Vary Cooking Methods
Today’s post comes from ideaflow council member Chris Aho. Chris currently serves as the Director of Thriving Congregations at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. In his role he works with individuals, teams, and congregations to imagine a new future for faithful organizations through clarity, agility, and collaboration. You can connect with him at caho@cbf.net or @craho on Twitter and other social media sites.
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I spent 21 years under a weekly deadline to create relevant, compelling, and challenging content based on a particular canon. Quickly, found I needed to engage contemporary inputs to generate meaningful outputs. This is what effective teachers, public speakers, writers, and facilitators do every day.
My experience working with new ideas every week, gave me three metaphors to describe idea development. Hopefully, they will do more than spark a craving for microwave mug brownies…
Hack the Cake Box/Doctor the Stuffing Mix:
If you haven't googled "how to hack a cake mix,” you’ve cheated yourself and deprived your guests. You kick the box up a notch when you add an extra egg or swap butter and milk for oil and water. The same works with stuffing, mac and cheese, or frozen pizzas. These boxed dishes are fine if we follow the instructions. However, by experimenting with additional inputs, these dishes rise above the box. The same is true in our work with ideas.
When work demands regular output, we develop heuristics to gather, process, and produce ideas efficiently. With just days to let an idea cook, we cannot process from scratch. Our gathering and processing heuristics are like boxed food that allows us to collide new inputs with predictable ingredients and forms to regularly meet the needs of our constituency. Columnists, radio hosts, and comedy writers from SNL cook their ideas through heuristics like this each week.
Microwave it:
Sometimes an idea needs to get out quick, so we microwave it. In these cases, we take an idea and move it to presentation as quickly as possible. In a wildly popular TED Talk about procrastination, Tim Urban describes how he effectively microwaved his thesis in college. Was it great? No. Was it passable? Yes. Letters to the editor are microwaved ideas. Tweets and liveblogs are also microwaved ideas. Microwaving ideas is great, but it’s worth remembering that when Jerry Maguire microwaved his idea, it sent him on a detour, to say the least.
The Slow Cooker:
When we work on big projects like planning a conference or engaging in a big writing project, ideas cook up like a stew in a crockpot. By building and converging ideas over time, a cohesive whole with depth and character can emerge. One key to this way of cooking is adding inputs over time, because things cook at different speeds. If you want to keep the veggies from getting mushy and losing their character in a slow cooker, you add them later. The same happens with ideas and big projects.
Significant projects benefit from adding ideas over time. Though a schedule guides the flow of the conference and an outline guides writing, both add ideas over time because neither has all of the answers from the start. While initial points may be clear, great ideas will also emerge during planning and writing. So even though it is easiest to pack the slow cooker and let it cook all day, adding components over time highlights ingredients and improves the dish. (Ed: see excerpt from John Cleese’s delightful Creativity here)
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Cooking is an interesting metaphor for how our ideas develop. Sandwiches take scattered ingredients to create a cohesive whole. So do salads. Lasagna, on the other hotpad, is a labor of love that develops character through layers.
As you think about ideas and your idea work, what metaphor resonates with you? How might you add depth of character to your idea through a cooking metaphor? And, how might you identify the ideas that would be well served by moving from the microwave to the crockpot? What needs to be in a sandwich rather than in a stew?
We all cook different ideas with different techniques depending on the situation. The key to helping an idea have the right impact is to know how to cook it and when to serve it.
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.