MarketingProfs was kind enough to publish a piece of mine, “Why Social Media Should Leave Your Marketing Department—And Where It Should Go Instead".” It's a distillation of a few chapters in my forthcoming book, Leading in a Social World (leadinginasocialworld.com). In the piece I basically try to deconstruct social media marketing, and reconstruct it in a customer care space.
Process vs. Product
I’m interested in the business-minded pursuit of understanding creativity. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I’m interested.
One thought that keeps coming to mind: The creative processes that I’m most familiar with don’t start with outcome. I can’t help but wonder if this is why businesses are tripping over the concept and have such a hard time integrating it into their working environments.
Business, by its nature, solves a problem for someone. If there’s no problem to be solved, there’s no market. No market, no money.
The creative processes that business minds are trying to learn from start in a very different place. A place of expression, not fixing. Exploring the problem, not solving it.
If you have a minute contrast a few articles: This nice snippet from the book Universal Mind of Bill Evans: The Creative Process and Self-Teaching is the great Bill Evans exposing how sophisticated the creative process really is. How the problem is the thing. How jumping ahead to the end of “a thing in a way that is so general [that you] can’t possibly build on that. If [you] build on that, [you’re] building on top of confusion and vagueness and [you] can’t possibly progress.”
Contrast that with this article where Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain walks us through what seems to be a rather linear process for her. Not that she isn’t brilliantly creative. She is. But there’s a difference here. Bill Evans is engulfed in the problem while Shlain clearly has a finished, tangible product in mind. Shlain focuses a the project, the making of a thing so solid it has an armature, a thing that needs to marinate, something to snuggle.
Which begs the question. Is the creative process in the expression-first art world an applicable model for the market-first business world?
Just starting to put some of these thoughts out there (involved in the problem). What do you think?
P.S. Not for nothing, but my favorite Bill Evans album is The Tokyo Concert.
Image: Creative Commons. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Must_Believe_in_Spring
Storytelling the Three Over Four Way
I had a terrific time working with The Colorado Medical Society this past May. The President of the CMS had a great idea to interweave storytelling techniques for leaders throughout the entire conference. His thinking was that we all leave these conferences full of energy, armed with new information to make changes in our society, businesses, or communities. But we’re missing the tools to actually do something about it.
So I was brought in to help by way of providing techniques for leaders to tell stories. Storytelling being, of course, one of the more effective way to engage and move people. We did a few things to bring storytelling into the conference. (This is an environment which, incidentally, isn’t exactly the most welcoming place for such a topic. After all, medical professionals are taught to actually ignore anecdotal evidence and seek out data. So it was a fun challenge in even convincing some of these docs that storytelling is important.)
The first thing was to work with the conference’s faculty to, as the Executive Director put it, get them “in on the play.” I consulted with each faculty member to incorporate some element of storytelling into their presentation. Then, after the typical questions about the content of their talk were covered during the Q&A, we’d deconstruct the storytelling portion to demonstrate storytelling’s effectiveness.
I also gave a keynote on storytelling as a leadership technique to set the tone for the conference. You can actually get the materials I created for the conference here which serve as a decent surrogate for actually being there.
I was also asked to facilitate a panel on leading from any position in an organizational structure, which provided us a chance to zoom back on the larger leadership context, take a look at the differences between power and influence, and how stories can help move people in most any situation.
There’s no doubt that this kind of approach to turning conferences from simple learning practice fields into action-oriented experiences can transcend the medical industry. Want to brainstorm how we can do it for your organization? Let’s chat.