This past Saturday, I attended the very cool DrawCamp series of seminars on all things drawing held at BucketWorks. A very enthusiastic James Carlson introduced the event as an “Unconference,” that is, one in which attendees volunteer to lead and teach one of the 45 minute segments scheduled throughout the day. It was inspiring to see the big turnout (including lots of kids- #ubercool) at yet another creative gathering that’s making Milwaukee a great community to live and work in.
James Carlson welcomes the DrawCampers.
I attended two sessions led by the inimitable Mike Rohde of Sketchnote Army fame. One of the sessions—no surprise—was a Sketchnotes class in which he took Sketchnotes while listening to a TED presentation by Dave Eggers titled Once Upon A School. While that was inspiring on all sorts of levels, it was the speed sketching session he led that was the most enlightening.
A group of 20 of us assembled for the speed sketching session. The exercise is very simple: you sketch the same subject matter in increasingly shorter periods of time. We were given five minutes to do the first drawing, two minutes for the second, one minute for the third, and the final sketch we were given 30 seconds to complete. The shorter the time, the quicker the decisions. It was a drill I was familiar with from my art school days at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Given only a matter of seconds to draw either a still life or a live figure, you will learn to capture the weight, motion and essence of the subject matter. I actually much preferred the drawings I captured in 30 or 60 seconds, versus the drawings I was given much more time to ponder.
My progressive sketches of a funky Navajo beaded doll.
I wonder if the same isn’t true when we are given deadlines at work. As creatives, we are famous for kvetching about not having enough time to spend on a project. We want a week, two weeks, four weeks (pretty please?) to think about ideas and come up with a solution. But my experience was that some of the best work was done with ridiculous deadlines—essentially, the 30 and 60 second speed sketch equivalents. Short deadlines forced you to rely on talent, intuition and instinct—and never allowed for you to overthink it. To use the Linchpin term, you were forced to ship.
The reality of the post digital era is that we often develop marketing in a crucible which is the equivalent of a 30 or 60 second sketch. You don’t get 5 minutes to work on your big idea anymore. Spend five minutes, and someone will have beaten you to it in 30 seconds. If you still believe you have five minutes to do a strategic plan, the reality is the entire world will have completely changed in one.
How do you see your job today? Whether you’re a strategist or a creative, are you struggling to find a balance between wanting 5 minutes—but only getting 30 seconds? Or knowing when is the appropriate instance to use which?
I’d like to hear your thoughts on how you’re learning to adapt.
Mark:
Very much agree with your premise – the shorter the time frame, the more that gets done, and often more clearly, because decisive choices must be made.
Your sketches are a great example!
The principle of rapid iteration is one that also plays out here – allowing for the constraint of time to serve in place of the dreaded “committee” against which we often bounce ideas that otherwise would have lived!
To do is to be, and to be is to do. Brings to mind Microsoft’s practice of “release early, and release often”. The Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good.
Here’s to being really good!
Bill,
The interesting thing we are discovering is how much we learn when that “5 minutes” plays out in front of the user. If you have confidence in what you’re doing, it’s actually pretty liberating.
And I’m pretty sure that “to do is to be” is theatrical in origins. Maybe from the Strasberg school.
And dammit, yeah, let’s be great!
We’ve done exercises at Bucketworks where we challenge groups of people (typically cross functional teams from corporate environments) to achieve a particular goal–a complex one, like “build a structure that completely encloses 24 people, that is free-standing, and has an entrance using this room full of random materials” and we give the group 60 minutes to achieve the goal.
Groups typically over-engineer the results, use more materials than they need to, and don’t collaborate effectively when given a full hour. Many members are idle. More knots are tied in the ‘architecture’ of the fort.
When we process this with the group we ask them to repeat the exercise, using the same materials, but we give them only 5 minutes to achieve the task.
The current winning record time?
42 *seconds* for a group of 24 people to create a structure that completely encloses them, stands on its own, and has an entrance. The structure they created was elegant, used minimal materials, and obviously involved extreme leadership, extreme collaboration.
This is not an exceptional group, either. When we give groups an hour, they take 30 minutes; when we give them 10 minutes, they take 5; when we give them 5 minutes, they take 1.
Yet these same people would also tell you they don’t ever have enough resources to achieve the goals they’ve been given (or chosen) for their organization.
Perhaps being ‘forced to ship’ cuts the waste, turns off the internal dialogue, and gives the brains of a team a clear flow from inspiration to output.