Category Archives: Creativity

Crafting Slides

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I’ve spent a good deal of my time over the last few days ‘crafting slides’.

This particular activity hasn’t changed a great deal in the last 15 years.

All sorts of progress and development in the collaboration arena has taken place over that time.

So why no change?

Why do we still need to transact over a set of information in a meeting?

Is the devil really in the detail?

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I work in a world that can appear very complicated. There are options all around, different ways of thinking about things at every turning, a new methodology just over the horizon and innovations just around the next corner.

Choices upon choices upon choices. Options within options within options.

I’ve been in a number of situations recently where, in response to this complexity, someone has said – “the devil is in the detail”. It’s a common saying which seems to get applied whenever complexity looks like a problem but is it really just cheap shorthand? Is it just an office cliché?

One recently situation was a review meeting where a number of people where looking at a design for a project we’ve been working on. Like all designs it defines a solution to a level. To document it all would be impossible and produce mountains of documentation, so the design focuses on the major elements and defines them to a level to enable understanding. During the review someone said something like “I’m OK with this document, but like all of these things – the devil is in the detail”. Whether it was deliberate or not the individual concerned was communicating “it doesn’t matter how good a job you do you’ll miss something that really important that will make our life difficult later on”.

In another situation someone was explaining to me the various options that existed for a solution to a customers business problem. I needed to be able to understand, at a high level, what the options were. The only way this particular individual could communicate was via the detail – lots of detail. When I tried to summarise what they were telling me their response was “yes, but the devil is in the detail”. or, in other words, “don’t simplify it, it’s too complex”.

These two situations got me thinking – is the devil really in the detail?

When I look back at all of the projects that I’ve conducted and all of the solutions I’ve delivered, how many times has the devil really been in the detail?

And, if we had spent more time on the detail would we have found the devil and removed it?

Or, actually, has the devil really been somewhere else?

Here’s my short conclusion: Sometimes, yes the devil has been in the detail, but normally, no the devil wasn’t down in the detail. And what’s more, where the devil was in the detail it is highly unlikely that would have found that devil by being “more detailed”. The devil wasn’t hiding in the detail we were looking at, he was busy in another bit of detail out of sight..

What I have noticed though, is that more often it’s not in the details that the devil lies – it’s in the overview, the macro, the summary. Or more specifically, it’s in the assumptions that accompany the high level view.

In simpler terms:

When I say x I mean x,

but you assume that when I say x I really mean x + y.

This is where a dichotomy raises it’s head. If the devil is in the summary and the overview, surely the answer is more detail – but actually putting more detail in just adds fuel to the fire of confusion. The detail doesn’t lead to understanding, it leads to blank stairs and nodding unknowing heads.

What can be the answer?

Unfortunately I have no hidden supply of magic bullets, or long lost alchemy, just some observations:

  • Simplification is an art that few are skilled in, but it is at the root of the answer.
  • Considering all of the options just adds to the perception of complexity.
  • Presenting all of the options turns complexity into confusion.
  • 1000 options are only 1000 options if you are likely to make a choice. If you aren’t likely to change them then they aren’t options. There are over 1000 routes from here to my house, but only very few of them are realistic choices.
  • Pictures are a great way of driving simplicity out of complexity.
  • Words need to be used precisely and consistently. Finding the right word can make all the difference, but words soon loose their precise meaning.
  • Defend the meaning of words. Once the meaning of a word has been lost there’s no point trying to get it back.
  • Projects act like snowballs travelling down a hill. if you start it off in the wrong directions there’s no point in trying change the direction correctly once it’s rolling.
  • Communication is another key.

Top 10 – Visual Sources and Places

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I love visual things, there are far to many situation where a picture would be much better than lots of words.

Here’s a collection of some of the visual sources that I love to use:

  1.  Information is Beautiful
  2.  Geek and Poke 
  3.  1.00 FTE
  4.  Someone Once Told Me
  5.  Patrick Smith Photography (flickr)
  6.   Dilbert Daily Strip
  7.   Flickr Blog
  8.  Richard Shilling Land Art
  9.  The Cartoon Blog
  10.  Brian Rafferty Wildlife Photography

There is . of course, always my own materials: Graham Chastney (flickr)

Top 10 – Communication Tips

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Communication remains a challenge to many, including myself.

I’ve found that the following tips really help though:

  1. Listening is more important than speaking
  2. If you can, start with a question.
  3. Too many words are more destructive than too few words.
  4. Simplicity is far more difficult to achieve than complexity.
  5. When preparing a message, constantly ask yourself “so what?” and remove everything that is not answering that question.
  6. A conversation is much more valuable than a presentation.
  7. Pictures speak a thousand words, but they may not be the words that you are thinking.
  8. Metaphor and analogy form gateways to understanding.
  9. Tell people a story, they’ll remember the story much longer than they remember the point of the story. The story will then lead them back to the meaning.
  10. Just because it’s interesting to you – doesn’t mean that it’s interesting to anyone else.
  11. Lists are often the worst way of communicating.

Branding Colours – on the Web

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I love inforgraphiics.The people over at colourlovers.com have done an assessment of the most powerful colours in the world, including the colours of the most powerful web presences. It’s really interesting to see the influence of reds and blues but also the power of multi-coloured approaches that focus on the primary colours (below). If you are thinking of launching a social networking site though, you need to make sure that your icon uses blue.

It’s also interesting to see how different this is to the spread of colour for corporate America overall.

Concept Entropy

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I’ve witnessed the entropy of many a fine concept in my time.

For those of you who have forgotten your schoolboy physics a quick reminder on what entropy is – and there are a lot of fine definitions, but I want to focus on a simple illustration. Entropy is what happen to your kettle after you have turned it off – it cools down until it is at room temperature. All of the heat dissipates until the temperature of the kettle is no different to everything else around it – well almost.

Jimmy and Granddad Explore the Lake DistrictWithin the IT arena we come up with all sorts of good ideas, but I’ve seen many of these ideas go through the same entropy cycle.

  • The cycle starts with an idea.
  • The idea warms up things around it as people subscribe to the idea and see it’s relevance.
  • The idea gets developed into a concept and a way of thinking beyond the first idea.
  • Thought leaders start to understand how the concept could be applied within their context – whether that’s a business, an organisation, or from a personal viewpoint. These thought leaders make the best use of the concept and it makes a real difference to their context.

At this point the system is still being heated up – the concept is still cooking, but entropy is about to kick in.

  • The concept starts to enter the mainstream.
  • Consultants start to see the concept as a way of generating more work by helping organisations to apply the concept to their environment.
  • Product companies see a whole new revenue stream from delivering products targeted at delivering the concept.
  • Because it is something tangible the products become synonymous with the concept in the minds of those that use the product.
  • The products enter the mainstream and become the concept and consulting review from the concept starts to decline.
  • At this point the consultants start to look for the next concept to jump onto leaving the old concept to the product providers.
  • The concept entropy is complete.

SOA is the last years concept, Cloud is this years. SOA has just finished the cycle, Cloud is on it’s way through the products phase.

I said at the beginning that a kettle cools down until it is just like everything else around it – well almost – and it’s that well almost that is important. The extra heat that the concept has generated doesn’t die – it’s just been dissipated throughout the other systems. The products that get delivered to enable a concept still live on making a difference to the way that organisations work. The products aren’t delivering the concept, but the residue of the concept that lives in the products is making a difference to systems around them.

Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business

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One of the most popular blogs on this site is the one on Rich Pictures. I think that pictures are fabulous, so I really liked Dan Roam’s article on ChangeThis called Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business.

Tower Bridge - Freshly PaintedIn this article Dan tells a simple story about getting directions in Moscow and the four different ways in which he could have been given the directions.

  • The Narrative
  • The Checklist
  • The Map
  • The Landmark Sketch

and Dan describes each one of them:

All four of these sets of directions are correct. Following any one of them should in theory get us to the Gagarin Museum in the same amount of time. But here’s my question: I’d like you to look over the four options again, really think about it for a moment, and then ask yourself this: if we actually were in Moscow, which option would you prefer?

The powerful communication methods are the map and the landmark sketch – without a doubt. We all know it’s true, so why do we use so many words in business?

I believe that for practical, business-oriented problem solving—when you and your team need to address something right in front of you right now, the visual options—the map and the landmark sketch are without question the way to go. The fact that we so rarely see these kinds of pictures used in business is why I write my books.

Over the last two days I’ve filled sheet after sheet of flipchart paper with diagrams. We’ve been talking through a solution with a customer, a solution that takes thousands of words to document. The documents don’t communicate, they just document. I had presentation slides and charts, but I knew that they wouldn’t communicate either. Simple blocks and lines on a chart with a commentary – that’s what communicated.

There’s something very powerful about a conversation held over a piece of paper, and I think it’s something intrinsic in who we are, but something that we suppress as adults. My reason for saying this is the difference that I see in the way that children react to paper table-cloths and the reaction of adults. What do children do with paper table-cloths? They write and draw on them, they get creative. What do adults do? They protect them, even though we know that paper table-cloth is going straight in the bin as soon as we have left. Why is that? One of the reasons, I think, is that the children’s  need to be creative is fresh and unimpaired, as adults we’ve come to suppress it so much that we don’t even think about it.

If you haven’t come across ChangeThis before then you really are missing out on a treat. I really like their manifesto.