Does a creative process have to happen in order?

Think, do, be. An agenda is not a design. An agenda is a list of topics with times next to them, and you can tell it apart from a design by one test: nothing in it can absorb a surprise.

Designing is the shape you put around other people’s thinking. That shape either holds them or exposes them, and they will feel which one it is within about ten minutes.

Early days, learning the craft. I was the support in the room, not the one running it.

The session was with department heads from the UK Department for Education, and my colleague was running it. She set something up, and I got inspired.

So I sketched an idea. Then I got up and ran the whole room through a complete concept that answered the entire brief, with no input from anybody else. I had even drawn how it would work.

I sat down thinking, job done, solved it.

The room went completely silent.

She looked at me, then pointed at the agenda on the wall, and said we are at point two of about eight.

The clients sat there wondering what on earth was happening. I have rarely felt a bigger fool.

The first is that I broke the session. Not by being wrong about the idea. By delivering it at point two, when nobody else had been anywhere yet.

An answer that arrives before the room has travelled is not an answer. It is noise with confidence on it. There was nothing for anybody to do with it, which is exactly why the silence.

The second took me longer to admit. The design could not take it. It only worked in order, walked one step at a time, and it had no way to absorb somebody arriving early.

And in creative work somebody always jumps. That is what happens when it is going well.

A sequence that can only be walked is a fragile sequence.

I could not let go of the question. Why does it always have to be by the numbers? Why can we not make a bold leap ahead, knowing that if it is wrong, or it fails, we simply fall back to the last known place?

So I drew the process as a board.

The six steps are all still on it. Brief, insight, ideas, test, develop, launch. But it is a board, not a line. The ladders are the leaps. The snakes are the falls back. And every square is a known place, so a failed jump costs you a bit of ground instead of the whole game.

There are two instructions printed at the top of that poster. Start here. And start anywhere.

Both of them are deliberate. Design for the leap, and the room can afford to have one.

Mark the peak and the end, then design them. Not the content in between, that mostly takes care of itself. Where is the moment people will remember, and are you finishing on it or burying it at 11:40? The last ten minutes are doing more work than the middle ninety.

Give every stage a known place to fall back to. Then a leap is a ladder rather than a derailment, and you get to find out whether they were right.