Manage your ideas as artists manage their paintings

Why managing your tools like a paintbrush is no bad thing. Stealing ideas from artists can you a better idea manager using your Navigator Journals. 

• The problem: At the core of all future innovations are the insights and ideas we create to design our solutions for everything from digital change to enhancing internal services. The challenge is creating new ways to manage our ideas until they are ready for action.
• Why it matters: We work on numerous challenges as part of their job. Learning to manage ideas that lead to effective results is both an individual skill and an organisational capability. Having a personal strategy for managing ideas is a useful and productive skill for all public servants.
• The solution: We can study how creative people manage their creative output in different spheres to gain insights for the management of ideas as a form of creative output. Several professional painters offer valuable insights for innovators.

AY Jackson painting in the outdoors, City of Ottawa Art Gallery

Some people find time management useful to give them structure and set goals. Yet, this is not enough for people who think in different ways. In 'How to stop killing the ideas of people who do not think like you’ I explored a theory of cognitive diversity. The essence of this work is that cognitive diversity is real, measurable, and a useful diversity to harness. This diversity is seen as a continuum from two extreme styles:

• You may prefer to focus on improvement to do things “better”. Being precise and methodical in your thinking appeals to you. Those with this style of thinking will likely find time management most useful.
• You may prefer to do things “differently” and you often think through tangents to explore ideas. You like testing assumptions, which may lead to radically different ideas.

The theory that underpins this work is a normal distribution. This means that some people will be towards the extreme ends of each style while most people are some combination of both.

I believe there is great value for public servants to explore their style of thinking to understand the tools that best help them be successful. If concepts of time management work for you, find a good time management system, either a journal or some form of digital system.

What if we modelled our notebooks to be like an easel to create an idea journal?

Lessons learned

Over the past 20 years of working with individuals and teams, I spoke to many people who wanted something different. Instead of managing their time, they were interested in a way of managing their ideas to achieve results, like an idea management system. Tomorrow’s big innovations start with today's small ideas. We nurture them. We develop them. When they’re ready, we act. Time management does not help with this. To understand the concept of idea management, here is a different perspective. While my thinking on idea management is new, managing creative output is not new.

I spoke at a creativity forum at the Banff Centre, a beautiful conference centre in the Rocky Mountains in Canada. This mixed experts in organisational creativity and innovation and professional artists. I spoke with an artist. I asked, “How many paintings do you work on at one time?” She said about a dozen. She can’t wait for creative inspiration. She earns a living by selling her art. She said some paintings were sketches while others are nearly ready for an art gallery to sell.

I asked how she manages a dozen paintings. She looked confused at first. I explained that I wanted to know how she picked a painting to work on. When she gets to work, how does she know which painting to work on? She said, “I can only work on one at a time. I keep all my paintings in one room. I look at them. I pick one that has ‘some energy’ flowing to it. That goes on my easel. I focus on this one and ignore the others.”

We need ideas to solve our challenges or create opportunities. Ideas, like art work, need to be managed.

Getting energy flowing

This made me reflect on how we manage our ideas. What can we learn from the way she manages her paintings?

• What if we modelled our notebooks to be like an easel to create an idea journal?
• What if used one or two-page spreads like a canvas for one idea?

Note pages could be for one challenge, project or problem. Each set of pages is the canvas for one solution. You can work on 10 challenges if you focus on one at a time. Nothing else goes on these pages. Painters do not use a canvas for phone numbers. I modelled this with a notebook to define the challenges I wanted to work on and found it very effective. I invested time each day to advance one or more solutions. This was highly productive as I could find the time, often waiting for someone. I often went to a local café with the intent to harness my creativity on one or more challenges. I often used this while travelling as we often have time to kill.

A few years later, the Ottawa Art Gallery hosted a show by Canadian wilderness artist, AY Jackson. Painting in the bush can be very tricky. It may be hot or it may be very cold. He also canoed to reach places to paint. The show included three tools he created:

1. His 'canvases' for painting in the bush or sitting on a canoe had to be small. He had wood pieces cut to a size of about 30cm by 40cm. These rough sketches became future paintings. He captured the scene and the colours. As a non painter, what he called “rough” seemed excellent to me.

2. He built a foldable easel that could sit on his lap or a log. It held one wooden canvas and his brushes and paints.

3. As these sketches did not dry quickly, he built a wooden box with slots cut in the inside walls of the box about 3 cm apart. The wooden sketches would slide into the slots. The damp sketches did not touch the panel in front of it. It could hold about 10 sketches. The box had a top to protect the sketches from rain.

I saw these as the tools for the management of his paintings.

The display of his paintings included the rough sketch for a painting and the final version. You could easily see the same basic scene. His rough version was small. This second polished version was larger, perhaps 70 cm by 90 cm. I also noticed something interesting. The sketch was created in the late 1930s. The final was done in the 1960s. I thought it was fascinating to see how he used the rough sketches so far into the future.

Art management = Idea management

There are so many useful lessons for the management of our ideas.

• We need ideas to solve our challenges or create opportunities. Ideas, like art work, need to be managed; to do this well, we need ways of working and some new tools.
• Even great artists likely created poor results when they started. They need to develop their skills to use paints and to capture the image they want to create. We can hone our skills to create, develop, judge, and communicate ideas to build our capacity to innovate.
• We can define our short and long-term challenges, problems, or projects as a canvas in a journal. We can start with each as a one or two-page canvas.
• We can’t do everything at once. We can spread our need for ideas to solve challenges over several months.

Idea management processes turn insights into opportunities, ready for action as painters use a ‘painting management process’ to deliver creative results. It's an idea worth trying.