Background Ops #10: Creative Processes
“PEOPLE OFTEN ASK HOW I GET SO MUCH DONE”
“People often ask how I get so much done. During most of the last five years, I’ve held two full-time jobs — serving as full-time chairman of MFS Investment Management and carrying a full teaching load at Harvard Business School. I’ve also served on the governing boards of two publicly traded companies (Medtronic and Nielsen), a health care foundation (the Commonwealth Fund), and a medical research center (the Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center). At the same time, I’ve managed to write three books (including this one) and publish roughly a hundred articles in newspapers and magazines. Through all this, I’ve maintained with my wife of thirty-five years and our two children, as well as a wide network or friends and relatives.
Though these multiple roles did not seem unusual to me, the editors of the Harvard Business Review were intrigued and asked if they could interview me about the secret recipe for my productivity sauce. […] [After the article which got an enthusiastic reception,] strangers stopped me in airports to talk about productivity, and an MIT professor thanked me for improving his reading habits. […]
In reflecting upon productivity over my career, I can point to a number of habits and methods that have helped me become successful. But even more critical was the realization early in my career that success comes not just from hard work and careful planning — though both are important. Success depends in large part on a proper mindset: focusing on the results you plan to achieve, rather than the number of hours you work.”
— Bob Pozen, Extreme Productivity, 2012
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TSR’S SERIES ON BACKGROUND OPS, ISSUE #10: CREATIVE PROCESSES
We are in our second-to-last issue in our series on Background Operations.
Our North Star for this series has been Sir Alfred North White’s reflection in 1910 —
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
That quote comes from Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics — the whole book is full of gems.
Thus far, we’ve looked at the more universal aspects of Background Operations — how time is the strict limit of life, how an operational keystone is likely needed in the modern world due to its vast complexity, how effective training ensures best practices happen every time, the nature of operations, how to define and live by organizational and personal principles, and how to achieve operational consistency.
Today, I’d like to look at a more specific subset that won’t apply to everyone, but which might prove life-changing to people who are engaged in it — creative work.
For many people — probably most people — doing creative and innovative work operates mysteriously. Sometimes you’ve “got it” and everything flows from inspiration; other times, you “don’t got it” and struggle and flail and thrash with the work you’d like to be doing.
This is, obviously, a bad state of affairs — there’s few things more frustrating than almost having an idea ready to turn into production, but getting stuck and thrashing around without being able to do it.
Must creativity be so mysterious? Is it inherent to the domain? Will producing creative work always be inconsistent and reliable? Is great suffering necessarily required?
To all those questions, I know the answers — no, no, no, and… no.
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POZEN ON FAILURES IN WRITING
“George, a friend of mine, is an expert in the field of medieval history. But he takes more than a year to write an article after he has completed his research. Why? Because he keeps getting “stuck” during the writing process. He stops writing he becomes uncertain where the article is going.
Diane, a clinical psychologist, complains that she can’t figure out what she wants to say until she writes the conclusion of a lengthy paper. Unfortunately, the rest of the paper then doesn’t fit well with the conclusion, so she is forced to revise and rewrite the body of the paper.
Both of those writers would be better off if they started with an outline. George wouldn’t get stuck because he’d know where the article was going, and Diane wouldn’t have to rewrite her paper to fit a conclusion that somehow takes her by surprise.
As these cases illustrate, you should think of writing as having several distinct phases, including an initial phases, including an initial phase of mapping the terrain and a second phase of translating the map into actual prose. Remember the principle of focusing quickly on the final product […]? This is a similar idea: formulate a rough plan for the entire piece you put pencil to paper. If you try to write without a plan, you will face enormous challenges.”
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BY RELIEVING THE BRAIN OF ALL UNNECESSARY WORK
Interestingly, Bob Pozen seems to have independently discovered the same principle — as it applies to writing — that Sir Alfred North Whitehead discovered as applied to mathematics in 1910.
Whitehead wrote —
“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the [human] race.”
Stop.
Please stop and linger on that quote for a moment; I think it’s particularly important.
Pozen explained, likewise, that —
“It is very difficult to plan and write at the same time, because the task of writing is very demanding of what’s called your “working memory.” Working memory is the mental space where information is held and processed in your brain, allowing you to perform higher-order tasks such as reasoning and learning. In the context of writing, it is this process that allows you to manipulate words into sentences and paragraphs. But your working memory has a limited resources: it can only hold and process so much information.
Psychology professor Ronald Kellogg demonstrates experimentally that the different components of writing — planning, translating, and revising — all compete for the same resources in your brain. Thus, if you can do most of your planning by creating an outline first, you can devote more effort to translating your ideas into text when you compose an actual draft.”
Pozen then lists out some experimental results that found that people who were able to build a structure — an outline — wound up going much faster, with greater consistency, and less hardship than people who did not do so. The time spent building that structure before actually creating far more than paid for itself — the people who built themselves outlines and defined what they were trying to do completed things considerably faster and with higher output than people who did not, even including the time spent in planning.
Do you get where we’re going with this?
“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the [human] race.”
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UNIVERSAL MOVEMENTS AND ACTIONS
If it hasn’t clicked for yet, let’s try another metaphor on for size.
There’s many different schools of martial arts — at least hundreds, if not thousands.
But they all have strong commonalities between them.
To start from the most basic and obvious point, the vast majority of martial artists have two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet, etc.
As such, every martial art will encompass some mix of striking with the left fist, striking with the right fist, kicking in a variety of movements with the left leg or right leg, elbowing, kneeing, grabbing with the hands to grapple or throw, and perhaps headbutting or — in desperate situations — biting or scratching.
This seems basic — it is basic — but there’s an important truth in here. There’s only so many things you can do with your body in a fight. To neutralize someone trying to hurt you, you’re going to use some mix of your hands, feet, arms, and legs.
Additionally, you’ll need to defend against attacks by either blocking or moving, and your own strikes will need to land. So there’s aspects of timing and distance in all martial arts.
In modern times, scientific-thinking martial artists like Bruce Lee and Imi Lichtenfeld — the founder of Krav Maga — sat down and actually worked just about all the ways the human body can move, strike, and defend. These basic patterns of movement are inherent to the human body, and any more advanced movements, strikes, grapples, or throws must be built on the human being’s natural ways of moving.
This makes perfect sense in martial arts, but this type of thinking is often missing in creative endeavors.
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POZEN’S “UNIVERSAL MOVEMENTS” OF WRITING
“My approach to creating an outline is completely systematic: first I brainstorm, next I categorize, and then I outline the final product.”
In Extreme Productivity, Bob Pozen laid down a lot of guidelines for how to be effective at work and in one’s career. By far the most valuable part of it for me was Chapter 8, Writing Effectively.
Before reading Pozen, I was an “inspiration writer” — I’d try to get the gestalt of an idea in my head, and then furiously write in an inspired session on a mix of caffeine and nicotine to turn it into a finished product.
If it succeeded and was good… great. If I almost got it that day but didn’t quite finish, it would often take me dozens more hours to finish the last 10% of a piece when the inspiration was gone.
If the piece was bad, I had no way to know how to fix it.
And sometimes, for mysterious and elusive reasons, I wasn’t able to write at all.
When I first read Pozen in 2015, I saw the inherent logic in it and committed to doing things his way. Gradually, the time it took to write one detailed essay fell from 30 hours to the 12–15 hour range. That’s… pretty remarkable, and was life-changing for me.
I should caution you on two things though — first, there’s no magic here. Actually, reading Pozen is a bit boring. He’s obviously a highly intelligent guy, and he’s likable enough, but there’s no rah-rah motivation stuff. You read it and go, “Oh, that makes sense” — but you’re not all fired up and ready to go kill a lion with your bare hands after reading him.
Second and more importantly, it was slow and painful to learn the way of doing things. I think there’s no way of getting around it. For around a month of trying to write using Pozen’s methods, it felt very unnatural and unpleasant. I was a slower writer and a less happy writer for the first month of doing things Pozen’s way.
But then… something clicked… and I was flying. It was well-worth it.
Pozen’s method is quite simple —
He separates out the stages of (1) Brainstorming, (2) Categorizing, (3) Outlining, (4) Writing, and (5) Editing.
When you brainstorm, you only brainstorm. You generate as many ideas, as rapidly as possible, about what you want to say on the topic.
Once you’ve brainstormed, you have a long list of unrelated ideas. You then categorize them and put them into an order that makes sense.
Only once this is done and you have a workable outline do you then do step (4), writing the piece.
This is much slower at first then just diving in and writing, but eventually, I’ve found it’s possible to outline a piece in 10–40 minutes depending on how complex it is, and then to write it about twice as fast as I otherwise would have if I would run into “dead ends” by just starting without an outline.
Additionally, Pozen recommends not editing at all until a first draft is done. I have mixed feelings on that; sometimes I mix in editing. But the general advice seems sound.
Now, what’s cool about Pozen’s method is it works in macro and in micro — when I start a series for TSR, I macro-brainstorm and macro-outline the entire series before writing Issue #1.
I then brainstorm and outline the entire piece for Issue #1 before I start writing.
And if I get stuck, I can ask,
“Okay, what am I trying to say here?” — and I can go through another micro-cycle of brainstorming, categorizing, and outlining.
The magic of this is that it frees my brain up to focus on doing great writing. I have, effectively, a “notation” of the “universal movements of writing.” I know what I’m trying to do at all times, and if any time I’m stuck, it’s simply a matter of brainstorming, categorizing, and outlining again before I write more.
Can you see the potential windfall of gains from this?
As Alfred North Whitehead observed —
“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the [human] race.”
I can attest to the truth of Whitehead and Pozen — my mental power is, indeed, much higher when working with a structure of universal movements.
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BEYOND WRITING
As far as I can tell, all creativity follows similar patterns.
The specific “universal movements” vary between domains, but there are almost always universal movements.
An architect obviously has different constraints from a writer — land size, budget, building codes, client specifications, desired aesthetics, etc — but like writing, there are certain universal ways of getting and synthesizing that information.
I remember telling Kai Zau, my business partner and a masterful operationalist, about Pozen. “I think he’s very Kai-like,” I said.
Kai read Pozen and said, “Yeah, we’re doing the same things. That’s how I approach programming.”
It’s interesting seeing Kai build new tech and products — he spends a lot of time on paper and doing research to figure out what he wants his code to do before writing a single line of code. But despite spending a lot of time “just thinking” about the problem before coding, he’s one of the fastest programmers I know.
There’s similar “universal movements” in product development, creating a marketing campaign, creating brand guidelines, starting a university campus club, writing a screenplay, shooting a movie, scaling a business, installing operations, or… really, anything that requires new generative work.
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GUIDANCE, I: READ POZEN
Well first, if you’re a writer, go read Chapter 8 of Extreme Productivity right now.
It’s a short read.
You probably won’t feel motivated afterwards. It’s very matter-of-fact.
But then, just practice and do what Pozen says. You might be a slower writer on his method for around a month, but you’ll then be a faster writer forever. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
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GUIDANCE, II: UNDERSTAND AND DISTILL UNIVERSAL MOVEMENTS
In any field you aim to do creative work in, you should seek out the universal principles underlying the work.
In more mature fields like painting and architecture, there’s already many best practices you can learn. From my understanding, most painters sketch their paintings in pencil before actually getting the paint out. There’s probably best practices around doing this sort of thing, and you ought to learn them as quickly as possible.
This is harder, though, in new fields — but no less important.
In a newer field, you’ll want to study what the best people are currently doing, look to understand and distill those to best practices, and then figure out what those “universal movements” are.
Only in the last few years has this sort of thing become rigorous in marketing, for instance. Justin Mares’s excellent book Traction gives very universal ways to test different marketing channels for a business; Noah Kagan, likewise, has excellent materials on how to track the ongoing success of marketing campaigns quantitatively.
A lot of people don’t want to learn these best practices because they feel it would somehow “constrict” or “constrain” them — but nothing could be further from the truth.
If you’re doing martial arts, everything you’re doing involves using your body — hands, feet, legs, arms, etc. To not study how the human body can actually move through space would be insanity. It’s not constraining to learn the universal movements — it’s liberating.
But this brings us to the next step.
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GUIDANCE, III: PERSONALIZING AND DEVELOPING YOUR OWN REPERTOIRE
I write differently than Pozen does — I aim for slightly different goals, in a different style, with different outputs than him.
In my case, I eventually added an explicit “Research” stage to my writing process. Gradually, over time, I refined what it was to be doing research: sometimes I’ll do large-scale “preliminary research” like just learning all the details about a war and its surrounding set of battles. Then sometimes I’ll do a “searching” type research where I’m looking for a specific anecdote or story that illustrates a principle.
In any event, your process will no doubt differ from mine, and perhaps from others in your field. Some programmers swear by unit tests; others think they’re unnecessarily cumbersome.
Once you get a grasp on the basic universal lines of movement in your space, you’ll want to personalize them, customize them, and make them your own in a way that’s maximally effective for you.
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GUIDANCE, IV: CROSS-POLLINATING FROM OTHER DOMAINS
Finally, I can’t recommend highly enough that you study domains unrelated to your own.
I’ve gotten immense mileage and lessons out of studying industrial engineering (like Taiichi Ohno or Eli Goldratt) and how militaries keep track and stay on top of everything, like General Orders for Sentries.
Any domain with clean and clear thinking can produce ideas to refine and really polish your creative work in your own domain.
I had a chance to learn from Angela Cheung when we traveled together on the GiveGetWin Tour, speaking at a bunch of universities — she’s a trained film producer, formerly of Disney, and her videos looked so much better than any I’d seen before of events.
When I sat and asked her to walk me through the elements, the first thing that she taught me was the value of a “framing shot” — so if when we gave talks at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, she took some film footage from around the Georgetown campus and of the building that the talks would happen at. She cut 5–10 seconds of this “framing shot” footage in front of any of the videos, and it looked much more alive.
That idea was interesting — a “framing shot,” how interesting. I started working with that idea and trying to polish the start of my writing pieces accordingly, framing the piece so it would open up well.
From screenwriting, I also came across the idea of a “hook” and learned the concept of in media res — “starting in the middle of the action” before flashing back to tell the story. (Fight Club famously opens with the gun in Edward Norton’s mouth before flashing back in time to work towards how it got there.)
Learning the stylistic movements and best practices from domains unrelated to one’s own is less important than getting the universal movements of your own domain down — but once you do, it can add new abilities to make your work come alive.
Once you have the best practices of your own field down, start studying and looking for the principles in other fields.
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CONCLUSION
Pozen: “Success depends in large part on a proper mindset: focusing on the results you plan to achieve, rather than the number of hours you work.”
Whitehead: “By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the [human] race.”
I believe those are firmly true statements.
Uniquely new and generative creative work often can’t truly slot into the background the way automated technology can — but you can invest in learning the universal principles of your domain, creating a structure that you can always operate effectively in, and reap all the gains from doing so.
Most people seem to not even be aware that this is possible — creativity is just something “mysterious” to them. Or perhaps, they fear that learning structure and universal movements would make them less creative and spontaneous.
I think this fear is overblown — I still get spontaneous inspiration, and occasionally I run it out without formally outlining and organizing my writing.
But nowadays, I have something most struggling writers do not — whenever I get stuck, I can identify exactly where, and go back to my toolbox of universal movements in order to get going again.
This applies to writing, business building, programming, marketing, making video or audio, making music, building buildings, building organizations… in any domain, there’s a universal set of movements. These can be learned and distilled into a personal structure, entrained until they’re nearly automatic, and with commensurate gains of huge amounts of consistency and vast reductions in the time required to produce good new creative work.
It takes a while. It’s boring to learn, frankly. But that original month of intense study and practice I brought to my writing has paid off in the dividends of hundreds if not thousands of hours saved across my life, higher consistency, higher well-being, and — I think — higher quality too.
If you’re doing creative work, learn the universal movements your domain down cold. Personalize them and make them your own. And keep studying other unrelated domains for inspiration on new best practices and edges you can incorporate.
It’s well, well worth the time — and, if you spend a lot of time doing creative work, perhaps life-changing.
The finale of Background Ops is next week — until then, yours, truly,
Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net
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This is the penultimate issue of Background Ops — our finale will be next week, and then we’ll begin a new series in two weeks.
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