Mona Akmal: Creativity & Convention: Achieving Complimentary Balance for Success - Seattle Interactive 2015
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Every productive working environment experiences the constant opposing forces of creativity and pragmatism. True freedom for innovation is achieved by establishing an atmosphere where these very different energies can be used to complement, instead of clash. In this session, Mona will provide her perspective and experience in setting up these forces for balance and ultimately, success.
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Mona Akmal: Creativity & Convention: Achieving Complimentary Balance for Success - Seattle Interactive 2015
- 1. CREATIVITY & CONVENTION Mona Akmal (Zulily)
- 2. CREATIVITY | CONVENTION Unknown Ambiguous Exciting Scary Risky Hopeful Leaps Big gain Novel Known Well defined Humdrum Safe Comfortable Steps Mediocre Boring Inertia
- 3. 26 year old Mona THERE IS NO BALANCE PICK ONE AND GO!
- 4. 36 year old Mona BALANCE IS ESSENTIAL AND ITS FUCKING HARD
- 5. • 5.0 MM active customers • 100+ sales every day • Sales last 72 hours • New site launched every day at 6am • A typical Costco has 4000 SKUs • At the Zu, over 9,000 SKUs daily • Featured over 15,000 brands! • Razor thin margins
- 6. WHAT’S THE RIGHT ANSWER? A) A special innovation team B) Existing team pivots to focus on innovation C) Existing team does both day to day and innovation
- 7. WHAT MAKES CREATIVITY SCARY?
- 8. RISK
- 9. TOO BIG, TOO OVERWHELMING
- 11. INERTIA
- 12. LOSS OF CONTROL
- 13. WHAT ANSWER DID WE PICK? A) A special innovation team B) Existing team pivots to focus on innovation C) Existing team does both day to day and innovation
- 14. WHAT WILL YOU DO DIFFERENTLY STARTING TODAY?
Editor's Notes
- I did a word association exercise with a few friends and this is what they came up with One definitely seems “sexier” than the other – so do we need convention at all? And if so how do we balance between the two?
- My personal story – 100% creatively driven kid. Art, music, dancing… Dad passed away at age 12, and I thought I was done with creative endeavors for life Worked hard, got into CS, moved to the US, super pragmatic about life choices, but pushed hard on all convention in a really overt way in my personal life Always thought that you had to pick on – in my career choices, I picked the conventional path. In my personal life, rejected all convention.
- Both are necessary – one optimizes for the present, one ensures long term success One hit wonders don’t last – creative risk taking is essential to discovering the next big avenue of success. Convention is grounding, can fund future growth and ensures a successful present that it's a constant balancing act, and acknowledging that there's natural tension between daily execution and creativity is critical. If you don't recognize it, you won't actively work to keep a healthy mix of just getting shit done, and bringing creative/out of the box thinking to everything.
- Let me share how I came up with this topic Narrate story of CEO (Darrell) and I discussing the Store team’s skill portfolio as well as time investments i.e. where are we spending our time? My team owns every pixel that our customers perceive as “Zulily” – from ads to Zulily.com, to Zulily mobile and Apple watch apps, to push notifications, to emails, Facebook messenger, and customer support Talk about the business model and how it’s a daily business and we have aggressive monetary goals we need to meet every single day It’s easy to optimize exclusively for the day to day – there’s a lot of immediate value in doing that. But are we borrowing from our future selves?
- There isn’t one – each option has pros and cons A – pros are dedicated focus, hiring with the right mindset, Cons – will this mindset have the mindset to productize and deal with what it means to really ship things? Example: Microsoft Research B – pros – don’t need a new team, will be inspiring for the current team because they’ll work on cool stuff. Cons - who will do the day to day work if the entire team focuses on innovation – saying that the day to day isn’t important is not something a retail service can afford to do C – sounds great but how does it actually happen without one cannibalizing the other Each of these options can actually work just fine (I have my preferences, which I’ll share later), or completely fail because this is an organizational view of creativity. However what usually curbs creativity isn’t organizational structure but the things that are truly scary about creativity
- What if we try something and fail? Whether you’re thinking of doing a start-up, or changing careers, or trying a new idea in your current role (like a new user model) What does failure mean? Is it an identity thing? Mitigations: 1. stupid risk is STUPID, don’t be STUPID 2. Surround yourself with data, understand your environment 3. Get comfortable with failure – it’s an essential part of learning 4. Actually learn from your failures 5. The more unproven the idea, the more risky it is
- It can feel like a massive undertaking – partly the nature of the beast (i.e. when you think big, what you come up with is big things) and that can be scary so you whiddle ideas down. Mitigations: Think strategically, act tactically Chunk it down. It’s about the next step, and it’s about knowing that you’re aiming to get to the top of the mountain. It’s not about driving yourself insane by sitting at the base of the mountain, looking up at it and getting scared off
- Safety in numbers – social proof is core to our psychology. If other people are doing it, it must be right. Reptilian brain in action. Core of this is lack of accountability that comes from fear of failure Mitigations: - Be around diverse group of people – the more diversity of ideas you surround yourself with, the more nuanced your understanding of convention will be. Keep other factors in your life constant Have a support group – convention can be grounding Have rituals
- It’s always harder to break the pattern. Takes more time, more effort, more emotional resilience. The cost of doing things differently is non-zero, whether it's the customer trying a new user model, or people within a team. That means it's always an effort to try something creative and new. Ultimately the energy and appetite to do this comes from the belief that there's a longer win that makes the cost of change more than worthwhile.
- As a manager of people, if I’m not the one directly responsible for creativity, it scares me to unleash a team of people to be creative. Mitigations: Wallow in the data Build context every single week Experiential understanding of the problem Trust (and tight feedback loop)
- Hire and retain diverse thinkers Form convention & tradition around taking risk, learning, testing, feedback loops Use the product, meet the customer, stay current Wallow in the data Make every trial a learning moment (hypothesis, implementation, result, learning) Always have a backlog of great ideas (that are small but aligned with a larger strategy) Take moments to step away and breathe (offsite, hack week)