The trouble with innovation work is, it’s so messy. It’s so unpredictable. It defies neat recipes and clever formulas.

Why is this a problem?

We crave efficiency. We want progress to map to time spent (ie when 50% of the time has passed, we ought to be 50% of the way done with the task). We want everything to be packaged up all nice and neat. But the creative process is rarely nice and neat.

It is, as folks like to say, “non-linear.”

The thing about non-linearity is that it defies explanation. Just yesterday, I was being interviewed by a reporter who was seeking to understand my own creative process. Apart from my personal vendetta against hypocrisy — which is to say, for any tool I advocate but don’t use, I have a simple rule: either start doing it, or stop teaching it — I said I hardly understand it myself. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

It’s only a bad thing when your job is to explain. (Which mine sometimes is.)

A classic example is what we’ve inadvertently done to “the design process” via the workshop format. The truth is, the creative process that underlies innovation efforts takes time. It’s not efficient. Sometime you need to daydream (we call that “synthesis”), sometimes you have to circle back (we call that “iterating”), sometimes you need to start over (we call that “pivoting”). Sometimes, the people we’re trying to design for just need space. But none of those things lend themselves to a workshop format.

There’s no time to take time!

So what do we do? We chop the messy parts out — because, after all, who wants to come to Stanford and go on a “daydreaming mission” — and we’re left with a perfectly straightforward sequence of events, which, while explicable, rarely yields the outcomes students hope for, in the manner they expect.

I was thinking today, while awkwardly carrying my coffee onto campus, of an old activity we used to do with students, where we looked at a photo and imagined various interpretations of a person awkwardly carrying a coffee down a busy street.

“I loved that activity,” I thought. “Why don’t we do it anymore?” I wondered. “Because we don’t have time,” I realized sadly.

I’d like to suggest — to myself, if no one else! — that we get back to allowing for non-linearity.

It’s the only way we’ll ever surprise ourselves.

Related: Treasure The Mess
Related: Practice What You Preach
Related: Don’t Be Efficient
Related: Disciplined Daydreaming
Related: Seek Random Inputs

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