Beginner's Mind

A.K.A. How the 'Seinfeld Strategy' can help you stop procrastinating

Creativity comes in many ways. I remember very well one of my theatre classes in 12th grade. Our homework was to prepare a quick scene showing the exact opposite of our character, e.g. if you are very extroverted you could act as the shy guy sitting the corner of the room. At this time, I wasn't familiar with the term creative confidence. Like most of society, I associated only people who can draw, paint or crochet to be creative. Guess what I came up with: I just stood there with a shrug. The teacher, but especially my classmates didn't realise that I have already started the exercise. They kept saying:" Jochen, it's your turn", not recognising this was the actual performance. It was just too bad. 

I have been interested in design thinking, lean startup and prototyping for a while. After coming to the one-week workshop called "Designing a service through experience prototyping" at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CCID), I thought now it’s time to get my hands dirty.

After the intro day on Monday, we were divided into groups. Yang accompanied me, an undergraduate finance student from Beijing, Claudine, a Copenhagen resident originally from the Philippines working as a cultural analyst, Astrid who is running innovation projects for the Danish Red Cross and Jessi, user researcher at Freeletics in Munich. All groups had the same research question and had to present their findings including their milestones on Friday. Here are three things I have learned:

1.     Trust the process

“Build, test repeat” is the mantra. One of the core principles of lean prototyping is that you should test your assumptions constantly based on real user feedback. The more diverse the group of researchers, the better. Various people bring different points of views. There is a reason why management consultancies are keen to not only hire business but chemistry, linguistics, mechanical engineering or philosophy majors.

I remember Wednesday afternoon well. We were quite frustrated (at least I) because we were stuck and only had effectively Thursday to finish our project for the final presentation on Friday. It felt like we were still at the beginning and wasted at least a day. “Why didn’t we go for the other research question? It would have been so much more interesting”. It was a cheap excuse, but that’s how I felt at that moment. Everyone seems to have a different view on how to proceed. The diverse cultural backgrounds played its part, too.

It was amazing to see that we turned it around in no time. We looked at our research question, our assumptions and everything we produced so far and tweaked our approach. The key was stepping back and remembering what has been taught to us on the first day. Creativity is not having a great idea while showering which comes out of nowhere. Usually, ideas develop over time and should be tested and refined constantly. Because even if you get the brilliant idea under the shower, it is most likely just the last piece which was missing in the puzzle.

This brings me to the second point.

2.     The breakthrough idea is just one comment away

Being German, you could easily think that all things need to be structured, every conversation should be killed when it is going nowhere. This is indeed not true in the process of designing a new service.

It was astonishing to see that everything came together for the result. That is why it was great to come up with loads of ideas in the first part and discuss them. In the end, we used a lot of our initial thoughts from our first project which we dismissed later for our final one. The final project was a combination of thoughts from all ideas. That is why every idea and comment counts. Each team member needs to speak out their thoughts loudly, even if it can easily lead to chaotic discussions. It is essentials though to foster the joint ideation process.

Of course, that’s the tricky part because you could always think that the next comment from someone is the breakthrough. That’s why it does make sense to set time limits. Once you have to agree to come up with an idea and hypothesis within a specific timeframe, you have to test and validate it.

That was another learning for me. At one point, I had the feeling that we are asking the wrong research questions to our user group. If you are asking the wrong questions, you are making false decisions. Sounds logic. However, even if that was the case, we still got valuable feedback from our conducted interviews because it contributed in different ways to the final project. Testing is always better than assuming: Even if you are not sure if the questions you ask are the right ones. The key here is not to strategise too much which leads to the last learning.

3.     Quantity trumps quality

This mantra is valid for most parts of life. Some of you might have heard of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. He is regarded as one of the"Top 100 Comedians of All-Time" by Comedy Central. 

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X on that day. "After a few days, you'll have a chain. Just keep at it, and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is not to break the chain."

You'll notice that Seinfeld didn't say a single thing about results.

I love this story. If you focus on quantity, quality will inevitably follow. It's the key to stop procrastination. And by the way: Quality is subjective, quantity isn’t.

At CCID, each group produced many prototypes, but the ones who created the most had the greatest outcomes. Striving for perfectionism might be right in some parts. If you want to design medical equipment, you should keep a close eye on quality. In most cases, however, especially when creating a new service or product, perfectionism is a killer. Done is better than perfect is the mantra to follow.

Conclusion

What a great week with tons of learnings. It's astonishing what diverse teams can create. What I discovered throughout the years, especially after watching David Kelly's talk, CEO of IDEO, about How to build your creative confidence, that there are many forms of creativity. People were often surprised by my suggestions on how to redesign their business model, even without noticing at that time that there is this term for such a thing. I did so mostly by thinking what I would demand as a customer or what has already been applied successfully to other industries. 

If someone had told me that I would be interested in any creative process, I would have had a hard time believing it. Think about it yourself: What is one thing you have been interested in trying out for a while which would surprise your 20-year-old self? 

Check out the video of our project.