Make Time for Exploration

“I try to keep Fridays wide open for exploration. They are my creative days. I keep a stack of stuff reserved for Fridays that I want to look into. Other than a call with two treasured collaborators, I have nothing else planned on Fridays.”

You might this came out of the mouth of some starry-eyed artist who doesn’t feel the grind of life inside an organization, unshackled from the pressures of quarterly earnings reports, etc. It is actually one of the CEO’s I admire most, who’s run many of the largest organizations in the United States.

Google’s famous “20% time” policy — which encourages Googlers to spend 20% of their time in a self-directed pursuit of that which they deem might be beneficial to the organization — is credited with putting innovations like Gmail into the world.

3M’s version — called the 15% rule, which allows researchers to follow up on speculative projects that haven’t yet amounted to anything — is what Art Fry credits with the invention of the Post-It Note. (Though the full story is more complicated, and much more delightful.) That one’s worked out alright…

At Pixar, Guido Quaroni, Vice President of the Tools Department, invented what he called “personal project days” to make sure he retained world-class talent. As Ed Catmull recounts in Creativity Inc., Quaroni “Allowed his engineers to work on anything they wanted two days a month, using Pixar's resources to engage with whatever problem or question they found interesting. It didn't have to directly be applicable to any particular film or address any of production’s needs. If an engineer wanted to see what it was like to light a shot in Brave, for example, he or she could. If a group of engineers wanted to build a prototype using Kinect, Microsoft’s motion sensing input device, to help animators capture characters’ movements, they could do that, too. Any idea that sparked their curiosity, they were free to pursue.

“‘You just give people the time, and they come up with the ideas,’ Guido told us. ‘That's the beauty of it: It comes from them.’” (Interestingly enough, personal project days were the source of inspiration for the wildly successful “Pixar Notes Day” I described elsewhere.)

It will look different for each person — Bob Iger gets up at 4:30 every morning to make space for creative thinking (as he says in The Ride of a Lifetime, while Nobel Prize winner Dr. Smithies famously carved out Saturdays for “crazy experiments” — but if it’s not on the calendar, chances are, exploration is not a priority.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.