Connecting people and ideas through improvisation

Plan less and explore the unexpected

March 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There’s a time for planning, and a time to riff. Planning helps you construct something specific, when details of your product are known. Creativity is often focused in the early phases of creation and limited once plans are set.

Riffing (or improvising) has boundaries and constraints, but the final product isn’t known until the end. Creativity lives throughout the process, but scope and attributes are sometimes limited by the lack of systematic planning.  This method is often scarier, which is why planning is so popular.

Before the most recent Ignite Phoenix, I ran around with a Flip camera and asked people to “show me what love looks like”.  Valentine’s Day loomed, and I thought it would stir some interesting reactions. It certainly did.

I ended up with about 15 minutes of clips and bits of people swooning, smooching, hearting, and being silly. These were people improvising to an improvised idea, and it showed. Brilliantly.

Unfortunately, I still had no plan what to do with all this great footage. Thankfully local Phoenix band, Super Stereo, provided a piece of the puzzle when they generously donated one of their tracks to the Phoenix music compilation CD. I got their permission to use a track and started seeing how things lined up with the footage.

It was pure, silly, fun creation. I had no vision for how this would turn out, and was along for the ride as things fell together. What I ended up with was a light little music video that showcased a lot of Ignite fans and friends having fun. A visual love letter.

It’s entirely not what I had in mind when I started, and it’s not going to win any awards, but I think it’s great. Could I have scripted it out all in advance, asked people to do specific things, and paced it better? Sure, but I wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun.

Creativity is as much about the process as the final product. Let go of your planning sometimes, explore, and see where it leads you. You may love it.

Filed Under: Improv Tagged With: , , , , ,

Pandora and The Whiz Dumb of Crowds

August 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I’m a big Pandora fan, and many moons ago I had an idea to make a spiffy new station – I’d crowdsource it.

I put a tweet out asking for what song could you not resist getting up out of your chair and dancing to, and fed them all into a new Pandora station. The goal was the greatest high-energy, must-dance, spazz-inducing station I had yet laid eardrums on.  So that was the goal.

What I got was two things. First was the most infuriatingly annoying station in my entire Pandora collection, and the second was a lesson on the serious limitations of the crowd.

The Crowdsource Dance Throwdown

The Pandora Station ended up with a lot of good songs going in, but ranged across such a wilderness of styles and formats I spent more time laughing than dancing.  Plus, Pandora takes your addition of a single rocking song from an artist as a reason to add every lame ballad that artist ever belched forth.

I thumbed down some very obvious misses, but generally left the station as it came to me.  I’m going to leave it that way until the end of September, then start editing it to suit my own tastes.  You’re welcome to give Crowdsource Dance Throwdown a listen and chime in.

Crowds know data, but not value

What I realized on a larger scale is that crowds are great for sourcing lots of general knowledge but there still must be someone curating it, like Wikipedia Editors do for Wikipedia. When you ask for opinions without any guiding hand you just get a disorganized pile.

Each individual idea might have merit, but the ideas don’t all have the same value when mooshed together.  It’s like a salad. When a salad is in a bowl you can pick around the bits you don’t like (tomatoes) or add the things you really want (like bacon bits).  If you drop it into a blender and make a single smoothie out of it… well, you’ll get something very colorful but not so popular on the menu. This has not been my most appetizing metaphor ever, but you get the idea.

Be careful when you get input from crowds on yourself and your ideas. Listen to their input (if you want) but only let it advise you; never let it replace your own judgment.

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Filed Under: Experiments Tagged With: , , , , ,