Lockdown I’ve found is a largely “couch based” exercise. All those online personas of people learning Mandarin or creating family Tick Tock videos with a cast of thousands leaves me slightly cold. My main activities have been wrangling a three year old and eating custard creams.
If I spend too much time reading what others are doing I feel like hyperventilating. The draw to life achievement in comparison to others is one of my main downfalls - so the current diet of millennial vlogs and quasi expert advice on how to maximise your productivity on zoom or get perfect abs in 30 days makes for an anxiety inducing time for the decidedly average. One thing about this daily fire hydrant of options though, is that its given me time to reflect on what I want, and enjoy, and what I really don’t.
For exmaple I’ve always thought I wanted to learn French really well or run a marathon and that it was a lack of time to train or practice that stopped me. Now I have time in theory to do both, I’ve worked out I don’t want those things enough - in fact I don’t want them at all.
What this time is doing for me is helping me to understand, if we are talking innovation parlance - whats my human problem? What is the thing that I am so passionate about that I have to do something about it and spend the next few months or years focusing on that wholeheartedly?
Both personal and organisational innovation is a tricky business. Many initiatives never get off the ground for a whole host of reasons. Two important ones are that the problem wasn’t really important enough to go through the turgid process of reiteration or that there wasn’t enough will to make it happen.
All too often we give up, because staying the same is a lot less work, even if we remain wholly dissatisfied with our lot. Often we start out on an idea full of passion, but it quickly wains and we give up. I’ve found over the years this is often because I haven’t spent enough time ruminating over either what the problem really is, or all the possible ways of resolving it. I’m a doer so I like the time between starting and finishing something to be quick and direct. Unfortunately this is often the death nell of innovative practice. It is essentially a creative pursuit and creativity is frustratingly circuitous.
One of the positive things about this period for all of us, particularly those who like to take action, is that its forcing us to ruminate. We can’t take the actions we usually would. I’m finding the time actually quite liberating. Ideas I would have come up with, not thought about too much and got on with (and then later abandon!), have had to be put on hold. Instead, I’m using the time to think things through more - take ideas in the planning stage through a lot more thought. Really thinking about the nature of problems and trying not to jump to a solution.
What I’m finding is that this process is taking me to some very interesting places. Particularly, one of the things I’m realising is that my initial ideas often start at a high level of complexity. More time to think it through, change and pivot my thinking is simplifying my solutions - ultimately this means I’m getting closer to ideas that, when I do come to actually build, will deliver much quicker outcomes.
Of course, this time is frustrating, annoying, upsetting and anxiety inducing - but it can also be liberating and highly productive in new ways. So perhaps the gift of Covid is that it can give us the time to be bored enough to think about how we can to pivot to more satisfying simplicity at both an organisational and personal level.