Scott Belsky of Behance

Many companies place ‘creative stimuli’ like pool tables in their offices to inspire remarkable ideas, but what actually materializes as a result? Whether your office is made up of cubicles or open-plan architecture, your workspace should foster a culture of Productive Creativity.

You can learn a lot about a person from taking a look around their home. Since everything communicates, a brief glimpse at a bookcase is a lens for what your colleague finds interesting. Much like you can tell a lot about a person by looking around their home, you can understand a company’s culture from their workspace. read more

Visionary leaders run the risk of overriding the ideas of the brilliant people around them.

Jack Welch, legendary CEO of GE, was known to walk in a room of great people solving important problems and proclaim “Here’s what I think we should do.” He would go on to explain his vision and reasoning. And then, after sharing his solution for the problem at hand, he would ask, “what do you think?” It is no surprise that he would get many nods of affirmation and not much disagreement or new, bold ideas.

Perhaps this is sometimes necessary in a large corporation, but never in a creative team. After all, a creative team’s purpose is to exchange, digest, and refine ideas. If you fail to capture the insights from each member of the team, then you are actually “losing value.”

The tendency to “act first” is a fatal flaw for leaders in the creative community. read more

Sometimes great wisdom is shared with very few words. Here are some thoughtful quotes I have come across that provide great perspective…

“There is no competition in the world. If you can start something, carry it through and complete it, you are in the top two percent of our society” -unknown

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How should we reconcile our tendency to seek the advice of experts with our desire to also question the status quo and try things differently? As creative professionals, we cannot become imprisoned by the past, but we must also not be stubborn and spend our time reinventing the wheel.

There is a somewhat healthy tendency in every discipline to defer to the knowledge of elders. Starting with the original “apprenticeship” structures of the 19th century to the traditional corporate hierarchies that permeate our life today, societies are built on collective wisdom from the past. Major conferences around the world gather industry “experts” to share their wisdom. We painstakingly listen to our elders’ projections as if they were coming from an oracle. read more

We all have a love-hate relationship with meetings. While some of the greatest ideas and solutions come up in brainstorm meetings, we also lose most of our time in discussion without action. Ideally, meetings lead to realizations that result as action steps assigned to individuals with deadlines. Realistically, most meetings are fruitless.

As we measure the value of meetings, we must realize just how costly it is to interrupt the workflow of each team member, literally stop all progress, and consume all brainpower with one topic. Clearly, meetings must be planned sparingly. But most teams plan meetings as liberally as they buy coffee.

Behance has come across a few habits of especially productive creative teams (from across industries) that we should all consider in our day-to-day work. read more

We all know the famous Google Policy, allowing all employees to use 20% of their time on a project of their choosing (they call it “innovation time off”). Publicly, Google claims that many of their breakthrough businesses come from this policy. However, a quick glance at their quarterly financial statements reveals that well over 95% of their revenues come from just a few of their businesses and really only one thing: ads. So, what are the real benefits from giving open space to your employees to pursue a project of their choosing? read more

Action steps are worthless without a sense of accountability to complete them. In our jobs and daily chores, the oversight of colleagues, wives/husbands, and clients helps us stay focused. In the mishmash of daily life, we must feel accountable in order to stay productive and push ideas forward.

However, at some point, supervision backfires. Having a boss over your shoulder or constant nagging reminders will actually reduce our motivation. After all, we want to take pride in our own productivity. As such, the drive must start from within. But methods to support our drive for productivity are critical defenses in a world of TIVO, email, and countless other distractions.From the Behance team’s work with especially productive teams in the creative world, here are a few of the tactics we observed: read more

Our latest intern at Behance arrived with a tremendous amount of energy and anticipation for the wild brainstorming that one would expect in such an environment. After all, we are a team that develops products and services for the creative community. We aspire to think out of the box. What could be more creative?

Our eager intern was clearly disappointed when she realized that we spend less than 1% of our time generating ideas. As our founder explained to her mid-way through her time in the office, “if anything, we have a surplus of ideas. Excess ideas are our greatest cost. What we need is fewer ideas.” In addition, our intern observed that the team essentially lives in “execution mode.” Not much fun.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for a creative group is to consume its creative juice sparingly. Creative people, regardless of their commitment to a cause, are more likely to exchange ideas than take steps to push any one idea forward. Why? Idea generation is an addiction. It is an engaging, brain-spinning indulgence that must be practiced in moderation.Of course, you should take pride in the creative capabilities of your team. When you do engage in creative flow, enjoy it. Just be sure to compartmentalize it. Recognize that such occasions have the tendency to be intoxicating. read more