Build a Sandbox, Not a Culture

SUMMARY: We have a responsibility to create a startup culture every bit as innovative as our products. Here’s a starting point. Reading time: 4 mins, 22 sec.

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I’VE been thinking a lot lately about a perfect professional life. Perhaps it doesn’t exist. Perfection, although unattainable, is sometimes a nice place to park your dreams, letting them idle for awhile.

A perfect professional life for me would be one that centers around creativity, in a deep way, towards a common good. All else is simply a distraction.

In what way can we achieve a fully creative life in a professional setting? As startup folk, we have the unique opportunity, dare I say responsibility, to build a sandbox for ourselves and our teams that pushes towards this goal. Lately, there has been a lot said about “building culture” and I don’t think that’s possible. The people that are part of your team become your culture. All we can do is make sure they have the right playground to express themselves and a strong culture will follow (I’m looking at you, startups, that force your potential hires to play kickball during interviews and ask them to alter their lifestyles to conform to your culture. Programming software works, social programming doesn’t).

A perfect professional life consists of two parts, creativity and common good, which feed on one another in symbiosis. The act of creativity always produces something new. If you didn’t produce something new, what you were doing was something else and not creativity at all. Whatever that may be is up for debate and not important for this discussion.

By a simplistic binary definition of experience as we know it, something new added is greater than the sum of everything before it. That new item can be negative or positive. It can be beautiful or ugly, depending on the beholder. It can be of consequence, or inconsequential, depending on the frame of reference. Yet, no matter how you slice it, it still exists and didn’t exist before.

It’s this simple, oddly cosmic, way of describing the output of creativity that really supports why we need it so badly to create innovative teams and products. If you can up the rate of new ideas generated in a space, your odds of building an innovative and valuable approach increase.

And that’s about how far I got the first few months I was thinking on this topic. I sincerely thought that a perfect professional life is one that is simply creative. However, I realized that I’m not an artist and just creativity would not suffice. Artistry is the output of being singularly creative, with no other constraints, in my view.

There had to be something more! Over the past months, I’ve tried the straight creative thing, focusing only on art, and it was sorely lacking in something for my overall happiness. Of course this is not a judgment on artists. I rather respect what they do, perhaps more than all else, as my appreciation for aesthetics runs deep. What artists do is deeply important in expanding the experience and thought landscape of life. A wise-man named Anonymous once said that some people push life forward, some people sustain life, and artists make life worth living. A beautiful triumvirate of roles that are all necessary to make existence worth it. An artists role is a fully-equal leg of that proverbial three-legged stool, and rightly so.

But I digress, I still had only settled on one concept, creativity, as a core component of a perfect professional life and not much else.

When a concept runs me into a wall, I set it aside for awhile. I jot it down in Evernote or tell it to one of my coffeeshop buddies to discuss another day. Then, some day over a lazy pint of beer or on a bike ride, a thought will emerge:

A professional life towards an end that is, in some way, perceived as positive by society is tantamount. A simple way to describe it, may be the “common good”. As long as I know that the final sum of whatever my venture brings extends the common good, makes something more accessible or simply more delightful for people, then my work here has meaning. It’s not money that makes you rich, scenes and experiences that deliver meaning do.

Creativity towards the common good. That’s the perfect professional life.

Now, many might dismiss the notion and say, you’re just describing a non-profit. Surely, “evil corporations, selfish and polluting”, couldn’t be increasing the common good. Yet, that really short-changes the definition. In my career, especially in the startup world, I’ve had the opportunity to do both, together, albeit briefly and not nearly long enough.

And it exists in engineering. The popular notion that engineering lacks creativity and is simply number crunching couldn’t be farther from the truth, especially in software. Now more than ever before, the addressable landscape of ways in which to express a solution to be solved by software is infinite. There might be a preferred method, perhaps accepted best method based on what is known, but we’ll never know for sure.

As trends push forward the legions of people learning to code, the number of frameworks available, the number of languages and platforms, the numbers of startups building on toolsets, the number of devices…the solution space becomes further unbounded. Picking the right way forward starts to resemble an artist searching through the outer reaches of infinite experience to pull together something meaningful and lasting.

Many can write with a pencil. But that does not make you Faulkner or Tolstoy or Shakespeare. Just because you have a paintbrush and throw oil on canvas, doesn’t make you Rembrandt or Picasso, either.

Now, just because you can throw some stuff on a web-page doesn’t make you an amazing thought leader in tech. It’s something, but increasingly, doesn’t amount to very much but process-centric work. If you manage to put pieces together that on the whole solve a new problem, the result of hard mental, creative work, now you’re on to something.

So, the need for a creative, rather than process-centric approach to building products is even more necessary in an expanding technology world with more tools and approaches you can possibly master. Just like there are infinite brush strokes that could be put on canvas, yet only a set few coalescing into true art.