How to put back on your practical hat
Donning a new hat to get stuff done
After exercising your creativity muscles during Idea Week and Creativity & Innovation Day last week (as I’m sure you all were!), it’s now time to put those fantastic ideas into action.
But how do you change gears from creativity ringleader and innovation cheerleader to schedule whip-cracker so that big ideas don’t flounder in the ether?
Scott Berkun spoke yesterday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and told us “How to innovate on time.”
It’s a fact of life for software developers as well as for any industry: to come out on top, you’ve got to keep innovating, so you’ve got to generate and encourage others to generate those Big Ideas. But afterwards, it’s the project managers and entrepreneurs who have to figure out how to translate these innovations into schedules and budgets and checkboxes.
How do you change that hat?
Berkun says you need to identify those people in your life who are the “Creatives” — those people whose thinking run to the new and exciting and see the possibilities — and hang out with them… in the beginning. But once you’ve decided on that destination, you need your other partners. You need those guys who thrive on numbers and dates. These are the guys who live and die by calendars and who know how to get things done. They love the details. And they’re the ones you’ll need to surround yourself with later in the project. These will be your “get stuff done” muses. Your inspiration for control.
Take them out for coffee. Go out for a drink after work. Spend as much time with them as possible and you’ll find the transition — the donning of your new “hat” — is much smoother.
The quintessential book on this is Edward de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” and managers will want to read it to assess the well-roundedness of employees and their team in general. It’s a good read for anyone who wants to “innovate on time.”
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Cathy is the Portal Manager at MaRS, responsible for all online media programs.
She helps bring the blogger out in all of us and keeps us informed about the MaRS community through our website and newsletters.