Podcast Ep35 – Aran Rees – How To Walk The Line Of Creative Flow
This is the thirty-fifth in a series of podcasts where Judy interviews people who have a track record of successful collaboration. This series is for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of real-life collaboration, especially collaboration among creative, intelligent, free-thinking individuals who are geographically dispersed.
The interviews go well beyond the obvious, as metaphor master Judy Rees explores the hidden thinking that inspires collaboration that works.
Hello and welcome to the Collaboration Dynamics podcast. I’m Judy Rees and with me today is Aran Rees. Hello, Aran!
Aran: Hello there!
Judy: Before we start, we have to say even though we are both Rees, we are no relation.
Aran: We are probably not. Not that we know of. I’ve not done my family tree. There’s every possibility that you could be my third cousin twice removed or some such.
Judy: We’ll find that out one day, but as far as we know, we are no relation, but we are friends.
Aran: As far as we know, yes indeed.
Judy: Aran, please introduce yourself so that people know what it is you do in relation to collaboration.
Aran: Okay. I generally call myself a creativity coach. I’ve been toying with various ways to say that. What I do is I coach people and I coach them specifically specialising in the area of creativity. It relates to collaboration in every level, but specifically for me where this relates to collaboration is it’s precisely how creativity really works.
One of my sayings – and I’ll try and pepper my little catch phrases throughout this discussion, I’ll jab them here and there – is that creativity is a team sport. One of the real frustrations I have and one of the reasons that I have developed my methodology for doing this, my way of doing this is that creativity is frequently taught to people as a set of tools and techniques, rather than a way of engaging with life and work.
But also it’s celebrated at an individual level. We talk about, “There’s this myth of the lone creative genius…” That is so damaging to people’s ability to really be creative that I try wherever possible to remind people that creativity does not belong to individuals, it’s a team sport, it happens in groups. I don’t think there are any real examples of lone isolated people coming up with anything particularly amazing, just purely from their mind. So shot right through what I do is the need to help people figure out how to collaborate creatively.
Judy: When creativity is a team sport like that, when you are collaborating at your best what kind of collaborations do you get involved in?
Aran: If I had to categorise them, I like any situation where there is a real desire to do something delightful for someone, where there is a feel of purpose to it. My skill set is largely in things like content creation – I do a lot of writing, but also in facilitation and coaching, and so on, and creative problem solving, because I have to learn a thing or two about that to do what I do.
But I suppose that anything that requires a group of people to place the object of their work first. What I mean by that is a lot of the time people are driven by extrinsic needs. We’ve been built into the system that is the hierarchy within which we work, so maybe we are trying to work our way up the hierarchy to get a promotion, or it’s the power dynamics of the team, or it’s money. Usually that doesn’t lead to great work. Usually that leads to good enough work. Sometimes it leads to great work, but I find that when people are doing really great work, it’s because they care about the object of their work, and they work in service to that above else.
When that’s the case, job roles kind of fall away. If the object of the work the group is working on is the thing, nobody is going to sit around arguing whose job is whose and whose role is whose, and “You should be doing that because that’s in your job description. I’m going to be doing that because that’s my responsibility.” This is what you hear people saying, “Who owns this? Who owns this particular thing?” I find it’s a horrible way of working, because you limit people. And that prevents collaboration. People need to feel that “I am a set of skills and abilities, and I am here to deliver the best of me to whatever this is that we’re trying to do, and not get caught up in those extrinsic concerns.”
Judy: When the object of the work is put first, whereabouts are you in relation to that?
Aran: How do you mean?
Judy: Specifically, you’ve said you like to be involved in these things where the object of the work is put first, and in situations where creativity is a team sport. Specifically, what would be one or two examples of how you collaborate and where you sit in that collaboration?
Aran: I suppose it’s quite fluid. Given any group of people working together, and usually for me this is co-located people, face-to-face, when there is something to achieve, there are various stages you go through – gathering insights, planning, ideation. At any given time, a person within that group will usually emerge as the most appropriate person to lead on that item. Other people will take on different roles in a fairly fluid way.
I don’t know that I see myself having a specific role. I think it’s very context-dependent. I do like being a specialist within a group. I like having knowledge and insights and being able to use that effectively. I’m not much of a – I’m trying to remember the Belbin Team Roles. They normally talk about the Chairman. I’m not much of that kind of character. I like to let someone else worry about the stress of keeping the team moving in that way. I like to be involved in the nitty-gritty. But yeah, that’s where I more naturally fit in.
I also love to generate ideas. If I’m collaborating with people during any part of the work, which requires new ideas and their input, I find that very exciting. And that’s where I probably get very fired up.
Judy: So when you’re generating ideas, you get fired up. And you don’t like being that kind of Belbin Chairman kind of role.
Aran: I don’t think I do that most naturally. But again, it’s bizarre. If you look at any team, if they are working in a very fluid way, at any given moment somebody could be doing an element of that. There’s somebody who even for a very brief second is taking on the role of taking a helicopter view of what’s going on and giving people feedback. That happens very fluidly. Even if it’s not something that I necessarily identify with, I’m sure I do it occasionally.
Judy: As you imagine all these different roles you take in these different collaborations, and it’s all quite fluid, and it’s usually co-located, and the bit you love is generating ideas, when you are collaborating at your best, you are like what?
Aran: Is this a metaphor we’re looking for?
Judy: It is.
Aran: I’m like an eagle soaring through the sky. I like to think that at my best, I am someone who challenges. At my best, I am a challenge to the group to always look for a better way, always look for more insights, always be even clearer on what we’re trying to achieve. I’d like to think that I have to walk that line between motivating and irritating. It’s the difficult part. I think at my best, I always take that line very well.
Judy: Walking the line between motivating and irritating.
Aran: Yeah, that might be a new catch-phrase for me.
Judy: When you’re walking the line between motivating and irritating, what kind of line is that line?
Aran: It’s a very thin one. What it means is constantly reading the group. I think there is a tendency to always seek a position for certainty and comfort. It’s not comfortable to be discomforted – I suppose it’s the tautological way of saying it. We like to make decision, feel comfortable with that decision and stick with that.
And without something to cause disruption, without something to cause new thoughts to come through to unsettle previously settled positions, it’s a great danger that any given group will quickly find the most obvious, and most safe path of least resistance and move in that direction. And if you are going to try and stop them doing that, you have to be very careful because you’re pushing them to do more mental work than they necessarily want to do.
And I don’t mean this in terms of them consciously wanting to do less mental work. I’m not saying that people sit and say, “I’m going to do the least possible”. But we’ve got clever brains. Our brains are wired to try and reduce our cognitive load. We don’t want to think more than we have to. That’s why we have lots of really great heuristics and short cuts to make decisions.
You’re trying to push someone to do more thinking, you’re trying to push them to stay open longer to uncertainty, which in itself is an uncomfortable position to be in. I think that requires a lot of empathy, it requires a lot of love, I think. You have to feel a lot of warmth towards people to do this, because otherwise you can come across as very irritating. You don’t at all want to give the impression that you are being disruptive. And it takes humour and bringing in a sense of joy to the work.
Judy: And you don’t want to come across as disruptive. And disruptive is important with that whole keeping everybody in a state of uncertainty for longer. And you need that disruption of the previous needs settled. And walking the line between motivating and irritating. And that line is a thin line, a very thin line.
Aran: Yes, it is. Very thin line. Disruption is an annoying word, because it means two things in this context. Being disruptive is obviously not good in a team scenario. But you do want to disrupt sometimes certain thought patterns and certain paths that people might be going down, if you feel that you’re getting too close to closing in on a conclusion and choosing a direction before you’ve really explored your opportunities, before you’ve really considered alternatives.
Judy: That very thin line in between motivating and irritating – is there anything else about that line?
Aran: I suppose one thing is that it is different for different people. I sometimes wonder about this – the whole negative versus positive reinforcement, and how some people apparently if you say, “Nah, you’ll never be able to do this”, they immediately decide to prove you wrong. Other people, if you say, “Nah, you’ll never be able to do this”, they immediately go, “Oh, I’ll never be able to do this,” and give up. Those people need you to say, “I absolutely believe in you”.
I think possibly that occasionally slightly irritating for certain people might be the right way to go. Sometimes you do need to get under people’s skin. But that’s a very-very difficult call to make. I wouldn’t want to make that call with somebody I didn’t know very well.
Judy: When you’re walking that line, between motivating and irritating, it’s a very fine line, how are you walking.
Aran: On tiptoes? How am I walking?
Judy: That’s my question. Are you walking on tiptoes? Are you treading on eggshells? Or are you walking in a different way?
Aran: That’s interesting. If we follow this metaphor along, there are times when you need to walk on tiptoes. There are times when you need to be careful. There are times when you need to maybe stamp a little bit. There are times when you need to make some noise. I think it all depends on the group. It all depends on the feeling in the room and reading that feeling.
I suppose at times you can almost stop. The other side of it is if you are doing this role, walking this line, there’s also the point where you say, “Right, I’m not needed right now.” There is a flow that’s been created there. We’ve achieved something that you don’t want to disrupt.
I sometimes say that being a creating leader is often as simple as shutting up and getting out of the way. And woe betide anybody trying to bring a team forward creatively if they don’t know when to stop pushing, stop motivating, stop doing anything and just allowing people to flow. I suppose, you can tiptoe, you can stamp and sometimes you just have to stop walking and wait.
This metaphor works quite well, doesn’t it?
Judy: Let’s play with it for a question or two longer if it’s working. When you are walking that line between motivation and irritation, whereabouts is motivation and whereabouts is irritation?
Aran: That’s interesting. I mentioned the word ‘flow’ before and I started thinking of the original work –Csikszentmihalyi I believe is the correct pronunciation of Mr Flow. Let’s just call him Mr Smith for now, because Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is very difficult to say.
Judy: I’ve never even heard anybody attempt it before.
Aran: I learned to say his name when I was at university. I was very unhappy for large part of university, so I became very interested in learning about happiness. I learned a lot about flow then. So I learned about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi or Mr Smith, and I decided that I’ve got to learn how to pronounce this guy’s name, because so much of what he wrote about was so mind-blowingly interesting and so powerful.
When we talk about where you’ve got motivation, the ultimate feeling of motivation I think is also what we would call flow. Let’s say there is a kind of channel of flow. On one side of it there is boredom, and on the other side of it there is stress. There’s too much stress. There’s angst and anxiety.
I think when you’re trying to achieve a state of flow, you need a big enough challenge to not to be bored, and not so much challenge or at least the right kind of challenge, so that you’re not irritated.
If we talk about where irritation is and where motivation is, it’s giving people enough of a challenge, pushing them enough that they can come to a form of flow, a form of motivation, without going so far in terms of difficulty that they become anxious, but also not giving them the kinds challenges that are arbitrary or inappropriate. I think a lot of the time difficulty with creative flow comes from having to work within seemingly arbitrary constraints, not feeling that the system, within which you’re working, has meaning to it.
For years, I’ve been wondering about how to codify this. Constraints are important, necessary, because constraints convey information. They can be seen as a framework, within which to achieve something. Okay, there’s a wall there, there’s a barrier there, there’s a door there. Now I know that I can’t go that way, but I can go that way. These things are meaningful constraints.
Judy: I love constraints. One of my favourite sayings used to be in the Twitter rules. It said, “Constraints inspire creativity”.
Aran: Yes, absolutely, the 140-character rule, which was actually quite arbitrary originally, became in itself a wonderful creative constraint.
But if you then said to someone halfway through a creative flow of some kind, “Now I’m going to implement a different and entirely arbitrary constraint that’s got nothing to do with what you’re trying to achieve.” I suppose my least favourite ones of these – or favourite, depending on the way you look at it – is arbitrary deadlines. When someone says, “We need to achieve this by this time.” You say, “Okay, but that’s going to require me to reduce this or change this, and that’s going to hamper the quality of what we do. What’s behind this deadline?” And they say, “I told my boss it will be done by that day.”
That’s pretty arbitrary. That’s not actually beneficial to achieving the best results. That’s an arbitrary thing that’s being done to make you look good. You’ve got your review the day after and you want to be able to tick this box. That’s a kind of constraint, which can I think lead to irritation. Of course, you can use it. You can say, “Fair enough. This is going to require us to do other things.”
You’ll have to put a link maybe some way, if you have show notes that you can attach to your podcast. I’ll try to find this and I’ll try to send it to you. There’s this brilliant video, which you may have seen. It’s been around the internet for a long time. It’s about a group of people having a meeting where they’ve got a specialist consultancy firm in. And one of the consultants is the technical specialist who’s going to achieve this result for them. They say to this person, “Okay, what we want is three red lines.” He says, “Okay, three red lines. It’s doable. We can do three red lines.” They say, “They all have to be perpendicular.” He says, “Perpendicular to what?” They say, “To each other.” He says, “That’s not possible. You can’t have three lines all perpendicular to each other. That’s not possible.” “Surely, you’re a specialist, you can figure this out.” And they go, “The other thing is we want them drawn with green ink.”
Judy: I remember this one, yeah.
Aran: It’s a wonderful video, because what you’ve got here are a bunch of arbitrary constraints, which don’t come out of the real deliverable, what you’re actually trying to achieve. And maybe it’s the best example of really arbitrary constraints. It’s ill-thought out stuff that doesn’t help you.
And if we loop in a long languid loop back to the original discussion, it’s these kind of things that don’t provide any information, provide contradictions and difficulties. If you had the power just to chop it out and say, “This constraint goes. It doesn’t do anything for me,” then you would. I think if you are trying to maintain a creative flow, you’re going to be very careful throwing in arbitrary constraints which can cause irritation, because what they do is they provide no useful input. All they do is constrain your options and reduce your ability to rise to the challenge. Of course that can push you up to that anxiety space.
Judy: And of course, the wisdom to know the difference is a great question. Which ones are arbitrary and which ones are not? For example, a newspaper uses certain fonts, in the old days it did that because you could only use so many fonts in one newspaper. Now you could in theory use any number of fonts, but the newspaper would cease to look like a newspaper, if it was just a jumble of different fonts.
Aran: Yes, this is where you have to say, “Who is the end user of this? What is the benefit they will derive from it?” If you draw all of your constraints from something that really does benefit the end user, then they are not going to be arbitrary. They are going to be real. If you find that you can’t see a connection between this constraints and producing the better end product for the user, then probably it’s something that’s arbitrary, something that’s not been properly considered, maybe something that’s driven out of an extraneous desire from somebody ego-wise or politics-wise to achieve something.
Also of course clarity of what is real value for the end user? What’s the difference between what somebody is very vocal and complaining about as opposed to what really matters to the silent majority. Really knowing the end user can make a big difference, and understanding what is a real creative constraint and what is an arbitrary one.
Judy: One last question, because we’ll have to wrap up in a minute. When you are walking that very thin line between motivation and irritation, what happens to constraints?
Aran: I think it heightens the sense of what is a real meaningful constraint, or to use a better word, perhaps it’s not a constraint but is a piece of information. Maybe we can, if we remove that word, the word ‘constraint’, and just think of what is information. Information is either useful information or it’s not useful information. It’s either pertinent or it’s arbitrary and can be ignored.
I think when you are walking the line between motivation and irritation – it’s growing on me, that line – you do become more aware in a heightened way about what is really meaningful, and what isn’t. I think it requires you to be very ‘skin in the game.’
You are there. You are providing an important role in the group. You are collaborating by helping people to think clearly. If you are asking arbitrary questions that are not pertinent, then you are derailing their though process. If you are putting in extraneous pieces of information, which are not useful, be they in the form of constraints or even worse, if they are in the form of well-intended but useless pieces of advice. Whatever it is you are putting in, if it’s not really driven by the needs of the group, then you are going to be harming them.
As they say in medicine, first do no harm. Maybe you become very aware of your capacity in that position to harm if you are not careful.
Judy: I’m afraid we’ve run out of time. I would ask you a dozen more questions, but we’re going to have to leave it there.
Aran: We can do one in a few weeks’ time.
Judy: Yeah, something like that. If people would be listening to this and they want to find out more about the stuff that you do, what you’re up to, how do they contact you? And who would you like to contact you?
Aran: They can find me at www.sabretoothpanda.com. I’m also on LinkedIn as per the norm. And if they want to hear my podcast, which I do, they can find the No Wrong Answers podcast. If they search various podcast directories, go in your favourite podcast player, and they can find nowronganswers.com and find more about me on there. Nowronganswers.com as well is my blog site where you can find No Wrong Answers podcast.
Who would I like to contact me? I suppose my major, my main thing at Sabre Tooth Panda is to do with creativity coaching, training and playing. I talk about the need to coach for individual awareness, train for force of context awareness, helping you understand how is that going to make a difference in your real world, and then play is what I call game time – doing it for real. It’s very much in the collaboration space.
Anyone who’s interested in figuring out how creativity really works, how to become more creative rather than just learning about creativity, what seems to be what most creativity-centric training does – it teaches you about it rather than helping you be it.
Anyone who’s interested in that should contact me. Also anyone who’s interested in words. Let’s just say that I love words. And I love writing. Anyone, who’s interested in figuring out how to get their ideas across in writing – I love doing that. It’s always exciting to get involved in anything in that area.
Judy: Brilliant! Thank you very much indeed.
Aran: Thank you!