For most of my life, I thought that that rules and structure hamper both my creativity and ability to get stuff done. I was wrong.
Structure drives creativity
It’s not where we have unlimited resources that we’re most creative, it’s where we have limited resources. We use our creativity to push our medium, be it oil painting, insurance sales, or helping entrepreneurs build healthy businesses.
Growing up, my dad once described me as: if I had bothered to learn what the rules were, I would have been upset and felt constrained by them. I embraced that and lived by it because it is true. I don’t like feeling constrained or bound by rules. And, when given rules, my mind jumps to why and how to break them. The same holds true with process. I violently rejected process at many stages of my career to an embarrassing level.
Structure helps us create
Here’s what I realized. Either I follow my consciously documented processes, or I follow the unwritten, undocumented, unconscious process that my subconscious figures out for me. As I’ve written about earlier, much of our day is spent in an unconscious state [Link to “We live unconscious lives”].
The same holds true for business. Either we write it down, make a concise checklist, or we do it the way “it’s always been done.” Someone once did it that way, it worked, and now we “unconsciously” repeat it at work. Want to learn how to do it? Find someone who did it and ask them for help. This is neither scalable nor improvable. It’s also a hit to our culture as there are now people who hold the sacred knowledge. These are the heroes who have been around long enough to have memorized and understood the unwritten processes. They are both amazing individual contributors and awful bottlenecks.
Nothing ever gets better because we’re not analyzing our approaches. Why? Because we don’t have approaches. We have the unwritten rules that we never consciously think about. We’re not paying attention – we are acting subconsciously.
Be conscious about the structure in your life
Both in business and personally, we go through much of our lives without a clear vision of what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. We’re not paying enough attention to make any sort of improvements to those habits, rituals, and processes that we’re already doing.
This is why I’ve become a convert. It is hilarious to think that I’ve been fighting against processes, rituals, routines, and habits while subconsciously ruled by them. It’s a funny kind of uncomfortable liberation that I suppose I’ve been under and going through, because I still slip into the unconscious throughout my day. I think that’s part of being human that we all must accept… we’re never going to get it quite right. But, I know I’m getting better, because I’m coming back to my processes, I’m paying attention, I’m consciously evaluating what’s working and not working and making tweaks.
I encourage all of you creatives out there like me, who reject the concept of structure in your personal or business life, to give it a chance. Break out of the unconscious structure and decisions your mind is making for you and put some work into designing your ideal day, your ideal morning, your ideal meeting, etc. You and your team will have more opportunities to be creative and you will find your days will be more impactful and intentional. How is that not a win?
Hey future John, keep this in mind:
Keep going with your processes! Take the time to document and review them. Make sure your teams buy in. Remember that processes are here to make you better, not hold you back.
Thanks to Stephen Leonardi for the beautiful photograph of the trees along the road and to Andy Goldsworthy for continually reminding me that the universe gives in infinite ways.