Sunday, June 26, 2011

Planning for creativity

Our local coffee shop is great for testing ideas. In a conversation with a colleague, Alex Walton of 3PM,LLC, we pushed around the idea of how to plan for creativity.

My first thought: you can't.

My second thought: well, take a page from Barry Boehm's spiral method and a page from agile, and mash them together with an implementation plan, and maybe there's something to be done.

There is a natural tension to be addressed: the creative mind wants no boundaries; the management mind wants order and predictability.

From agile: take a white board and a dart, and begin storyboarding or other creative activity.

From spiral: from the starting point, build outward in cycles, addressing a new point with each cycle with an objective of getting the right pointing vector for the implementation phase.

Back to agile: box the available resources so that something useful is more or less a certainty. After the whiteboarding and spiraling about--so called iteration 0 where no operational deliverable emerges--use one of the boxes to plan out the mechanics of implementation. It's expected that you'll begin with 10lbs to go into a 5lb box, but after creative iteration, you'll come up with 5lbs that is useful and worth doing.

Then: do it!

Then: DONE [when you have a deliverable that is useful and operational]

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