Tenet 10: Harness the Power of Teams

But still the limiting factor is your resources, most of all your time. You simply can’t do it all. There is a way to maximize and this is to build teams.

This is why 1) creativity cannot exist in a vacuum and 2) creativity is multiplies (exponential?) by the number of collaborators, or solutions available, and thus collaborators.

This helps explain the success of open source software. Open source tools like GitHub allow for ordered mass collaboration. Ideally, we would collaborate with as many top-notch people as possible. Eventually though, this great mass of ideas gets tangled up, opinions run rampant, emotions run high and the whole machine gets bogged down. We need ordered systems for mass collaboration. This has worked wonderfully in software.

Can it be applied to other fields?

Your Team is an extension of yourself.

Well, we’ve hit a seemingly insurmountable wall. We did everything right. We cultivated the spark. We embraced and refined our ideas critically and found ways to turn them into real-life results. We have a list of similarly brilliant ideas, longer than a biblical genealogy. And the motivation to execute. But it hits you once you ve completed the trudge through the endless sea of details required to complete a single project. You will be dead before you get through the next four projects on your list. Or at least senile. How do I hope to accomplish all of these important ideas? How can I get it all done? I have asked myself this many, many times. The conclusion I have come to is simple. You can’t. Not on your own.

If only there were a clone army- no, not even an army. Three or four replicas of me would do wonders. I can picture us all working together in the workshop, singing four-part harmonies of indie rock songs, all mashing keys like madmen and making real progress towards my goals. But clones aren’t a reality (yet) and even if they were, I might suggest a more robust solution to the time-limitation problem that we all have: build yourself a team.

Not of clones. But of people, peers that have at least enough overlap in interest so that meeting your collective goals is possible. Think of a team as an extension of yourself. But with some enhancement. And probably some bugs. Bugs we might call features.

When I say enhancements, I am referring to the fact that when we work with other people, we effectively add their set of unique skills to our arsenal. If you’ve got the interpersonal skills to move things in the right direction that is. This is why I might prefer to have a team of real people, flaws and all, to a bunch of me-clones (as good looking as they all may be). It’s like the difference between the bad batch and the everyday clones. Yes, I am talking about Star Wars. The bad batch were a group of defective clones with their own strengths and personalities while standard issue clones were more…standard. Which would you rather have on your team?

The real people bring to the table a diversity of thoughts, experiences, and skills that you won’t get access to any other way. Remember how we talked about the exponential increase in available solutions to creative problems? The more solutions in the database, the higher the total solution combination count you start with, which increases your odds from the start.

Well, with a team, especially a well-oiled team with great communication and a healthy, risk-free environment for sharing ideas, you get a tremendous boost: Access to each member of the team’s collective solution base. This is incredibly powerful.

You only get the most out of your team, though, if you are intentional about creating a great environment for creative work. The environment will be different for each team, but generally speaking, making sure that each member feels safe, accepted, and that it’s a good thing for them to take risks, or rather what might be risky things to say or suggest in a standard issue corporate environment or in everyday life. Ideally, here in a safe space they (and you) don’t feel like they are risks at all, but rather another possible solution. The only source of pressure that you may want present is an objective to solve the specific problem at hand. Humans tend to wonder. Otherwise you will be dealing with human nature of losing focus. But balance is the key, you never know when that rabbit hole will lead to just the right solution.

Think about all the mental prep work we did in the first 5 tenets. It’s mostly an effort to get yourself comfortable with truth and with yourself. Comfortable enough to let ideas flow without your active mind restricting them. Well, think of your team members as extensions of yourself. You want to treat them as kindly as you should be treating yourself. You want to connect with your teammates and feel open and free enough to share their craziest intuitions without hesitation.

None of this is easy. A lot of chemistry and good emotional intelligence and interpersonal work goes into it. These are often skills that stray far from the technical realm that the creative work may center around. There is a lot of effort and planning too. Picking the right members for your team is crucial. How to do it exactly is beyond the scope and is probably enough for a small library on its own. But knowing that it is important is a start.

This gets into the negatives of teamwork. The truth is, it’s difficult. Sometimes you will wonder if It’s worth it to cast your lot in with that human filth. You will see the worst in yourself and in others through conflict. It’s also how you grow. Dealing with conflict will force you to understand yourself in ways you didn’t realize was possible.

There’s lots more to say on how to go about assembling your squad. Who qualifies? Spouses? Friends, paid and unpaid? I have pretty loose definitions for team. Most people on my team probably don’t even realize it, or think of it that way, but they are essential, nonetheless.

Don’t know where this goes. Problems

Sometimes, it is not coming up with solutions that is troublesome but coming up with problems. It is one thing to be able to dream up a fancy plot treatment once you have a plot to treat. It is another thing entirely to come up with the plot and cast of characters in the first place! Figuring out what problems you are attempting to find solutions to is half of the battle of the creative mind. To seek solutions is not enough. You must know deeply the problems your solutions are for.

How do you find new problems to solve? This used to be a problem for me. It used to be more of a problem for others as well – before the days of the web. Now, just about anyone can find their niche market with some clever marketing. Instant exposure to a massive crowd of people varying interests and varying problems, are at the tips of your fingers. I just meant that now, you can solve almost any random problem and odds are someone will buy into it. It makes the necessity of a market existing for solving your dream problem less pressing. But it doesn’t mean that your dream problem is worth the effort. You really should be choosy. Why? It comes back to the idea of opportunity cost. Its not even necessarily motivated by money, though I’ve mentioned markets twice in a short time. Opp. Cost is important because here you are missing out on the opportunity to spend your time , most valuable resource, on solving a better problem. What are the criteria for a best problem? I ask myself this constantly. If you are asking, you are most of the way there. You want to cap your risk, but just like with finances, you want to make sure that even if your project fails, you still win.

We are probably at this point, even further than we were before from solving problems. Finding problems. Now we have self-imposed criteria we must meet. But how do I find problems to solve in the first place? You must

1. Observe the world around you. Observe people. Listen. The world is full of ‘problems.’
   And again, I don’t always mean literal, car-wont-start problems. I also mean problem that only your fiction solves. Imposed borders. Initial conditions. The hole in the fabric of reality that, once filled with your work, will make everyone think it was so obvious. But only you saw it.

So step 1, you listen to the world. Step 2, you need to utilize your creative intuition. Your likes and dislikes, in order to discover and populate your version of the world with imaginary solutions to the problems. Extrapolate reality and visualize the solutions in your mind. Visualization of solutions is imperative. You must be able to feel it right in front of you. Harness your visual acuity.

You may have noticed that these steps are just the first two steps in the broader creative synthesis process. It’s sort of meta, because it is the creative process the third step. Execution involves repeating the first tow in order to attain the best combination of solutions.

Creative intuition
Likes and dislikes
Imagination seeing what isn’t there. Writing fiction.
Dabbling in the world of the non-extant.

Your likes and dislikes give you very defined information about what problems to solve and what solutions should be like. Your bucket of potential solutions comes from your experiences thoughts and general exposure before. But how does your combining software work? How does it know what could go well with what? An optimization? Od you tell it with your conscious mind? Or do you rely totally on your sub-mind? Your combining software is your imagination. You can train your imagination. you can practice imagining. You can practice writing fiction. When I say writing fiction, I mean writing about worlds that don’t exist, but specifically, the world that doesn’t exist because it has your creative work inti .t that is the fiction you care about. By writing the fiction, you make your creative works come to life.

You have to think of your body as a single glorious machine. Imagination, your software, can only operate to the extent. To which the hardware can handle it. You should incorporate your emotional response into your creative work. Let it freely course through you and attempt to understand it. Your emotive response to a solution or to the problem itself is hugely indicative of its potential. And how you go about solving it. You can train the body your machinery to be in tune with your software, with your imagination and this will help you better bridge the gap between you and your ultimate creative work.