How To Drive Digital Creativity Overnight

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:00:00 PST

If you want to get things done right, you must first inspire the right people to get things done. Here are 5 approaches to doing just that. As a warning, none of them are easy, all of them work, and you're screwed if you don't change something so you might as well start here. I've also listed some resources at the end so you can start driving digital creativity immediately.

1. Promote your innovation process as a feature

Sell collaboration, iteration, and cheap mistakes from the start. Obliterate the mindset that "clients are stupid" and work to educate your clients as meaningful contributors to the creative process. Unless the clients are lazy, stupid, and hate you, this will improve the final product. Your clients are not lazy, stupid, or hateful.

A "client" is anybody who writes checks that affect your work life. You don't need to be at an agency to produce boring, outdated digital work.

2. Get the right developers involved early

The ones who build digital things every day have the best grasp of what's possible, what's innovative, and how to ship things quickly. They can add credibility to an idea by communicating to management that the idea can actually be built. Of course, not every great developer is a great communicator. In fact, most aren't. Instead of expecting developers to speak your language, take the initiative to learn theirs. They'll respect you for trying and happily correct you. Sometimes they'll laugh at you. But you knew this wouldn't be easy.

3. Embrace inexpensive mistakes

You don't avoid glaring mistakes by allowing more time for development. You avoid glaring mistakes by hiring people who know what they're doing. If you have the right team, you'll be able to move an idea into market quickly with must-have's and update with nice-to-have functionality as you learn more about your audience. And if you've sold your client or project lead on your innovation process, you're already assured they won't freak out when something breaks.

4. Encourage micro projects

If you want your digital teams to create things on the bleeding edge of innovation, you must first embrace non-client work as an investment. Encourage projects that explore new technologies as a way to learn on-the-fly. Stop acting like the time your developers spend on Hacker News is wasted. Instead, ask your developers to share what they're learning with your entire digital group and reward them. Google (client) has succeeded with this approach. Now do it yourself.

Further reading: The Google Way, In support of employee autonomy.

5. Learn to hate your comfort zone

Learn what your digital neighbors do and get your hands dirty building things, asking for help, and failing quickly. If you want to drive digital creativity you must first understand how all the parts work together. You don't need to be a guru, just learn enough so that you don't glaze over when somebody outside your silo talks during a meeting.

You'll avoid a lot of eye-rolling if you try to find answers yourself online before asking a developer. Most of the stuff you'll be learning at first has already been written about ad nauseum online. Google that stuff!

Here are some resources to help you get outside your comfort zone and start earning respect:

Get started with some coding at Code School or jump into a Code Academy Exercise.
Explore Sass and Coffeescript.
Dig into user experience (UX), and Part 2.
Get real with classic 37 Signals.
Get smart about: Responsive web design, A/B testing, Intro to Git.

Thanks to Mark Newcomer, Dmitry Dragilev and Joshua Clanton for their input on this article.

The Emperor's New Website

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:00:00 PST

I worked with Joshua Clanton to develop the site you're viewing right now. It might not matter to you that it lives on Heroku, runs on Ruby, and incorporates a custom type to serve up posts written in Markdown and uploaded using Git.

But you probably care that it loads really, really fast, is incredibly easy to read, and responds to the size of your browser window.

What's missing? Comments. Between Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Hacker News, and myriad other outlets, you have lots of places to share your perspective on the content you find here. What's even better is if you send me an email with your thoughts. Perhaps then we can write something new together.

Stay blessed!