Uncertainty

Jonathan Fields: Yes, and it's definitely when I started that process it was pretty unconventional. I think, interestingly enough, along the way it's probably become less of an aberration these days, but that initial jump for me really happened because I was working an incredible number of hours, under a lot of stress, and my body literally gave out on me. I ended up in hospital with a perforated intestine and an abscess and in emergency surgery. You know, when your body pretty much rejects your career you tend to take a step back and say "Hmm, what's happening here?" And for me there were two big awakenings from that event. One was that the thing that I was working so hard for I really didn't have an interest in, I had no desire to be a partner in a law firm, and there were many things that I really was passionate about that I had completely stopped doing. So that set in motion a really substantial change in the way both that I lived my life and that I pursued my living.

Rachel Salaman: Do you think it's hard for people to get that kind of perspective if they don't go through a physical breakdown of any kind?

Jonathan Fields: I think, sadly, it may be. We tend not to pause long enough to really ask ourselves whether what we're doing is a path which is intelligent, which his deliberate, which is meaningful to us, or whether we're just kind of following along the path that most people like us find is suitable. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of times the thing that does make us pause is some sort of major incident, and part of the challenge is to try and create regular opportunities in our own life I think to reflect and to contemplate without having to have something major happen.

Rachel Salaman: Well your book is about unleashing creativity, how relevant is it for people who may not consider themselves to be creative as such?

Jonathan Fields: Yes, it's a great question. I was just talking to a company in New York yesterday actually and one of the questions came up after the presentation, they said "My job here is not creative, I do this, this and this," and I said "Actually you need to stop for a second." We tend to label positions, we tend to label ourselves either creative or non-creative based on whether we're a big idea, sort of a blank canvas person or not. The truth is we're all creative, we all create on very intense levels throughout our day, but there are different creative orientations, and regardless of the orientations, whether you're somebody who comes up with an idea from nothing or whether you're the person who then helps take that idea and build it into something real and concrete and manifested in the world, they are two different parts of creativity which are both equally important and both subject to a lot of the same challenges.

Rachel Salaman: So what research went into your book?

Jonathan Fields: A lot. It's been a fascinating subject of mine for years and years and years, so I've been gathering research for a long time, on three levels really. One is my own experience, having changed careers a number of times, launched, grown and sold a couple of companies. Second level is having access to a lot of people that I can interview, that I can sit down with, from best-selling writers to chief innovation officers at major creative agencies, to high-level executives and to more consumer-side businesses, and really just walking through their experiences. And the final part of the triangle there is more traditional published research, you know, university sponsored, pure review, published research, and there's a tremendous amount of research sort of in the psychology of innovation, of action, of decision making that really impacts the creative process and your ability to take action in the face of less than perfect information.

Rachel Salaman: And as you note in the book, the feeling of uncertainty is uncomfortable. Do you think that we have to endure that feeling if we want to do creative work, is it an integral part of creativity do you think?

Jonathan Fields: The answer is really two-fold. One is we have to go to that place where we take action without knowing how it's going to end. The only way to take action in the face of perfect information is if either we or somebody else has done this thing before, at which point it becomes derivative so why bother. So our brains are generally wired to experience that as unease, as anxiety and as fear. So we do have to go to that place where we have to make decisions and we have to take actions without knowing how it's going to end, and very likely feeling we don't have all of the information we'd like to have. How we feel in response to that is something which is much more subject to our control, so there are practices and strategies and processes that can move us or help move us from feeling like we're suffering, like we're overcome with anxiety, paralysis, and fear, to a place where we experience a far greater sense of calm, of ease and equanimity in the face of these exact same circumstances.

Rachel Salaman: And that's what a lot of your book is about isn't it.

Jonathan Fields: Yes, exactly.

Rachel Salaman: You talk in the book about what you call "certainty anchors," could you just explain what those are and how they help with the creative process?

Jonathan Fields: Absolutely. So a certainty anchor is essentially a moment or activity in the day. Very often it can be sort of a few seconds, as long as minutes or even hours, where we pretty much eliminate the decision making part of that moment or activity, create known outcomes that we can expect to always happen the same way at the same, and they allow us to essentially repeatedly touch psychological stone throughout the day, to create a space that we can lean into while working. We know that there are going to be all these moments where we know what's going to unfold, where we're essentially dropping these little certainty anchors throughout the day, where we can keep coming back to these moments and have a sense of almost security, that we know that at these touch points throughout the day we can touch down. What we found is that a lot of people do this, both in the context of their work, but they also do it, especially people who tend to be very creative, tend to do it in their life outside of work as well, and we see a lot of ritualizing as part of this too. So things as simple as a lot of people will wake up, they'll eat the same thing for breakfast every day, they'll put on essentially the same clothes every day, you know. They're ritualize and they create these little moments of certainty throughout the day, and then they'll do it within the work process as well, and it changes the underlying psychology by feeling like they have enough of a tether to these moments when they know what comes next. So that when they're charged during the work with the responsibility of really going to that place where they don't know what's going to happen, they feel more comfortable that they do have these touch points and they'll have moments where they feel more... basically safer.

Rachel Salaman: That's interesting isn't it, because it's somewhat counter-intuitive to people who might not have given this much thought, because you think of creativity being about letting yourself free from your routines and rituals rather than using the rituals to unleash the creativity.

Jonathan Fields: It really is, and what was fascinating to me was that I didn't come into the process really looking at this, but as I started interviewing all these different people I had the benefit of beginning to identify patterns that I saw across large numbers of people, and I started to pick up on this. So then I started to ask more deliberately, you know, about people's routines and how people were systematizing certain parts of their work and their non-work lives, and the patterns really became powerful and crossed a number of different fields. What you realize is that we do need to create windows to allow for a high level of novelty, of different input, of new experiences, but at the same time very often we create a larger framework around those windows of ritual and routine that allows us enough baseline time to operate effectively on a daily basis, but also that allows us to move from idea to productivity and to actually finish output.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, because you talk about a two-stage process of creation in the book, which picks up from what you've just said. The first stage you characterize as "Insight dot connecting and disruption," and the second you characterize as "Refinement, expansion and production." So can you talk us through that and tell us how you developed that model?

Jonathan Fields: Yes, and, you know, it was partly through my own experience, partly through looking at the creativity research, which actually tends to identify more stages than that, and also through just a lot of extensive interviewing. You know, the earlier question that we were talking about, where you said... and the example that I used, where somebody said to me in a corporation, "Well, you know, I'm in a part of the company that's not creative"and I said "Wait a second, everybody's creative," but we tend to have... there are these two modes of creative orientation is what I call them. So one is insight and ideation, and this is typically the person who, you give them a white piece of paper and they're the happiest person in the room, they get to go from blank paper to a crazy idea. And then there's another person who'll be sitting at a table with you, you know, if you're on a team, and if you give that person a blank piece of paper they'll start to shake because they're terrified, but if you give them the paper that that first person has just jotted some really cool ideas or drawings or sketches on, they'll take that and they'll quickly... they just dive into it, they come alive by looking at that and say "Oh, well we need to tweak this, fix this, refine this, expand this" and go through the iterative process of going from there to actual final output, whether it's a painting, a book, a product or a service, or a division or an experience an organization is creating. What's fascinating when you bring this into a larger organization is that when you look at the makeup of a team, it's actually really important that you have a healthy balance of both creative orientations on any human team, because if you don't then you end up either trapped in idea land and never actually bringing anything to life, or you end up having a lot of people who are capable of execution but not having the ideas flow into that group that are really good enough for execution. So it's important to sort of balance out your teams with the right combination of those orientations.

Rachel Salaman: But how easy is it for a team leader to know where the orientations lie within their team members?

Jonathan Fields: I think it's pretty easy actually, it's just that nobody asks. We all tend to have... I pretty much guarantee that everybody listening to this right now as I just went through those two examples were saying to themselves either "Yes, that's me" or "That's me." And it's not "I'm 100 percent this or 100 percent that," we usually have some mix, but we usually have a very strong bent towards one or the other orientation, and we can pretty readily self-identify who we are. And if you really have any question, then give somebody a white piece of paper and see what happens.

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Rachel Salaman: You talk about Creative Hives in your book, and that's very useful, especially for lone workers. Can you apply the Creative Hive idea to organizations as well?

Jonathan Fields: Absolutely. In fact, organizations have a much easier time creating these. So what I was starting to look at also is what's the social dynamic around creativity and innovation that allows individuals and groups of people to come up with ideas and move them through execution rapidly. So I started looking at different models, and one of the most fascinating ones that's been around recently is coming out the world of tech-entrepreneurship, and it's called the Seed Accelerator Model. Some people know this, you know, the big examples are Y-Combinator and Techstars, and what they essentially do is a couple of times a year they bring founding teams into a 10,000 square foot working space, and they may have a dozen teams of 2-5 people working intensely for 12 weeks, and at the end of that 12 week window they all present what they've accomplished, you know, to a team of founders, of venture capitalists and angels, and a large number then get funded.

What I wanted to find out is how is this type of environment changing the social dynamic in a way that allows these people to make such tremendous progress in such a short period of time, and a lot of them will come in with a single idea and then the team will iterate, they'll pivot on that idea, the business model, the platform, and they'll literally build technology, kill it, build it again, kill it again and then build it again, you know, as they pivot the model and the service. So one of the things that I started to find was that there are some really big changes in this environment, and we actually see elements of these changes in larger organizations as well. So some of those changes are fundamentally... there's a top-down culture that exalts experimentation, and that's mission critical. We see this in big organizations, you know, the obvious example is Google and their legendary 20 percent experimental time, where it's become part of the culture. It's a really big thing to the organizational structure, that we want you to go out and do things that you couldn't justify doing. Roger Martin, who's one of the big design thinking people, I heard him speak earlier this year, and he shared something that always stays with me. He said "The two most dangerous words to innovation are 'prove it,' because anything worth doing, anything that's truly new and advanced you won't have enough information to prove." So we need to get organizations to understand that a certain amount of time should be allocated to projects that are not provable in advance, and that's really important to have that sort of buy-in and top-down.

One of the other things that's really important in that type of environment is that we know that... you know, we talked about it earlier, the fact that people tend to be very fearful and anxious when they're charged with having to make decisions or take action in the face of uncertainty. In fact, part of the brain called the amygdala, the fear center, lights up. What we have discovered from later research is that it's not just deciding and taking action, but there's a huge fear of being judged for making decisions, taking actions, without all the information, guessing wrong. So judgment is one of these things that really tends to paralyze this and we don't process well. What we see happening in this Creative Hive environment is again on a cultural level we change the dynamics, so that instead of operating in an environment where very few other people are taking risks, very few other people are trying new things, and those who do and fail are largely judged. We create an environment where we say "This is all in, everybody's responsible for doing this. Everybody will be transparent and sort of be held accountable to reporting on what you're doing on a weekly basis," so nobody's left out, it's all in, meaning if somebody has to report, then 10 minutes later somebody else is going to have to share what they're up to, and what it does is two things; it normalizes the expectation of exposure to criticism so that you don't feel like you're all alone any more, you feel like you're in this with everybody else, and that really takes the edge, sort of it changes the psychology of judgment. The other thing that it does is it allows you to more easily extract the data from judgment and separate it from the emotion, because everybody's in the same boat together and because the repeated exposure to this sort of transparent reporting and feedback creates a loop where, over time, it's almost like exposure therapy, it makes you more comfortable with what's coming out of it, and what we know is for creativity and innovation data is mission critical. We're desperate for feedback, we need to know if we're on the right track or not, so if we can create environments that allow us to process the data without being crippled by the emotion that often makes us want to reject it, it's massively empowering to the process.

Rachel Salaman: It sounds quite time consuming to do this properly. In your experience is it quite difficult to get buy-in from corporate decision makers to allow the time that needs to go into a Creative Hive process?

Jonathan Fields: Yes, and this is a great question, and here's the way that it will usually happen on more of an organization level. You never go in asking for wholesale buy-in, because it just won't happen. So what we do is we try and have experiments, so we say "Okay, here's what we're going to do. We'll take one group and we we're going to use 30, 60 or 90 days, and we're going to do some restructuring of the work flow, we're going to do some restructuring and we're going to turn it into a Creative Hive, make sure the orientations are right, and also bring in some of the practices," sort of the daily practices that we'll probably chat about in a little bit, "and see," you know. And what we want to do is we'll set a metric or a series of metrics in the beginning to identify if this experiment is working. So we'll say "Okay, we don't expect you to just buy-in to this, but it actually won't take a lot of effort. We just want you to allow people to operate a little bit differently for a fixed window of time, and at the end of that window we're going to look at the metrics, and if this team has come up with more ideas, better ideas, if they've executed on a level which is far superior to those around them, then the data really proves the validity of the ideas."

Rachel Salaman: You also talk about something called Socializing Creation, which I think is different from the Creative Hive idea. Could you explain the difference?

Jonathan Fields: It is, and they overlap to a certain extent, and what we see also, and what's kind of fascinating, is that some of the lessons that came out of Japanese automotive manufacturing a few decades ago came to this country and has now really been seeing a lot of uptake in the tech-entrepreneurship world, not just in the U.S. but in the U.K. and all over, where it used to be sort of a waterfall mentality, it was the development style, and this is actually a huge thing in the advertising, communications, creative agency world also. So you have a client and you're charged with coming up with some sort of really creative idea or program or product, and you have your teams that go through ideation and you try and come up with a dozen different ideas internally, and then you develop them, you spend a fair amount of time, money and energy developing them internally, all based on guesses largely. And then at some point you get something that you feel is polished enough to show to a small group of people to try and see if you can get some sort of representative feedback on it. And then you release it into the wild, and what happens is very often you've developed it largely in isolation without bringing anybody, end users, into the process. It is a massively uncertain process, huge anxiety and fear provocation because you really don't know what's going to happen until you release the product into the wild, and very often you and the organization have invested a substantial amount of time, money and energy and reputation into this thing before you ever know if it's going to hit. It's terrifying, and very often it doesn't work, the vast majority of the time actually the vast majority of product releases don't work, they bomb.

So there's this movement around agile and new methodology to change that, and it changes the process but it also changes the psychology of the process, and what I mean by that is instead of waiting until the end to bring your expected end users into the process we actually bring them in as early as possible. We create the most fundamental version of a product experience, service or solution that we can share with people without being horribly embarrassed, knowing that it's not the end product, knowing that it's just a smidge, you know, it's enough to get a feel. And then we bring in a nice sized representative sampling of the actual end users, not a paid focus group, which are very often hugely biased, we bring in a sizeable number of private community, of the real people who will be using this, and we ask for their feedback. And the goal here is not to build a list, the goal is not to make money, the goal is to reduce waste, to maximize learning, and to shift the psychologies, to bring enough moments of certainty into the process, earlier in the process, that we feel comfortable investing more and executing more effectively and more quickly. What happens is also, by the time you then iterate this, you know, five, 10, 15, 20, 100 times, it takes the same amount of time to bring a product to market, but by the time you actually bring it to market your likelihood of succeeding sky-rockets because you know, you've brought people into the process far earlier and you've integrated it. It's almost like you're co-creating with them, to a large extent people would say you are in fact co-creating with them, so it's not just you, it's them.

Rachel Salaman: Now you devote a chapter of your book to training your brain to work with uncertainty and improve creativity. What are some of the ways to do this for a time-poor professional person?

Jonathan Fields: Yes, and this is where it gets kind of fascinating, because we consider ourselves very progressive and we know a lot and there's great science, and what we start to realize is that actually the ancient Greeks knew a lot more than we did. A couple of thousand years ago there was no such thing as a scholar who wasn't also an athlete, because they understood there's a deep connection between them, and what we now know is that there's tremendous research around the impact of movement and meditation on the creative process, on cognitive function, on problem solving, on creativity, on anxiety and fear and stress reduction. If you are an individual who works in a team or an organization that's driven by innovation, to integrate daily exercise and mindfulness and meditation into the experience of the people who are creating and innovating or charged with that, they're the two probably most powerful force multipliers on the planet for that.

Rachel Salaman: There's an interesting part in the book where you explore the crunch point, where a person has to decide whether to hold or fold in a risky, creative project. So what factors do you find people need to weigh up in that kind of situation?

Jonathan Fields: Yes, and you know, this is probably one of the most difficult things that anybody who's trying to bring something new to life deals with. The journey, it's a lot of work and there will always be moments in time where you just step back and say "This isn't going the way I thought it was going, is it really worth it? Is this just another challenge along the road that I need to figure out how to move through, or is the market telling me that the idea was so wrong that this just won't work no matter what I do with it?" I spent a lot of time asking the question, how do you deal with this, to a lot of people, and did not get the most satisfying answers to be very honest. A lot of people, I said "How do you know, how do you know the difference between that feeling in your gut that's telling you it's time to fold your cards, or the feeling in your gut that's telling you 'This is really tough but you should keep pushing forward'?" And the vast majority of people told me "You just know," and I'm not comfortable with that. So I really tried to push further and say "Okay, how can we ask the question? There may not be a definitive way to tell, but what are the intelligent questions to ask around the process?" And I think one of the big questions that a lot of people skip, sort of the overarching question, is "Is this something that I'm being called to do? Is this thing I can't not do? Is it a mission which is so much a part of who I am or who this organization is that it cannot be abandoned? Or is this something which is just a project, a business which is designed with a specific goal, but it's not who I am?" Because the answer to that question will very much change what you're willing to endure and how hard you're willing to push forwards in any particular endeavor.

A lot of times within an organization the answer is no, and the question becomes "Okay, it's not a calling, it's not something that's fundamentally what the entire organization is about, but it's an interesting project, it's an experiment, and we would love for it to succeed," and then what you do is you start to look at the data. So what we're doing is, you know, every project, let's say we've set up a team to roll out a new product, well we staff the team and then we make a plan, and into that plan go a set of assumptions, and part of those assumptions are true, but part of those assumptions will be proven horribly wrong, always happens that way. So what we want to do is set up systems to keep a really good beat on the process of data replacing hunch, data replacing assumptions, and checking. So, you know, we set up a meeting every week or every two weeks or once a month, depending on the flow of the project, where we can basically say "Okay, this is what we were trying to create, here were the opening assumptions. As we're gaining momentum, as we're moving forward, here's the data that we've now got. Which of the assumptions can we replace now with the hard data?" And you sort of keep an ongoing grid like that, and then what you do is you look at it and you say "Okay, do we still believe, based on what we now know, that what we want to do is still viable, can we do it?" So that's one big question you have to ask. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no.

Then we ask "Even if we do believe it is viable, so let's say the market is telling us that a lot of our assumptions were wrong, but we also now can see pretty clearly that if we change X, Y and Z we can create something the market will really like, but does doing so, so change the initial product, service or project and the underlying motivation that brought us to it, that even though we feel we can now make it succeed it will no longer resonate, we will no longer be truly vested in wanting to make this happen?" Because I've seen that happen so many times, people, they start with bad information, and we all do, there's no way to not have assumptions that are going to be wrong, the market starts to say "Hey, here's the right information," they replace it and they build what the market wants, and then they're less on top of the product, saying "It's viable, it's making money, it's doing well, but I have no interest in it because it's morphed into something that I'm no longer connected with." That's very often the moment when entrepreneurs sell a company or people move out of teams. So it's an interesting process, but those are sort of the big questions that you need to ask along the way.

Rachel Salaman: So finally, what simple steps might someone take tomorrow if they wanted to do more creative work and felt they were being held back by fear and uncertainty?

Jonathan Fields: So there are a couple of things that they can do, and I break this out into different categories. One is personal practices, and we talked about some of those, so immediately going out and saying "Okay, let me go download tomorrow a very basic, guided, mindful meditation, or maybe I'm going to go out and learn TM," whatever it may be, make a phone call and go download a file and just start to explore it. The same thing with exercise, start to explore not just what's effective in a vacuum, but what type of movement makes you come alive, and those are daily practices that you do just like brushing your teeth. You know, some of the ideas about changing environment, you can start to think of that as "Okay, how can I restructure my day so that I have more of the support I need, the people who are working around me are like-minded and striving in a similar way, and have more freedom to experiment, and also start to create of these certain anchors in the day?" Explore integrating ritual and routine into certain parts of your day, where you don't want to become... you know, there are two extremes; one is you become so ritualized that it almost becomes obsessive-compulsive, and the other is that there's so little structure that you never end up creating anything. So you want to find a balance, you know, what are the small rituals that you can create in your day?

And I'll throw one other thing in there, which is working in shorter bursts. One of the things that we know now is that the brain generally isn't capable of functioning all that well after about 90 minutes. So instead of powering through for hours and then wondering why you're working for three straight hours but the last two of them, you know that you've been working but you really can't point to what you've gotten done, and we've all experienced that so many times. How many times have you gotten through a long day where you just know that you're insanely busy, and then somebody says "Well what did you actually get done?" and you have no idea. So pull back to 90 minute bursts of intense focus, because what we know is the brain loses attention, awareness and focus very quickly, and after about 90 minutes we're cooked. We need to take a break and refuel, and the refueling can be these things like a short meditation, a short brisk walk, you know, it can be the mindfulness and the movement, and they can be listening to music or things that are non-work related.

We also know that very often those moments where we pull ourselves away from what we would linearly define as the work are the moments where very often the greatest ideas, ideation and insight very often comes to us, not when we're working hard within the work, but when we work hard and then create deliberate spaces and step away and give moments for the amazing stuff to bubble up.

Rachel Salaman: Jonathan Fields, thank you very much for joining us.

Jonathan Fields: It's been my pleasure, thank you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Jonathan's book again is "Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance," and you can find out more about him at jonathanfields.com. There's more on the book at www.uncertaintybook.com, and you may be interested in an audit tool that you can find there, which is a 27 question assessment designed to help people decide where to focus their efforts.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.