“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
– Gustave Flaubert (from the wonderful SugarToad restaurant at Hotel Arista in Naperville, IL):
Over the years, I’ve learned that keeping an orderly project room can make a big difference in the innovation process. Though i’m not always good about making it happen, I find that when I am, it facilitates data tracking, pattern finding, and synthesis. It helps mitigate the inevitable overwhelming feeling of swimming in data.
To be clear, the goal is not cleanliness or spotlessness. Going to an extreme level of neatness can actually hinder creativity. As Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman point out in their book A Perfect Mess, a little bit of disorder can foster spontaneous connections between data. So what’s the right amount of order? Here are the organizational practices I find helpful:
Hang it up
As one of my old bosses used to say, “if it’s not on the wall, it might as well not exist.” This sounds extreme, but I’m always surprised how easy it is to forget data that’s hidden away in piles and computer files. By putting important information on the wall and making it visual, you increase the likelihood that it sinks in, that folks will mull over it, and that it will later be connected to other pieces of information.
Divide the room into sections and label them
By making it clear where different types of information live, you make it easier to find things. The categorization of information types also makes it mentally easier to think about and manipulate them. Headings I often use include:
- Agenda for the day/week
- Primary field research
- Secondary research
- Frameworks
- Ideas
- (and sometimes) Design Principles and Imperatives.
Rerack the room periodically
Your wall space is probably limited, so every month or so, take down old stuff, archive it in an organized fashion, and put up new things. If you have piles of things sitting around, go through them and file them away or throw them out. The process of archiving will help that old stuff stick in your head, and deciding what to keep will force you to do some synthesis of information as you determine what’s important and what’s not.
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