027. Productive Creativity with Pete Sena
Growing creative skills, with the founder of Digital Surgeons
Introduction
- Pete Sena (@petesena) is the founder, CEO, and CCO of Digital Surgeons, a design, branding, and digital marketing consultancy
- Pete explains his responsibilities as Chief Creative Officer
The intersection of creativity and productivity
- Create / Produce vs. Creativity / Productivity
- The seesaw of effectiveness and efficiency
- Creativity is born from curiosity
- Productivity is how people are a pro at their craft
- Critical thinking is important for becoming great creatives
- Being "Creatively productive"
- "Creativity is just connecting things." -Steve Jobs
- "My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success." -Isaac Newton
- Understanding shortcuts
- Repetitive vs. Unique
Managing creative duties and other responsibilities
- How productivity differs in a CEO and a CCO role
- “Labels are important but be careful how they define and limit you”
- Set a vision
- Remove obstacles
- Methods for giving all roles the attention they need
- Mitigating affronts to productivity in different roles
Tips for managing creative people
- Stop managing creative people!
- Understand their motivations and enable them
- Servant leadership
- Daniel Pink’s Drive: three intrinsic motivators
- Problems that are unique to creative teams and their work
- Pete's advice for a new manager of a creative team
- Dividing work up in a creative team
- Find out why work is important to the team and client
- Translating the needs and wants of the client
- Look at team members, project requirements, brands, rules, etc.
- Logistical planning meetings for dividing tasks and ensuring consistent messaging
- Create concepts to review
- Find opportunities for people to collaborate
Cultivating a creative skill
- Critical thinking is clearly listening to the intention of the person who is saying or writing something
- Design thinking exercises
- Combine uncommon things (three columns exercise)
- Idea discussion > brainstorming
- Keep using it. If you’re not, then the skill will diminish.
- Outside of work: make a vision board, mash sources from media (e.g. magazines)
- Improving a creative skill over lunch breaks
- Why do you want to start that creative thing? (5 why’s)
- If there are multiple answers, split them up and explore them
- Elon Musk's first-principles thinking
- Use existing tools, read, and watch others
- Micro progress and the power of getting started, a James Clear interview
- Make a game out of it
- Other ways someone can grow a creative skill
- The importance of motivation, inspiration, technique, gumption, and experience
- Knowing where to focus your energy when developing a skill
Related links
- Digital Surgeons
- Warren Berger’s Three-Part Method for More Creativity on Farnam Street
- Pete Sena blogs about productivity on Medium
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott for better writing
- Write Dumb: Writing Better By Thinking Less by James Dowd
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