It’s an absolute mistake to think that art is not practical - or that business cannot be creative. The best artists are extraordinarily practical…they make use of everything they have at their disposal.

I just read an interview with Twyla Tharp in Harvard Business Review and found myself wanting to highlight practically everything she says.

In my experience, there are two big forces driving product success. Both are hard to pin down, but I’d roughly describe them as “business savvy, knowing the market, having the right focus” and “creativity, problem solving, identifying the open spaces and finding interesting ways to fill them.” They overlap, as you can tell. The latter is often called Innovation, and as a product management practitioner I read a lot of articles about it. I do not walk away from those articles wanting to highlight much in them.

There’s no secret to fostering creativity in a product management organization, and there’s no process that you can neatly clip out and import into your team to turn them into Innovation machines. It’s kind of like losing weight - it’s a series of habits, done daily, reinforced, stuck to even under duress. It’s hard to start but it gets easier. It comes easier to some people than others, but listen to Twyla:

…I don’t like using genetics as an excuse - “I can’t do this because I don’t have that particular genetic gift.” Get over yourself. The best creativity is the result of habit and hard work.

So how do you start building the creative habit in your product management organization? And what can we hope to gain from this?

To go back to the weight loss analogy, you’re not going to “become creative” (or lose ten pounds) in a week. I’ve listed some stepping stones that have worked in my organizations. Some of them may feel natural to slip into existing processes; others may need a bit more planning.

Question “industry standards”. I often hear “let’s not reinvent the wheel, just copy Yahoo” (or Amazon/Flickr/etc.) Before you do - encourage your team to take 5-10 minutes to try to reverse-engineer their thinking.

• Yahoo (etc.) was trying to solve the problem of…
• Users are trying to do… and this allows them to succeed because…
• I do/don’t use this feature because…
• If only they also did…

In many situations borrowing an established feature or UI convention is the appropriate, pragmatic solution - hey, that’s not your core competency. But it’s good practice to understand why that solution is in wide usage, and sometimes you may discover a reason why your audience or product is unique and needs some tweaks (or a completely different solution).

Exercise non-dominant skills. This takes planning, because you don’t want to “practice” in front of customers. It’s also contagious - if you lead by example, others tend to follow. Tell your team about a skill that you try to avoid, and how you are facing it head-on. Involve them in your effort! (”I tend to email people when I should give them a call. If you catch me contributing to a back-and-forth email chain, pick up the phone and call me.”

Some common skills that individuals may need to “exercise”: public speaking, written communication, negotiating (vs. capitulating), admitting they don’t know something, brainstorming (free-form “raw” ideas vs. making polished suggestions).

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. (NYTimes)

Make sure this isn’t an exercise in embarrassment. Warn people before putting them on the spot (at least at first), use small groups, and emphasize that this is a low-to-no consequences zone.

Write it twice. Communicate the same information in drastically different formats and examine which is more effective. In the UI world, this has taken off as A-B testing, but anything can be A-B tested. Next time you are writing an email, hit “print” instead of “send”. Then open up a new message and write up the same information in a different style (long vs. short, bullet points vs. paragraphs, serious vs. funny, high-level vs. detailed, whatever.) Print out the second email and put the two side-by-side.

• Which one does a better job of conveying the most critical piece of information?
• Which one is better at identifying next actions that you or others need to take?
• Which one is easier to skim?

If neither jumps out at you as overall more effective, get more objective feedback. Give each email to a coworker and ask them what they think you are trying to say and what the next actions should be. You will probably be surprised that you are nowhere near as clear as you think you are.

Planned nitpick breaks or meetings. No one likes the person who interrupts a presentation to pore over a detail, but sometimes nitpicks are incredibly productive.

If it’s not your area? Find 5 minutes to discuss it with the owner. One on one, face-to-face if geography allows, so the person doesn’t feel attacked. Many small decisions are made without a lot of thought. Someone wrote that text at 1am after a long day, or it was inherited from a predecessor and no one thought about changing it. When those decisions are attacked at the wrong time/place, people tend to get defensive and fight for this decision.

What if it’s your product or presentation that has areas to pick over? Schedule a nitpick meeting over lunch where every idea is heard and written down. Invite anyone who is interested! Even if you don’t use 95% of what’s contributed, you’re fostering open communication in a situation where the stakes are low.

Be passionate about other things. Great ideas come from unpredictable sources. Share the things you’re enthusiastic about - whether it’s cooking or skiing or the Romantic poets - and the things that irk you. Listen when other people do the same. I can’t explain how a conversation on mob psychology turned into a data filtering enhancement, but somehow it did.

If you do only what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won’t fail. You’ll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that’s failure by erosion.

Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit, is available. I’ve ordered it from Amazon and will follow up with a review once I’ve read it.

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