy to be self-motivated to find this information because these are ideas and people you have picked. The deeper you dive into the people who get you, the more you learn. Your “team for life” is always there for you, showing you new places to explore, books to read, and things to listen to. This is also an excellent antidote to information overload, a filter on the internet.

You could pick from some of the usual suspects: Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Steven Spielberg, or the Beatles. But the people you pick don’t have to be famous; they just have to get you. Appeal to your particular way of thinking, the thing that motivates you. For example, I like Shakespeare, Neil Postman, Adam Curtis, and Georges Simenon. Now, that’s just me, but when I watch a Shakespeare scene or listen to an interview with Neil Postman, it motivates me to keep exploring. That motivation turns into things like starting to write this article.

Pick your team for life
Take 10 minutes, sit down, and write a list of people that you really enjoy reading, listening to, or watching. Don't worry if it’s hard at first or if you pick the wrong people. Your team is going to change and evolve as you do, and that's a wonderful thing. Once you have two or three people jotted down, open up a podcast app or YouTube, visit your local library, and look for anything about that person: interviews, music, movies, books, articles, anything that allows you to explore their ideas further, and make a playlist. The next time you’re bored or lack motivation, just pick something off your "team for life" list and enjoy.

Introduce other people to your team and share their ideas with your work colleagues or with your friends. It might fall flat, or it might be the opportunity for someone to find a new member of their own “team for life.” Find your people on your “team for life,” and they will open endless doors of insight, discovery, and motivation. This will allow the fear to pass over and through you, and what will remain is the most motivated version of you.

Look outside yourself

Have a problem at work? Try a mindfulness app. Have a family conflict? Feeling sad? You guessed it, try a mindfulness app.

What if instead of using an app to look inward for solutions, we looked outward?

If you feel your attention is scattered, you can practice meditation, breathe, and build your focus skills.

You can also make a coffee date with a friend once a week and sit and listen. Resist the temptation to offer quick fixes or anecdotes from your past experiences; just listen. I would argue that this would build your focusing skills just as much as any mindfulness app might. Sitting and listening also provide a new perspective on your own issues.

Modern culture has gone from a collective sense that we are interconnected to an almost robotic individualism, which is leading to record levels of anxiety, loneliness, and worse. The BBC writes, “suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among Americans under the age of 35, according to the Centers for Disease Control, America's health protection agency.”

Meditation and mindfulness clearly have a place but even monks talk to each other, they share ideas, problems, and chores.

If you want to get fit, get a personal coach. If you want to improve your mental health, get a therapist; if you want to learn a language, take a course with a teacher and class full of fellow learners.

While you can improve all these things by yourself with a smartphone, doing them with other people helps not only with learning a new skill, it also helps with the more intangible social learning which neither a device nor your inner voice can provide alone.

I am not advocating for returning to offices five days a week or only getting fit at a gym, but there needs to be some counterbalance to the relentless message that everyone fixes themselves alone, which seems to erode our culture one person at a time.

Even my favorite stoic, famously inward-looking, wrote,
“But the greatest benefit is to be derived from conversation, because it creeps by degrees into the soul.” - Seneca

The power of archives

Ramesses II died in 1213 BC. Venerated, he lived 90 years, a ripe old age by modern standards. But when you realize that the average Egyptian at the time died by the age of 25, that would be the equivalent of a person today who lived to 400. You can see why he seemed like a deity.

I found this cultural gem in a story about the British Museum's giant statue of King Ramesses II in an archive called A History of the World in 100 Objects, created by the British Museum and the BBC. It's a 100-part podcast series that views the history of the world through the lens of objects from the British Museum.

This kind of archive is not just a collection of items or stories; it is a carefully curated collection with a function, purpose, and vision.

I love archives; they connect with our past and help us understand our present and future. These invaluable resources are often collected and curated by driven individuals to ensure we maintain this connection with the past and its rich source of culture and knowledge. 

Here are some archives I have found and created that have captured my imagination. Please check them out and share any archives you have found with me. I would love to see, hear, and watch them.



History of the World in 100 Objects 

This fantastic collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum tells the story of civilization through objects curated from the British Museum's catalog.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
This one-person odyssey of an archive tells the story of rock and roll through 500 songs, providing a rich cultural history.

The Studs Turkel Archive
A brilliant author in his own right, Studs Turkel had a radio show for 45 years, and the archive of his interviews allows you to listen to fascinating regular people and some of the most influential people in the culture of the twentieth century: the juxtaposition makes this collection unique.

Over the years, in collaboration with various organizations, we at Buscada have created archives covering multiple topics and ideas. These are some of my favorites:

This Triangle Fire Open Archive
Following this significant tragedy for working people over a hundred years ago, the archive collects political, cultural, and personal objects and stories that show how much this event has shaped our modern world.

Working with People
This video archive examines words like collaboration, community, power, and representation and allows individuals to express their diverse perspectives on the meanings of these words. They are creating a space for dialogue and nuance around some of the most critical issues of our time.

Family List
This is our project to curate activities for kids to try, make, and play. It focuses on diverse books, play activities, and cultural ideas to help kids and adults understand the world around them through play.

Investigating design

A software product designer is often given a problem like this:
“People cannot figure out how to share a document using our current software experience.”

It’s natural for that designer to want to talk to end consumers of the software and ask them what the issues are with the software experience. When they do, they often hear responses like, "It’s just not clear," or "I don't even know where the button is,” or "This is not how it works on Microsoft Word." These conversations might offer valuable insight, but they don't really help a designer understand the whole problem; the feedback is about specific parts of the problem but doesn’t form a complete picture of the experience.

But what if this was a mystery?
What if there was a crime, a murder! it happened in the middle of the day, and there were several witnesses, but none of them actually saw the dirty deed.

Interview the witnesses
You would interview the witnesses - just like in our software design problem when the designer talked to the users. But where would you be if you just stopped there without examining the crime scene or forensics?

The crime scene
At the murder scene, we’d investigate the details of the space. Too often, in software, we overlook those spaces where it all happens: the software screens, the buttons, menus, fields, and workflows. There is much to be learned from those old screens, like from a crime scene.

Forensics
Where did people click? Could they understand the labels? Was it clear that this item could be shared? What is all the functionality that's available? In other words, let’s establish the facts so we can see the whole problem.

Put the pieces together...
Once you’ve interviewed the witnesses, investigated the crime scene, and have all the facts in place, you can recreate the sequence of events that led to the crime (the user experience). You can see what is happening and why it's going wrong. You can take all those eyewitness statements (user interviews), put them in context, and make sense of them.

Once you can see what happened in a design, unlike a crime, you can change what will happen. As a designer, you can change the sequence of events and alter the facts to make the outcome something that engages your users and helps them get things done. In other words, you can create a design that is no longer a crime.

Reactive vs Proactive work

A recent official report on Fostering Innovation by the British Psychological Society, having surveyed all the relevant research, concludes that: ‘Individuals are more likely to innovate where they have sufficient autonomy and control over their work to be able to try out new and improved ways of doing things’ and where ‘team members participate in the setting of objectives’.

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind - Guy Claxton

Office workers now have more autonomy than ever, and it’s clear that people feel that autonomy is important to them—yet understanding how to use this newfound freedom is often challenging. Autonomy needs a new mindset.

To take advantage of your newfound freedom, you need to consider the balance of reactive versus proactive work that you do.

How do you know if you are doing reactive work?

Are you executing on work set out in the project plan and primarily responding to other people’s requests?

How do you know if you are doing proactive work?

Are you planning how you’ll approach your work?

Here’s an example of choosing one of these two ways to work in response to the same scenario. Your boss briefs you on a new project. You can:

A: Wait for your boss’s project plan and for someone else to schedule a kickoff meeting.

B: Make your own project plan, research the subject matter, and schedule meetings with end users of this project.

While plan B sounds like a lot more work, it has the benefit of being proactive, putting your needs out in the world, and communicating what you want to achieve with the project. Even if you don’t get everything you want, you might get more than you imagine. In addition, you will be much more motivated to do a task you set yourself rather than being told what to do.

Balance is essential. You don’t need to control everything, but you do want control over some aspects of what you do. Doing proactive work can help you achieve this balance.

No matter what your level in your organization is, proactive work can have an impact. If you are an intern, it’s a way to ensure you get a chance to do more exciting work. If you are mid-level in your career, it lets you set the tone for a project, and if you are a leader, it enables you to control your most precious asset, your time.

My books of 2023

Change is the one constant in life; it’s also the key theme in some of my favorite books from this year.

Maybe you are like spy George Smiley, looking forward to retirement before having your world turned upside down, or maybe you are like John Cleese, discovering the power of your subconscious mind and its ability to change how you think. The artist Wayne Thiebaud recalls his ability to change between being an acclaimed artist and a teacher. Peter Ackroyd details the amazing roller coaster ride of change that is British history.

Adapting and changing is a crucial ability in life, and W. Timothy Gallwey’s great book The Inner Game of Work helps you find ways to focus on the change you want.

I hope you find a book here to take into the new year that can help you focus on the change you want in 2024!

The Inner Game of Work
W. Timothy Gallwey 

The spy who came in from the cold
John Le Carre

Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide
John Cleese

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors
Peter Ackroyd

Wayne Thiebaud: Draftsman
Isabelle Dervaux

Give as few orders as possible

“82% of employees and 62% of HR directors believe that workers will need to hone their current skills or acquire new ones at least once a year in order to maintain competitive advantage in a global job market.”
- HBR What Your Future Employees Want Most

As a leader in an organization, your first priority is often to deliver results, complete projects, and meet deadlines. Doing the essential work of helping individuals and teams acquire new skills is often left to employees’ own self-motivated efforts or mandated training courses. 

I think there’s a better way to help people hone and gain skills. I recently read the book The Inner Game of Work by W. Timothy Gallwey, which focuses on a coaching approach. Gallwey’s coaching system involved not giving specific instructions to the people he worked with but instead suggesting specific things for them to focus on that could lead them to improve a skill. This coaching method is not about filling people with new information like a training course might; it is about helping them improve and optimize what they already have. 

In one example, Gallwey writes about his work with call center employees, who do a job that is often challenging and thankless. Instead of having them learn pre-determined scripts or evasion tactics, Gallwey asked the call center workers to focus on the tone of a caller’s voice. By learning to listen carefully to a caller’s tone of voice, the call center workers evolved a skill they already had; over time, they became better able to understand the emotional state of the person on the other end of the line, which allowed them to approach the conversation in the right frame of mind. Gallwey’s book is full of examples like this wherein coaching helped people better understand their jobs and increased their ability to handle most situations—all without giving them step-by-step instructions.

To put this coaching style of management in context, I made this diagram to show the spectrum of different team management styles. 

Order
Direct & results 
This is the most familiar management style: telling people what you need and when you need it, directing them about the results you need.  

Lead
Suggest & results 
This style requires a person to convince an entire company or group to follow a particular path without giving specific orders but rather through suggestions. This requires a very different set of skills. Communication and persuasion are the critical skills required.

Teach
Direct & learn
Teaching involves helping people learn something new; it requires structure, tools, and materials to help people learn a new skill. The goal of a teacher is to achieve understanding, not results. 

Coach
Suggest & learn 
Coaching is often the most misunderstood of all the categories. It is a subtle skill set. Coaching is about trying to get people to level up the skills they already have without micro-managing the process. 

Management styles are rarely delineated like this; worse, managers are often expected to use all of them. Yet, managers may find it hard to master all these different styles, and switching between them can confuse managers and teams. If you give orders and demand results one day and then offer open-ended suggestions the next, people often don’t know what to expect—or what is expected of them. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the hero receives some good advice: “‘Give as few orders as possible,’ his father had told him... ‘Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.’”

Following the “order” style of management can get results, but it often leads to teams feeling like they learned very little in the process of getting that desired result. When people on teams don't learn, they get bored, which makes getting quick results even harder. While “coaching” is often the least used management style, it may in fact, be the most effective at giving employers and employees what they each want: growth and new skills for employees and proactive, motivated employees for employers. Seems like a win-win.

Tomorrow is another world

“Never mind.” He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.".
- Wolf Hall
 | Hilary Mantel

Feeding my subconscious

Design is a process, not an outcome.

The process of exploring a problem will always lead to better results compared to creating the first thing that pops into your head.

I recently read John Cleese's book on creativity, and it reinforced this notion of design and creativity as a process of discovery.

In the book, Cleese notes that there are two parts to the process: first, the conscious effort you put into thinking about a problem, and second, the way your subconscious takes over as you daydream or sleep. It’s this subconscious time that makes sense of the tangle of issues with a problem and allows you to unwind your thinking and often to come up with a solution you could not think of when you were struggling consciously. Your subconscious mind is a mysterious place, and you are not entirely in control of it, which leads to these happy insights.

As I read this, I had a thought. If I am not in control of my subconscious mind, then what happens if instead of feeding my subconscious brain with fun, creative ideas, I provide it with, let’s say, reading hundreds of posts about negative things, a disaster here, a negative comment about my ideas there. What if I’m feeding these thoughts into my mind 2-3 hours a day in a constant visual and text stream? What will my subconscious make of that? Will it emerge with something positive or negative?

I am not in control of what my subconscious does. But I am in control of what I feed my subconscious. The diet I feed my mind is as important as the one I provide my body. I find that every day, I need to eat my mental greens to feed my mind with challenging and nourishing ideas and that maybe I should take a break from those Instagram Big Macs.

Think like a designer

"In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem solving".
- Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Designing Your Life

The small things in life

A quote from the Design + Culture article The Danish way. Please take a read and let me know what you think.

Are you directing or acting?

“Cut! Let’s try that one more time!” 

You’re on a movie set, and the director didn’t see exactly what they were looking for in a particular take. The lighting was off, the costumes looked wrong, or the expressions on the actors’ faces didn’t match the dialogue. Directors like David Fincher are famous for doing forty or fifty takes to get what they want. Everybody involved takes this process in their stride because they expect this to happen; they just set up and try again. This might seem like a super annoying—or incredibly inefficient—way to work. But this seemingly slow method can lead to great results for creative work. 

Doing multiple takes while everything is set up and everyone is in the right frame of mind is, in fact, very efficient and creative. 

Let's take another scenario. Let's say a designer spends some time creating a poster for a design team review. They present a couple of ideas, but something is not quite right. The structure is wrong, or the content does not quite work. What happens next? The people trying to decide if the design makes sense (the “directors”) cannot say, “Okay, let's try it again” in real time because the designer cannot just make another idea for the poster on the spot. It takes another 2-3 days to make a meaningful version, which, once again, might not be quite right. 

Suddenly, it’s our standard process for designing that looks pretty inefficient and emotionally bruising compared to the film process of repeatedly trying. 

To avoid this situation, a lone designer will often try to both act out the scene (create a design) and direct the scene (decide which of their ideas is the right one to show). But this is difficult. I know there have been a few actor/directors, but I would say that they are the exception, not the rule. 

In films, the audience never sees all the takes, just the final cut; in design, a client or internal stakeholders only need to see two or three versions of a design, but a design team’s internal process needs to be much more expansive to come up with those few strong ideas. 

If you are designing something, you are an actor. So, don’t edit yourself. Come into an internal team design review with a range of different concepts. This is where it’s helpful to think in concept models. What is a concept model? For example, cars, trains, and bicycles are different concept models of transport that can get you from A to B. They require very different elements to make them work. Cars require roads, insurance, driver’s licenses etc. Trains need stations, tickets, timetables etc. They each provide the same outcome of getting from A to B but go about it in very different ways. Their concept models are clearly different. 

One simple rule for crafting different concept models of an idea is to take your first idea and then make the complete opposite version. (Car vs. Train) Another method is to take your initial model and then take everything out of it apart from the essential elements (Car vs. Bicycle).

Finding the right concept model is the hard work of design. Once the concept model is transparent, creating the sketch or image of the design is usually pretty fast. Bring a variety of concept models to your “director”—now they can see a breadth of options, leading to better outcomes and a much richer conversation about the problem you are trying to solve.

If you are a design director, then you are like the film director; you cannot be involved with creating individual concept models/ideas. It’s not impossible of course, but you do have to flick a switch in your brain and let go of any attachment you have to an idea and look at it as if you were seeing it for the first time. This sounds logically possible, yet it’s often emotionally very difficult to do; the effort it takes to make something makes it hard to let go of, clouding your ability to understand the problem and see the right solution. 

I can hear the outcry from designers now: “Why can’t we do both?”

I would reply there is no harm in being an actor. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, and Angela Bassett … are all great actors; they have considerable influence over the creative process, but they don’t edit and direct the final movie. They play their part. A considerable part, and they seem very happy with that role. 

Design is the ability to make sense of things. It is often a collaborative activity, and even the “crazy ones” have their own creative collaborators. Brain Eno, famous for his creativity, has a term for this. He calls it scenius, his term which describes “the creative intelligence of a community.” In these collaborations, we all have a role. Sometimes those roles are interchangeable, but great ideas are often formed when people focus on a single role, allowing the design process to work and creating something beyond a single imagination.

Efficiency is overrated

It’s 7 am, and it’s a school day. That means getting our son to school on time. For the longest time, it has been a tricky task, that is until we wrote a checklist. Every morning, he has to do seven things to be ready for school. He checks them off the list, and we are out the door on time. A model of efficiency, checklists are great for activities in life that don’t need much consideration. The issue occurs when you start applying the checklist mentality to parts of your life that require real consideration. 

“When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.” - Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

Checklists, timers, stand-ups, speed reading, book summaries, and workflows are some of the efficiency tools that have come to dominate our lives. They are great tools for production and for getting things done. Yet, when we apply these same tools to the creative parts of our lives (arguably the more important parts of our lives), they are destructive and rob us of much of the value of these creative moments. 

What matters when you slow down is the experience and emotions you feel when you enter this state; it is quite different from the momentary fix of the dopamine you get from checking something off a list. 

In the next few posts, I will highlight several examples of how slowing down improves creativity and makes activities more enjoyable.
To get started, I’ll share an example from music and one from conversation.

Music: Slow, Slow, Quick 
Recently I noticed that while practicing his guitar my son was playing the same songs as usual, but very slowly. I asked him why he was doing that. It turns out that his guitar teacher had recommended this slow playing to improve his technique. Playing slowly leads to better form, so when he plays at full speed, the notes he produces sound clearer, more exact, more pure.

Conversation: Repeat after me
A while ago, I read a great book called Non-violent Communication by Marshal Rosenberg. It’s an essential book on asking for what you need and listening for what others need. One important exercise in the book helps reduce conflict in conversations. Practice accurately repeating back to your conversation partner precisely what they just told you. This sounds simple, but it is a deceptively challenging thing to do. It requires you to stop jumping ahead in a conversation to what you want to say and to slow down and really listen to the thoughts and feelings of the person sitting across from you.

In the sci-fi classic Dune, Duke Atredies gives his son Paul Atreides (the hero of the book) the following advice.

“Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for a quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurances of success. Take your time and be sure.” - Dune by Frank Herbert

This rings true. Slow down to ensure not only success but also enjoyment in the parts of your life that are most important to you.