Set An Input Quota
“You don’t know where ideas are going to come from. You have to get out and experience life. I encouraged all of my design teams to go out and get inspiration. In fact, we put time on the calendar: every other Friday was ‘craft Friday.’ The team would do things from glass blowing to visiting Disneyland… we created an environment of reverse peer pressure where everyone learned to value these experiences.” - Claudia Kotchka, VP of Design Innovation and Strategy, P&G
KPI’s drive many of the daily activities of individuals in organizations. So why not set a KPI around creativity?
Suppose you wanted to do just that. If you were to set a creativity KPI, how might you define the indicator? My money is on inputs: Inputs drive outputs. If you want to amplify your creative output, inputs are your single-greatest point of leverage. Deliberately seeking unexpected and fresh input is the key to stimulating one’s own imagination and creativity. Even Steve Jobs was an inspiration junkie.
One of the most successful CEO’s I know sets up shop in the same spot most days of the week, and invites promising start-up founders to join him for casual coffee conversation. He says 90% of those conversations don’t go anywhere, but the meetings are so critical to helping him understand where the market is going, and how consumer behavior is shifting, that he maintains the practice despite the “failure rate.” The inputs to his thinking are the important thing.
Claudia told us how a former board member, who was a senior leader at Target, enforced a strict practice on his people: anytime they visited a new market, they had to seek out a cultural experience, and bring something from that culture back to share with the team. She said that if you missed the latest museum exhibit, you were likely to get called out by senior leaders. That’s an input quota!
Richard Feynman made a habit of visiting other fields. Bill Baker, President of Bell Labs, chose a random lunch date every single day. For years, Hollywood Producer Brian Grazer kept himself to a strict regimen of meeting a new person every single day.
It can take different forms, but one thing is clear: masters of creative practice are disciplined about seeking fresh inputs. Why not hold yourself and your team to doing the same?
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