Taking My Cue From Creativity At Work

I’m not sure how many more times I can learn to defer my judgments. Hopefully at least as long as I walk into situations with my own somewhat self-absorbed sense of how things should go.

Fortunately, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond Creativity at Work program managed to shatter my preconceptions and judgments quickly. As a result, I actually learned a great deal – about myself, about other organizations in town, and about approaches to creativity and innovation that already have served me in good stead.

Just ask anyone who has gone through the six sticky notes activity I’ve been using in brainstorming sessions lately.

In session one, I found myself fascinated by ways in which simple activities with clay shaped my thinking about my own business. I quickly gravitated toward the concepts of divergence (expanding perspectives) and convergence (bringing them back into focus and prioritization).

Session two was equally illuminating, primarily because the pace shifted and I began to learn more about the other dozen participants in the three-month, three-session experience. (Including two senior leaders from my old employer, Luck Stone.) Nothing beats finding yourself among a group of blindfolded classmates, trying to create a box out of rope – well, nothing like succeeding because the group came together, listened and trusted ideas.

I was in and out of session three because of work, but I was happy to make it back briefly at the end of the day to get my official set of Creativity at Work clay blocks from the VisArts team. And I’ll be recommending the program far and wide when the Visual Arts Center schedules the next round.

Greater Fulton: Design Day In Action

Photographer Lauren Stewart captured dozens of photos during our two days at the Neighborhood Resource Center in the Greater Fulton community. Peter Fraser and I spent time with neighborhood leaders, residents and local experts sketching on maps as we began to shape a visual framework for a community vision for this slice of Richmond's East End. Watch the two-day session unfold, courtesy of Lauren and Gickr.com:

Make your own animation

Everyone Owns The Culture

I was quoted on Twitter – or “retweeted” in the vernacular of the popular social media platform – recently in reference to the launch Facebook’s email service.

In response to a discussion generally about the blurring lines between social and work, I suggested that the lines were about to become increasingly blurry.

Smart organizations are actively looking for ways to strengthen the commitment of their employees – when tim es were flush, they mostly did this with enhanced benefits and bigger 401(k) matches.

For several reasons, “employee engagement” has become the new coin of the realm.

A new generation of workers is entering the workforce, and the connectivity – what old people call the Internet – is their oxygen. They have been connected their entire lives, and foolish is the employer who thinks they’re going to stop this particular wave.

But we’ve also struck an interesting moment where multiple generations of workings are suddenly looking for meaning at work. The Baby Boomers are chasing meaning in some cases because they dropped the ball on their generational aspirations three decades ago. In other cases, unemployment has given them a bit more time to ponder their legacy.

Facebook sees opportunity here – obvious ways to make the connections between work and personal more pronounced and vital. It keeps Facebook relevent, because suddenly 500 million users are using it more openly the eight hours a day their corporation pays them to work. It gives corporations – particularly those with sluggish IT infrastructure – a quick way to connect to their workers, and to build their brand.

Onto my quote, which is a rather simple concept.

“Smart organizations OWN their culture. They don’t subcontract it,” I tweeted.

The Floricane team recently started working with one organization interested in regaining ownership of their culture, and is in discussions with two other large organization with eyes on the same prize. The senior leaders at all three places see the need, are open to the opportunity and are not blind to the challenges – in each instance, we start our work by listening to the employees and helping them identify their own opportunities to be more connected.

And while smart companies don’t subcontract their culture, they do know when to bring outside perspectives into the conversation. Our work – simply put – is to make organizational culture something everyone has a role in creating, and owning.

Greater Fulton: Drawing A Better Future

Putting a gigantic map on a wall – and giving people permission to study it, draw on it, talk about it – is a great way to create community visioning.

That’swhy designer Peter Fraser and the Floricane team hung a huge map of the East End’s Greater Fulton community on the wall of Fulton’s Neigborhood Resource Center (NRC) early in November.

We had already talked the community to tears – two community-wide visioning sessions, close to 100 door-to-door interviews, and visioning activities with area teens and elementary school kids. They told us in clear terms what they wanted in their neighborhood.

In November, we spent time sketching their hopes and aspirations onto onion skin overlays, and directly onto a four-foot-by-six-foot neighborhood map.

We envisioned the stretch of Williamsburg Road between the NRC and the Powhatan Community Center as a real Main Street. We redrew the traffic and pedestrian flow at the commercial intersection of Government and Williamsburg roads. We explored the hidden pathways and connections between Fulton, Fulton Hill and Montrose Heights.

Throughout our two full days – almost 24 hours total – of mapping, we chatted with dozens of residents who wandered into the NRC to see what we were doing, or to provide us with very specific guidance.

You see, they’ve been down this road before, some of them. They’ve heard promises of street lights and ball fields, of elementary schools and bus service. They’ve heard it since the densely populated neighborhood grid often referred to as “Fulton Bottom” (to everyone except residents, who know it as Fulton) were hammered by the one-two punch of flooding and “urban renewal” in the 1970s.

They’re still waiting for the renewal. We’re hoping that this process – driven by the neighborhood, funded by Virginia LISC and supported by Floricane – might be the beginning of a promise kept.

New Business: Virginia Poverty Law Center

I'm not sure we can call our work with the Virginia Poverty Law Center (VPLC) new, although this is a brand new engagement between Floricane and the VPLC team.

We have spent time this year with both the staff and the board of the organization, and are excited to be starting a strategic planning process to help the VPLC explore the ways in which it build awareness of and provides support around the legal needs of low-income Virginians.

One of the most important tactical pieces of work the VPLC staff does is to provide support for the Legal Aid community across Virginia. VPLC's staff are primarily lawyers, and they represent areas of law that disproportionately impact lower-income indviduals – health, housing, domestic violence, among others.

But VPLC also plays an important role in keeping the legal issues affecting lower-income Virginians visible to the rest of the public. Their "Through Different Eyes: The Faces of Poverty in Virginia" exhibit is a strong and emotional example of the power of images to tell the stories of our communities. For five years, "Through Different Eyes" has traveled the state, telling the stories of people struggling through poverty, and building awareness of the issue.

We're excited to begin exploring powerful new ways for the VPLC team to continue its training, research and legal support of Legal Aid organizations, even as it explores evocative new ways to tell the stories of Virginians in crisis.

2nd Birthday Superlatives: I Get A Kick Out of RMCVB

It’s dangerous when you’re in my business to call a client or project “the best” but I have to say that spending a February day with the marketing team from the Richmond Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau (RMCVB to their friends) was a kick.

The team wanted to build a stronger sense of identity and vision for itself, and so we gathered at the Visual Arts Center for a series of activities and discussions designed to get them thinking a little more intently about who they aspired to be.

Since RMCVB’s essential task is to market and sell the Richmond region to tourists and convention goers around the world, I thought it might be interesting to see which cities the RMCVB marketing team identified with.

After playing with a hundred balloons – a small lesson in collaboration – the small group filled dozens of colorful sticky notes inked with phrases and characteristics the group felt described them at their best. They were then asked to use those characteristics to determine what city they – as a team – were most like.

We ended the day in two teams with markers and pastels and very large sheets of paper laid out in a workroom at the Visual Arts Center. VisArt’s Aimee Joyaux guided both teams through a mildly competitive mural making activity – capturing their team as a city visually.

What made the RMCVB marketing engagement so much fun – even beyond the creative and colorful elements embodied in balloons, post-it notes and pastel crayons – was the high energy and sense of fun the team itself brought to the day. There was little apprehension, and plenty of willingness to play hard and take a critical look at the gaps between their self-perception as a team and how they might be perceived by others.

I’m not really sure which city they finally embraced, but working with the RMCVB team was a good reminder of why I love working in Richmond.

2nd Birthday Superlatives: Fastest Learning Curve

There are lots of runners up for the project that taught me the most about my business. Seriously.

That said, my five months with the staff and board of the Valentine Richmond History Center involved schooling on so many levels.

Here’s a recipe for learning.

It starts with a new consultant – one who’s a little wet behind the ears but works hard not to let everyone know. (That'd be me.)

Put the new guy in the room with some incredibly smart people – the staff and board of the Valentine, for instance. Invite more smart people – technologist Chris Busse, educational/learning expert Richard Sebastian, and so on – to be part of the conversation. Accelerate.

Believe me. I learned tons – about Richmond history, about trends in technology and learning, about strategic planning.

Mostly, though, I learned how to be a better consultant. (I can safely say this is an outcome of almost every client engagement.)

In the best of times, my most important job is to ask good questions, listen deeply, connect dots, help people see patterns, push people to see more deeply. It’s not to be the expert on the organization, or to write their strategic plan.

(I’m still learning, by the way.)

I mark my time with the Valentine Richmond History Center team as my fastest learning curve because it taught me so many lessons about the work Floricane seeks to do. It also happened as I was trying to clarify my business model.

The lessons I took away from the Valentine's strategic planning process remain a yardstick with which I continue to measure our success with other clients.

Don’t get me wrong – I think we did good work with the Valentine’s strategic plan, and the leadership there uses the plan as a platform for effective leadership and decision making. We’re even having a reunion of sorts in January, when they bring me back to check in on their progress.

But sometimes the best good work is work-in-progress. If the Floricane team can continue to learn from our work with clients, we'll be doing our best good work.

Thanks for the lessons, Richmond History Center.

2nd Birthday Superlatives: The Hardest Step

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t the first step that was the hardest to take. It was the one midway into the journey.

I decided to start my own consulting business in November of 2008 after being laid off from my 12-year career at Luck Stone Corporation – the result of a construction materials supplier meeting a recession. The first months were engaging and fun – designing an identity and website; networking with literally hundreds of amazing and interes ting people; dabbling in the beginnings of actual work, both paid and pro bono.

It wasn’t until mid-summer that reality really came a’calling.

By early July, both my generous severance from Luck Stone and some early client work had dwindled to a meager trickle. I was doing more free work than paid work.

One Thursday afternoon, Nikole called to tell me that our personal bank account was nearing empty. At least it matches the business account, I thought, even as a pit began to form in my stomach.

So, this is what “cash flow” looks like on a bad day.

For more than eight months, I had stayed busy doing the soft side of entrepreneurship – building relationships, testing the waters, casually looking for interesting opportunities.

I’d forgotten that running your own business was – at its heart – an exercise in selling, doing, delivering. Forgotten, perhaps. It is more likely that I just didn’t realize this at all until this moment.

We talked through the weekend, Nikole and I. First, we sorted through the short-term issue – paying our mortgage for the month, and buying groceries. Then came the hard part.

Were we cut out to be entrepreneurs? Did we want to ride the ebb-and-flow of a start-up consulting business in the midst of the worst recession in our lifetimes? Did we have confidence in my vision, my abilities and the fledgling Floricane brand I had worked to build?

The conversation was not easy – for either of us. In the end, we asked a good friend (and my old mentor) over to help us walk through our decision. He pushed me especially hard to acknowledge how much of my ego was invested in this new venture, and that if I was serious about running my own business I needed to start acting serious.

Ratcheting up my commitment was harder than talking about it. And sticking to that commitment remains a daily exercise.

I walked into the office the next Monday with my sleeves rolled up, and two weeks later started working with my second strategic planning client – the Valentine Richmond History Center.

My sleeves have stayed rolled ever since.