How I Use Visualization to Drivecreativity

Note to class: This is an unusual article to read in law school. However, creativity is a core requirement for most tech contract drafting. When someone on the business side comes to legal with a new business development idea that they want you to draft a contract on, the lawyer needs to grasp the overall structure and then think creatively about all of the issues that should be addresses in the contract. Most of the time, the business people have not thought through a lot of the nitty-gritty details that can often derail a contract down the road.

It is important to develop the skill to step back from the email threads, and visualize the relationship – step by step. Then you can start to make notes of all of the issues you need to raise with the business people. After they respond to the issues you have raised, you will be ready to start drafting the contract details.

The article below will give you some ideas about how to stir creativity. While it is written from the perspective of an entrepreneur, there are some useful pointers that are applicable to contract drafters. Read through the article and we will use a real world example of how to convert fuzzy deal points into a robust contract using creativity and visualization.

How I Use Visualization To DriveCreativity

Mark Suster

Jan 17, 2011

This is a guest post byMark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur turned VC. He sold his second company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. Read more about Suster on his blog atBothsidesofthetableand on Twitter at@msuster.

Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity.

As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativity. The one that works best for me is visualization coupled with self talk.

Visualization is so important to help yourself & others conceptualize ideas. It’s why I always work hard to find images for my blog posts & why all of my keynote presentations are visual rather than bullet points with words.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:This is a long post, so I put an executive summary here if you want to get the point without reading all the detail. If you plan to read the post you can skip the summary if you want.

§  Almost all business success relies on creativity. This applies equally to VCs, startups & big company executives

§  Despite the importance of creativity, there seems to be almost no focus on teaching it, encouraging it, training at it & incorporating it into our daily routines. The need for creativity extends well beyond product design.

§  Many people are visual thinkers. Therefore to drive creativity people need to do visual brainstorming

§  You need to find what works for you to put yourself in that environment and learn how to do “self talk,” learn how to create visual charts, learn how to test & iterate ideas and the learn how to effectively communicate results.

§  For me I can only do this by myself. I think team sessions are better for testing ideas than for original thought, but that’s me. Solitude & creativity go hand-in-hand.

§  I use tools to invoke my creatieve self. One example is driving, which has an actualphysiologicalreason it makes you creative. The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward

§  One of the books that first made me aware of the “creative brain” was “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. It’s a book about creating art but shows how an artist’s mind gets “into the zone,” how creativity can be invoked, and why looking at what you create in a different way than the rational mind would conceive is an important part of creativity. She literally encourages you to draw things upside down.

§  Other ways I drive creativity are time pressure, showers & occasionally wine. All are known creativity drivers and are covered in the book mentioned above. For others they swear by music. I personally find music more distracting than helpful.

§  Adding structure to creativity is not an oxymoron. It’s how you codify your ideas

§  Like anything, creativity takes practice. There’s no such thing as “not being a creative person.” Some people are more creative than others but it’s within us all. You just have to dedicate yourself to a wanting to tap your creative juices.

§  I apply visual thinking for nearly everything I do: preparing for important phone calls (I imagine my opening lines, I imagine the responses), writing keynote presentations, deciding whether or not to invest in a company, preparing for board meetings – you name it. These are all creative processes.

§  Visualization is a well known technique in professional sports where the difference between winning & losing is often psychological more than physical. If it can work for them, it can work for you.

THE DETAILS

What exactly is visualization?– It is exactly as it sounds. The process of visualization is literally imagining or seeing things in your mind. When I need to give a speech and I’m writing a slide for my deck, I think up the story in my mind that I’m going to tell for this slide. I literally imagine myself on stage saying the words. I think about how the audience might react and whether if I were in the audience I would be intrigued.

It’s why before every speech I call the organizer and drill them about who will be in the audience. I want to know how many people, their level of tech sophistication, their age and their interests. I look carefully at who is speaking before me. In order to visualize how an audience will receive my presentation I have to be able to imagine the whole situation.

When I write a blog post I often see the words before I write them. If I know I have a topic I’m interested in writing about many times I’ll literally think whole sentences in my mind as a test drive before I ever sit at the computer and type.

Strange, I know. But for many people the most important driver of innovation is this kind of visualization & self talk. Yet it almost sounds too strange or mystical and as a result I seldom hear leaders talk about it. So I thought I would.

Creativity in our business lives– The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring / firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing / branding, and on and on. I hear very little discussion ever about how to be more creative.

It’s ironic because I believe creativity is the most important success criterion for a startup. And if we’re reflective, it’s also one of the most important success criteria for investors, senior executives, tech writers and virtually anybody involved in business leadership. Yet most startups seem to constrain creativity to product design. That’s a shame.

Creativity is what helps us think of our ideas in the first place. It’s what helps us imagine what feature sets would be most appealing. It’s how we package our company story and drive our press coverage. As a VC it’s how I think through which markets will be attractive in the future, which ones I want to be in now and how the technology & business world will likely evolve. Without creativity I’d simply invest in the trends I’m seeing on TechCrunch which I inherently believe means I would be investing in what has already happend rather than imagining what could be.

When I make important phone calls I literally play out the start of the call in my mind’s eye before I ever pick up the phone. I imagine myself saying my opening line and put myself in the shoes of the receiver to think about how they’ll react.

There is not a single important business function I do that doesn’t involve creativity. And whether I’m preparing to attend a board meeting, I’m planning to lead a strategic discussion with an executive team, or whether I’m preparing for a TV interview – I use the same process.

The creative process- Whenever I need to do any task that requires insight I have to be able to visualize – to literally SEE the decision framework. Many people are visual thinkers. I often start with a blank piece of paper & a pen and start doodling. I try to visually deconstruct the problem with boxes, arrows, circles & other shapes. I add words & ideas. I try to figure out the structure of the component parts. I start to build in metaphors for what I’m thinking about. I roll up metaphors into a narrative or theme that has coherence.

I know this sounds abstract so let me give you an example from this week.

I recently invested in a company in the media & entertainment sector (this will be announced in a couple of months) so I’ve been thinking a lot about how the industry works, why the structure has evolved the way it did, why the company I invested in has had so much success and what this all implies for the future. I had to do all of this in order to get comfortable that the company had a scalable & sustainable advantage and to think through the threats I thought they would encounter.

I started to build this into a media & entertainment value chain that broke down the components of the industry into discrete parts. I put my definitions on them because I didn’t want my thinking to be constrained by industry-defined boundaries or definitions. From left to right I wrote in boxes: talent discovery, content development, production, post-production, distribution, & marketing. Underpinning it all I wrote: sales, asset management, analytics & talent management.

I used these boxes to imagine what existing film, tv, radio & print media companies did in each of these areas. Were theyvertically integrated? If so, why? Did they dominate one or two areas? How did they come to do so? Why do cable & satellite companies force us to take content “bundles” that cost more than we want and have content we don’t watch. Why? Who else is complicit and equally bound byThe Innovator’s Dilemma? Will this hold in the future?

Where do the new entrants like YouTube, Pandora, iTunes, Huffington Post, Boxee, Netflix, Demand Media and other disruptive offerings fit into that equation and how is it changing? How much power does Google have due to search? How does social media on Facebook & Twitter change things?

If the past required us to watch in a linear, time-based TV show that favored a grid-like TV Guide or electronic programming guides (EPGs), how will we find & discover content in the world of over-abundance? Can the market support new entrants like Clicker or will it favor the old guard like Rovi? If this appointment television had a 22-minute structure, is there a reason to expect that time allotment in the future? Why?

I wrote my initial conclusions in a post onThe Future of Television & The Digital Living Room. If you read the post you’ll literally see the dissection of the topic in the way I saw it in my head.

But as I contemplate the future world I asked myself this new set of questions and I literally thought about each topic in my head and I scribbled notes onto my page. I moved the boxes around, I changed where the arrows went, I drew bullet points underneath each box. I rewrote the page 7-10 times. Writing it & re-writing it is not a problem – it is part of the creative process for me.

By having thought through the issues I can now begin the process of talking with industry people about this topic and why it works how it works. I can ask for feedback in a focused way rather than a vague way. ”In which situations do you start with talent and built content that matches their talents and in which situation do you write the storyline first?” My framework gives me a deeper understanding of the sector.

Creativity & structure are not mutually exclusive– We associate creativity with the right side of our brain and logic or structure with the left side of our brains. So having structure with creativity sounds like an oxymoron. It is not. In every brainstorming session I have (with myself) I start by scribbling down ideas in a rapid, free form way and then I look for structure. As I already spoke about, when I do it with paper I often draw shapes, words, lines & bullet points and then think out loud in my head with self talk to think about how they’re connected.

I have a process I use for blog posts, too. The ideas themselves almost always come from an idea I had in discussions with others as part of my daily working life. I then mull them over in my head when I’m jogging, when I’m driving or when I’m laying in bed. I visualize the blog title and think about whether it will be impactful. I often start thinking about sentences and constructing them in my head. I think about what the key points are.

From there I add the title into WordPress.I probably have about 30 blog titles tee’d up to write for any day that I sit down. I never really come to WordPress and think, “what should I write about today?” Either it’s a thought I’ve had and have to get out of my head, or something I’m reacting to because I read a post that I want to respond to or – as is usually the case – I look through my titles and think, “which one am I passionate about today?”