A new way of thinking and working for creative teams, inspired by Burning Man
I want to introduce a new way of thinking and working for creative teams, inspired by the possibilities of digital tool Realtimeboard and the philosophy and culture of participatory festival Burning Man. Maybe you’ll enjoy the read, maybe you’ll even change the way you think and work.
New ideas often come from unexpected places. For this story I’ve been exploring the philosophy and culture behind Burning Man — a Nevada Desert festival where fascinating things are happening. Every year Burning Man gathers tens of thousands of people who can’t seem to stop talking about their experiences — among them are many of the top CEO:s from Silicon Valley. This is indeed a curious place worth taking a closer look at.
This exploration of Burning Man is part of my ambition to find new ways for creative teams to work together, ways where meaning is created twice: first within the team as a natural and automatic result of the way the team is thinking and working, then secondly in the outer world where the meaning is transferred for everyone to enjoy it. This could be translated into the following rule of thumb for teamwork:
Even if what you do never reaches the world it still should be worth doing because of the meaning you create within yourself and your team.
A tool and a set of principles
Later in this article I will suggest a tool and a set of principles to go with it. Both the tool and the principles are inspired by Burning Man, since I find the festival a great example of people creating meaningful things together. To understand how, we must take a closer look at Burning Man itself.
What is Burning Man?
Burning Man is in it’s core a network of people guided by a set of principles. They use Nevada’s Black Rock Desert (there are also festivals in other places across the globe) as a place to gather and create together during participatory festivals. Together they build what is called Black Rock City.
The network doesn’t really have a clear purpose or function other than to “… bring experiences to people in grand, awe-inspiring and joyful ways that lift the human spirit, address social problems and inspire a sense of culture, community and personal engagement.”
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey said: ”It’s a little like what Daniel Pink talks about, he talks about motivating people in the workplace, but you can apply it to what we do. He says people need to experience autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose, for their lives to be meaningful. That’s very much what we do.”
So, Burning Man creates meaning by giving people autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose. This really is key to any team that wants to succeed; later we will look into how we can translate this into teamwork outside of Burning Man.
Welcome to Black Rock City
Instead of me going on about how the experience of being at Burning Man is (I’ve never been there), I’ll give you a peek:
Sex. Drugs. Hippies. There are a lot of opinions on what goes on in that desert, but I try to look beyond that and into the creativity it undoubtedly sparks. Let’s look at how this can inspire creative teams.
How Burning Man is relevant for creative teams
Let’s look at 3 things creative teams need that Burning Man provides.
1. Creative teams need to find motivation from the inside
Creative teams need to feel motivated from the inside to do good stuff. Daniel Pink, who wrote the book Drive about what really motivates people, talks about this in an interview with HBR:
“… it’s really a matter of tapping the things that the science shows lead to enduring performance, particularly for more complex tasks. And that’s a sense of autonomy, self-direction, the desire to get better and better at something that matters, you can call that mastery, and also purpose, that is, doing what we do in the service of something larger than oneself.”
Burning Man makes that happen somehow. It finds the lust for creation in people without incentives, rules or constraints — unlocking truly meaningful experiences for the people involved (which also creates meaning for people on the outside).
2. Creative teams need a space where things can happen
The spaces where we do stuff are important. To a large extent spaces control our behavior. This is also true of digital spaces, where one aspect of this was famously expressed by Marshall McLuhan as “The medium is the message”.
If you look into the eyes of your team members when that Word document hits their mail you will see pain. Creative teams need spaces where stuff can happen that isn’t Word, or Outlook, or a limited amount of time in that room where you only have one whiteboard. Creative teams need their empty desert. It belongs to no one and it doesn’t tell you what’s expected.
3. Creative teams need principles
Creative teams need common ground to stand on. This is a huge problem sometimes where for example the thinking, methods, processes and worldview of a copywriter collide with more visually oriented designers with different ideas of how to solve a problem. There has to be some common ground.
At Burning Man people are guided by these 10 principles:
Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
How to mimic the Burning Man set up in your creative team
I suggest creative teams try the Burning Man way of working. This is my guide to how.
Realtimeboard — your Nevada Desert
Realtimeboard is a whiteboard in your browser or in an app. They call it the “simplest visual collaboration platform for agile product teams, ux/ui designers, project leaders, marketers and creatives.”
Login and you’ll find this:
… space.
Zoom in and out, draw stuff, write stuff, put pictures, pdf:s, videos, icons, tables, charts, wireframes and much more in it. One of my projects currently looks like this zoomed out:
It’s a little world of stuff. In here is everything and nothing regarding a particular project that my team have been working on. In here are great idéas, stiff legal issues, steppingstones, bad ideas, stuff that no one understands, inspiration, questions, comments etc.
Realtimeboard is great, but not a guarantee in itself for good teamwork. I have seen teams get nothing out from using this tool as well. It’s only together with principles and some kind of organization that things start happening. You can die in the desert, or you can come together and create.
Your principles for building Black Rock City
Burning Man is all about sharing what you have with others, making your abilities merge with the world. To make that happen I suggest your team starts living by the following Burning Man principles while creating in Realtimeboard:
1. Radical inclusion
I like this one a lot because it says that anyone can be a part of what you are doing. So called experts and so called amateurs are equal contributors — a great starting point for exploring new ideas. Try inviting people who are not traditionally seen as creative as well; the more perspectives you have the more you can discover. Start every board as an exploration to discover what might be the problem you want to solve. A huge bonus is that you can collaborate effortlessly without having the entire team in an expensive conference room on Manhattan as well, making teamwork a lot less about where you happen to live.
2. Gifting
This might need some interpretation. While Burning Man festival runs on people giving each other gifts, you can use this principle to get everyone on the team to look for opportunities to contribute with their skills to what others are currently working on.
3. Radical Self-reliance
This is an interesting idea. A lot of the time in projects people get stuck in a mode of “best practices”. It’s like having a conversation with someone who googles all the facts — it doesn’t go places. Use this principle to challenge people to take stabs at things they usually would ask the so called experts about. Let Mike Arauz opening words in his 2017 Creative Summit talk be a guiding light: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” It’s only when you don’t think you have the answers that you are open to better and more creative solutions to your problems. You simply don’t have to know everything or to ask the ones who do. Just go for it.
4. Communal Effort
This really is a no-brainer: In Realtimeboard you achieve together. No one has any more power to build or change than anyone else. You don’t have that much of an advantage if you are a designer or a writer — the tool is easy enough and offer different enough ways to express yourself so that the individuals melt together into one.
5. Leaving No Trace
This might sound minuscule, but creatives working with post-its leave a lot of traces. Creatives working in Realtimeboard don’t.
6. Participation
As Burning Man, I to believe transformative change occur through deeply personal participation. It’s achieving through doing. Realtimeboard makes you do more and play more. Nothing looks good enough to become sacred, nothing looks bad enough to become discarded. It’s a great place to just do stuff together.
7. Immediate experience
Burning Man says “Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture.” After having worked with a ton of projects in Realtimeboard I can honestly say the immediate experiences of building, dragging, dropping, touching, reading, writing, mocking up and joking around together creates a deep shared experience within the team that almost functions like a shared brain for both emotional and intellectual connection to the project.
I hope you are willing to try this out. Please tell me if you do! Use Realtimeboard as your desert and try working by the principles stated above.
Best of luck!
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