You are wasting so much creativity

Here’s the thing.

If you are striving to allow your team the freedom to innovate and be creative, you also have to balance efficiency.

The act of creating is wasteful. It’s the opposite of efficiency.

But from a cost, performance, and business standpoint, efficiency is also important.

So how do you balance those two?

Try this on.

Create with waste. Deliver with efficiency.

Don’t constrain the act of creating or innovating. Rather, constrain, optimize, and improve the act of delivering that creation.

Don’t track the time your developers spend building a new feature. Rather optimize the time it takes to merge, test, and deploy that feature to prod.

Don’t track the process for developing data visualizations. Rather improve the effectiveness of receiving feedback from stakeholders and the time it takes to complete iterations.

The more you improve the delivery process, the more capacity you have for creation.

Think about the different areas your team creates in and the core areas where your team delivers.

Enable space for the first. And pursue efficiency in the other.

It was good to see you today,

Sawyer

from The Data Shop​

p.s. Open Office Hour next Monday from 2-3pm ET. Drop in and say "Hi". Chat about data or whatever else is on your mind. I'll send a link on the day of.