This Wednesday 18th is National Youth Homelessness Matters Day and Kate and I were very proud to finally release our short doco “Bee’s Journey” last night for YHMD at Redfern Community Centre – how can you go wrong with popcorn, fairy floss, giant Jenga and Connect4?
This project has been six months in the making, with the support of Yfoundations and The Salvos.
We’re super excited to invite you to our interactive photographic exhibition at Jurassic Lounge.
Jurassic Lounge is a weekly after-hours event at the Australian Museum that showcases live art, music, performances and new ideas.
We’re erecting a big colourful wall in the museum’s iconic Skeleton Hall, come help us create the artwork via chalkboards, canvases and lots of polaroids. Stick around for a surprise at the end of the night too :)
Where: Australian Museum’s Skeleton Gallery, 6 College St Sydney When: Tuesday 28th of Feburary, 5:30pm – 9:30pm Cost: Museum entry is $15
We’re working on a funny Christmas newsletter and thought it’ll be fun to share some outtakes, hope this gives everyone a laugh because we felt ridiculous doing it!
The newsletter is set to go out early next week, if you haven’t subscribed to our mailing list please do it here.
The 2011 NatGeo Photo Contest closes on November 30, that’s just two days away, so you better get your entries in! Categories are ‘People’, ‘Places’, and ‘Nature’. Grand prize is $10,000 and there’s no limit of entries per person, if you’re willing to pay that is :).
My submission is an image I shot on my 2010 trip to Buenos Aires. I couch-surfed for two weeks and a couple of my hosts managed to pass on their tango bug to me. I’ve been learning and dancing for more than a year now, and loving it! Also a great excuse to buy pretty heels I’d never otherwise wear.
x.
Anna
My entry: Tangueros slink and spin across the floor at La Viruta in Buenos Aires. The heady pulse of tango music draws dancers to the humid underground club in the early hours, when all other establishments have closed. The ritual of finding a partner for a tanda (a sequence of four songs ending with a cortina; a break) is conducted without words. Dancers eye each other from across the floor and dip their heads if a match is acceptable. Partners are chosen with care, as one awkward tanda with a unskilled dancer could damage your chances for adept partners later in the night.
Couldn’t resist pulling out a few more photos from my archive – this is my dance school on Pitt St, I love the mix of students.
My wonderful teachers, Jacqueline and Anthony from Tango Spirit.
Magical moment on the floor at a milonga (social dance).
Fastest feet in the game; maestros Cristina Valeria Sosa and Daniel Nacucchio.
I usually stick to blogging about my own work, but Scott Belsky and his book ‘Making Ideas Happen‘ have had quite an influence on me, so I decided to spread the word :)
Belsky, founder of the Behance network and the 99% conference, spoke at the Sydney Maritime Museum a few weeks ago. I attended without knowing too much about him, but left invigorated and motivated. Belsky and his book are filled with years of research on successful creative entrepreneurs and the practical processes that begets their success. Afterall, creatives are notoriously good in coming up with ideas, but making them happen are a different game altogether.
My friend Gemma from Creative Innovation had the opportunity to interview Belsky, and is much more eloquent than myself. Enjoy and be inspired!
x.
Anna
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Scott Belsky on the habits of successful creative professionals
Scott Belsky has a unique understanding of the challenges facing the world’s creative professionals, which lead him to write ‘Making Ideas Happen’ and co-found a global creative portfolio network, Behance.net. Over the years, he and co-founder Matias Corea and their team developed a series of projects to help organise and empower the careers of creative professionals, including The 99% conference and Action Method.
As a result, Scott has become an advocate for technology and community initiatives that empower the careers of creative professionals and help businesses leverage the creative potential of their people. In 2010, he was listed in Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” list.
Here, Creativeinnovation.net.au interviews Scott, who shares strategies and tips which will assist Australia’s creative professionals to improve their productivity and realise long-held creative ambitions…
What are the common practices of successful creative people?
I think that all of the tips and tricks that I’ve observed all fall under three areas.
The first is really how people stay organised and execute, how they manage their time, how they manage their schedules, how they prioritise, how they constantly optimise the way they work. I see that as the first area of strategies that we need to think about more.
The second area is really how we leverage our community to gain traction around our ideas. Without accountability and refinement from people that surround us, our customers, our clients, our competitors. There are forces in community that we must harness in order to push our ideas forward.
Then the third area that we really need to think more about is leadership and how we hire and engage and lead ourselves and others in creative pursuits. There is a great void of leadership in the creative world.
What is the most common barrier for creative practitioners, which inhibits business success?
The greatest obstacle as creative professionals that we face is negative tendencies. Creativity is a double-edged sword. The more ideas you have, the less likely it is that you are going to focus on any particular idea long enough to make it happen.
So, this idea-to-idea syndrome is something that we struggle with. There is a real, great sense of disorganisation in the creative world. In fact, I would probably say that the creative community is the most disorganised community on the planet.
However, these are also the same people that make our lives interesting. So the question is, how do we augment our own negative tendencies to make sure that we make an impact that matters most to us?
I ultimately believe that it comes down to some level of compromise, that notion of the creative compromise…. of us comprising a little bit of our natural essence, in order to be more productive. I don’t think that means compromising our artistic integrity, or our morals or values, it just means that we are providing restraint on some of the natural inclinations that we may have during our process.
What advice would you give to a designer who has just left their job to start their own business?
You have this grand idea and you decide to take some major risk and go out on your own. Even if you are in a company and you are starting your own team, where you are focusing on some new project – what are common things we struggle with?
One of them is making sure that we stay engaged with a project long enough to make it happen, rather than come up with new ideas and new ideas and never push anything forward.
When we are in a real regular job where we are getting paid every two weeks and we have the bonus at the end of the year and we have managers, its easier to stay engaged sometimes, because we have this short-term rewards system that is always keeping us on track.
The challenge is when you unplug yourself from that short-term rewards system and pursue something big and bold over the long term, and you no longer have those short-term rewards to keep you engaged. Oftentimes, we suffer without them – why? Because we are so used to them. Even from childhood, we are so used to getting a grade on a test or a grade on a course… So to unplug from this is sometimes very difficult.
What we need to do when we start our own creative projects, our own creative businesses, is, especially in the early stages, to short circuit our own rewards system. Put things on the walls that have to do with goals and milestones, make a game out of it. Tell people what you’re doing, so people hold you accountable to it.
Also, it is important to spend some energy on how we structure things. Oftentimes, we will just start writing the novel, or start designing the things that we envision, and we never start with the team of people that we are working with to discuss how are we going to work together. Otherwise you are going to find yourself in a precarious situation where you are mismanaging your energy and you don’t have the structure to support your creativity.
How do you find the right person to partner with and why is a strong creative partnership really important?
Partnerships are really important and really scary. They are marriages. They are finding someone who will oftentimes frustrate you, will constantly challenge you, will when you need it, support you, and its really difficult. In relationships, we tend to date for a long time before we make such a commitment, but in partnerships oftentimes we just jump in with the theory that it would work, on paper, but not from experience.
The greatest partnerships really start from incremental tests. You know, lets work together for two months or something and see where we end up. Lets decide what happens, if in two months we decide to split ways, lets decide that upfront. And if two months pass and we decide we want to keep working together then lets make an agreement for another six months. And then if that works, lets decide if we really want to take this over the longer term. But that is a better series of steps into a long-term partnership.
Communication is extremely important, and partners need to be committed to optimising how they work together. I encourage partners who are working together on projects to set up what I call a ‘Responsibility Grid’.
What that means is that you list all the types of decisions or things that need to be done in the business on one side, and then the partners names at the top, and you decide that for each of the tasks or things that need to be done, which ones need every single partner to agree, which ones need only a certain partner, and which ones any partner can just make on his or her own without getting any agreement.
Setting up some sort of understanding at the onset prevents any confusion later on, when you say to me, hey you know, how could you make that sort of decision without consulting me. That sort of confusion is what breaks up partnerships and it can really be prevented with some advanced thinking.
On the importance of creative partnerships, what we all individually need to know and realise, is that ideas don’t happen in isolation. That the notion of the lone creative genius who somehow conceives and executes an idea on his or her own, is a myth.
We need to surround ourselves with people that have the opposite tendencies that we have. We need to have people that see what we’re doing, with some perspective, and can constantly refine how we work, and challenge our thinking. Partnerships are a pivotal role in helping ideas gain traction. And it’s a humbling realisation for any creative person, to realise that they can’t do it alone.
What can managers do to get the best out of their creative people?
I think that the best managers manage through questions. Rather than coming in and stating, “do this” or “don’t do that”, stating questions along the lines of “what was your thinking along these lines?” or “have you considered the cost of re-doing that” and re-phrasing the problem.
When you lead a creative team and you are failing to ensure that people are working at the intersection of their interests and their skills and being fully utilised, then they suffer in their careers and they end up realising it and then they leave.
The other mistake that we make as creative leaders, is that we go in and we say what we think we should do, and then ask everyone else what they think. And that’s the reverse way that you ensure you fully utilise someone’s skills. What we should be doing, is asking first.
What are some of the reasons why creative professionals end up leaving an organisation?
Why do creative professionals leave an organisation – a job that they were originally drawn to because they love the topic, because they love the content?
When you go into an organisation, whether it’s design firms, or advertising agencies, and you talk to people in HR, who do the exit interviews when people leave their jobs, what you learn is that people seldom leave for more money.
That may be their excuse but they would have never even taken the call, they would never have even taken the meeting for that new job, if they felt that they loved what they were doing. But more specifically, if they felt fully-utilised. I think that’s the one expectation that every creative professional has – is to fully utilise his or her skills.
And when we don’t feel fully utilised, when our potential is not being fully tapped, that’s when we start to wonder, “Is this right for me?” That tracks back to a lack of leadership capability.
In your book, you outline the three types of creative professional, the Doer, the Dreamer and the Incrementalist – can you please explain what the key differences are between these types of people?
Over the years, meeting a lot of different individuals and teams that work in a lot of different areas of the creative world, I started to classify the types of people that I met. And the three rough classifications are the Dreamers, the Doers and the Incrementalists.
The Dreamers are the folks with the tendency to constantly come up with something new. Even when they are going to bed at night, they are most happy when they are coming up with new ideas, to introduce and present to their team the next day. Even a week before the deadline, Dreamers are thinking, “Maybe we can do this, maybe we can do that”. That is their essence – introducing new things into the picture.
In contrast, you also have the Doers. They are the “Debbie Downers” of the world. The Doers of the world are the ones who are thinking, “Well, we can’t do that because we don’t have the budget, we can’t do that because of the timeline, that should go on hold, we can’t talk about that now.” The Doers are trying to keep us focused on the task at hand and they are very focused on execution and they play a very important role as well.
Then you have the Incrementalists, who have the innate ability to rotate from Dreamer mode to Doer mode, to Dreamer mode, to Doer mode. And you might hear about the Incrementalist and think, “Gosh, that’s the Holy Grail, if only we could all be Incrementalists”.
The problem is that they create too many things and none of them ever scale. They may have an idea and execute, have an idea and execute, but then they look back and think, “Had I just focused on one of those ideas long enough, I would have really scaled it to be massively more impactful in my world.”
The point of this, regardless of which one you identify with, at any given point in time, you need other folks around you, other people with the opposite tendency to round you out, to challenge your way of thinking, and to really provide some level of discipline, and restraint on your natural tendencies.
Can you explain what ‘Insecurity Work’ is, and provide some examples of how creative professionals can overcome it?
‘Insecurity Work’ is defined as stuff that you do, repeatedly, throughout the day, without even realising it. It is stuff that doesn’t move the ball forward in any way, it doesn’t really fit with your strategy of what you are trying to achieve. You’re simply doing it to assure yourself that everything is OK.
This means checking your analytics program to see how many people are checking your website, or your sales figures, to see how many people bought a product or service that you sell, searching Twitter to find out how many spoke about you, or talked about your company, or whatever the information is that you are constantly tuning into, for no real clear thoughtful reason.
A long time ago, we didn’t have the ability to do it, because this information was delivered to us weekly or monthly – now its at our fingertips and we can literally do it 30-50 times a day, without even realising it.
It’s a problem because of the switching costs. Going into it, and looking into stuff and then going back into what you were doing – the lost attention, the diluted energy, is really expensive.
So what we need to do to combat ‘Insecurity Work’ is first of all, be aware of it. What are the things you’re doing simply to assure yourself that everything is OK?
The second thing is to make sure that we compartmentalise this work into small chunks – so doing it for 30 minutes at the end of every day – tuning into all of this stuff, all of these metrics, rather than doing it throughout your day is the best practice.
Just make sure that it doesn’t surround you and consume your energy. With an instantly connected lifestyle and our iPhones, and checking into this and that, you can do a repetition of things over and over and not even realise that an hour just passed, when you could have been thinking about what your goals are over the long-term.
Hi everyone, check out this fortnight’s Big Issue – I’m their Roving Eye feature and there’s also a short interview by Michael Green. $2.50 from every sale goes directly to the vendor :)
As a personal project, and a good reason to try out some new gadgets, I photographed the Campsie Food Festival in early June. I’ve been wanting to do something with stills and audio for a while, this was the perfect excuse :) would be interested to hear everyone’s feedback!
x.
Anna
Campsie is a modest suburb 30 minutes west of Sydney’s CBD.
I have lived in Campsie for 20 years, and am still fascinated by its growth.
My family moved into a working class suburb of predominantly caucasian, Greek and Lebanese residents in the early nineties, and over the decade saw a steady stream of Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean immigrants settle. Blocks of houses were torn down and rebuilt in red brick flats to accommodate them.
In the last five years there has been an influx of African immigrants, bringing with them a distinctive flair in food, culture and clothing. As Sydney expands and real estate agents market Campsie as ‘inner’ west, trendy young professionals are also choosing to relocate here.
The Campsie Food Festival is an annual event run in celebration of the suburb’s diverse community, and attracts in excess of 20,000 visitors.
I started an interactive art installation in 2009 call the I Will…Project . People were asked one question – “What is one thing you can do for the environment?” at the MCA exhibit, and “What can you do to foster creativity in Sydney?” at the Live Futures 2020 Festival – to which they responded with a polaroid. The artwork, a wall of polaroids, grew because of it’s participants.
Both shows were successes but I had the foresight to document the second one :). This video has been a long time coming but better late than never!
