Scott Belsky really struck a chord with the audience at the Creativity World Forum, witness the enthusiasm following his keynote. Not a surprise really, as the average audience at this type of conferences is always hungry for practical tips and tricks that help them overcome creativity ‘bottlenecks’. In this respect, Belsky really fit the bill.

Scott Belsky is the co-founder of Behance, a company that develops products and services for the creative industry. He is also the author of the bestseller Making Ideas Work. His point? There is no lack of (great) ideas. Actually, there is an abundance of them. But most ideas never happen. This is why: ideas generate energy and excitement, which evaporate over time, as we fail to transform these ideas into actions. And when the initial euphoria around an idea dies, as it mostly will, we instantly generate another idea, and if that one doesn’t lift off, yet another. This place where half baked ideas float around in the doldrums, Belsky calls the ‘project plateau’. In his keynote, he systematically went through a number of steps to help us find the tenacity to push these ideas out of the project plateau, and towards a tangible outcome.

Many ideas fail to come to fruition because of five reasons: (1) the gravitational force of daily operations (aka office life as we know it), (2) lack of organization, (3) lack of accountability, (4) lack of leadership capabilities and (5) disorganized and isolated networks. In order to make ideas happen, Belsky urges us to work more efficiently on three levels: (1) organization and execution, (2) communal forces and (3) leadership capabilities. Let’s go into a few of those.

Creativity x Organization = Impact

Most ideas do not happen because we fail in overcoming what Belsky calls ‘reactionary workflow’. Most of the time we seem to be pecking away at our collective inboxes, be they email, twitter, text messages and so on. Instead of spending time creating, we are responding to incoming information. The solution to overcome this is to create (more) areas of non-stimulation, or forced time of disconnection. Sadly, says Belsky, one of the few such instances seems to be the time we spend in the shower.

But creativity is not enough. Organization is key. Belsky proposes the following formula whereby Creativity x Organization equals Impact. Hence, however high the creativity score, the impact will be zero if there is zero organization. In other words: 100 x 0 = 0. Much better to aim for 50 x 2 = 100. His advice is to spend more time and energy on being organized, to organize with a bias to action and to value productivity by means of ‘action steps.’ This specifically applies to meetings, when practically everyone involved is basically unproductive. Meetings without tangible action steps are a waste of time. And it does not come as a surprise that Belsky is an advocate of standing meetings.

Capture action steps and prioritize 

We should have a culture of capturing ‘action steps’, says Belsky. And we should take care to separate these action steps from backburners and reference items. Backburners are ideas that you may want to do something with sometime in the future. It pays to immediately park these ideas, and to create some kind of ‘backburner ritual’ where you process and reevaluate them in batch. Another tip that helps you forward is visualizing your projects and the progress you make (“progress begets progress”) and to prioritize your projects visually. Belsky compares the human brain with computer RAM. There is only so much RAM, and the more applications you open, the slower your computer will function. The same applies to you. The more ideas you work on, the slower you will work on those ideas. Bottomline? Prioritize, as you simply cannot handle everything.

Communal forces: leverage your community for feedback and resources

According to Belsky, there are roughly three kinds of people. The ‘dreamers’ do exactly that: dream. They go to sleep a day before the deadline, happily thinking that whatever they are working on can still get better, if only they change this or do that. The ‘doers’ are the opposite, geared towards just getting things done, obsessed by budget and timeline, and averse to surprises or novelty. ‘Incrementalists’ are people that manage to ricochet in between. Belsky’s point is that creative teams or communities have (to have) each of these three types, and that each of them has their own role to play.

Belsky urges us to broadcast our ideas and to share them liberally. Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson puts every new idea he has on his blog. His take? The benefits outweigh the costs, and if an idea is so easily copied is probably wasn’t a good idea to start with. You should go further and also share ownership of ideas, as it buys you engagement from your team. Next: actively seek out the competition, find out what they are doing and how, as it usually is a good impetus to act (faster and smarter). Thirdly, fight your way to breakthroughs but do not become burdened by consensus, the easy solution, the unremarkable. And last but not least, overcome the stigma of self-marketing. As an aside: good self-marketeers often turn out to be curators of what is interesting to them. Clever and consistent curating is also a clever way of self-marketing.

Real leaders talk last and reward initiative

As he was nearing the end of his keynote, Belsky gave the leaders in the audience some sound advice. Good leaders listen first and talk last, he said. They listen to others’ ideas instead of immediately proposing theirs and asking their teams for feedback. He wondered aloud why it is that, in most organizations, bonuses are given only to those who succeed, when we all know that success is almost always preceded by (repeated) failure. This reward system seems to instill the idea “You better innovate, but don’t you dare fail.” Belsky proproses that it would be far wiser and fairer to judge and reward initiative, rather than only result.

His final statement was one that resonated a long time with the audience, and got a fair amount of tweets and retweets: Gain confidence from being doubted. He gave the example of a friend who spent a lot of time and energy on a workgroup that was investigating digital publishing. This was at a time when this was both still a novelty and an oddity, and nobody believed in its viability. Belsky’s conclusion: “”If everyone thinks you’re crazy, you either are crazy. Or you’re on to something.”

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