An established workflow is often the mark of a talented professional.
For years, I sought to find the secret sauce that would become my “style”. I combed through libraries, bookstores, and websites looking for clues. I even would wait after lectures to ask presenters “how do you do this?”.
And the answer was always a secret.
Why is it that creative professionals don’t share these techniques? Why do we find something that works well, looks great, and is super efficient only to keep it for ourselves? We believe our own secret workflow will somehow will separate us from our colleagues and competitors all for our own gain.
This is foolish.
In a recent interview, with the Louisiana Channel, world renowned architect Renzo Piano stated that he encourages his younger staff to “steal everything”. This sounds like a crazy person – who would offer all of the details (especially those details), the drawings, the sketches, etc to young people? Doesn’t he know they will just rip off these ideas and make them their own? Doesn’t Mr. Piano know that these secret ideas/ workflows are what make us unique.
Oh yes – he does.
Piano says, “Stealing, I know, is not nice, but if the condition is that you give back, it’s not that bad.” When young people come to work at Piano’s offices, what they’re told is to “take, take away – don’t wait for us to give you, take. But if possible, give back one day. “
Did you catch that? The lesson that I missed all those years? The nugget of wisdom that completely unlocked a new way my design perception…give back.
I think this insight tells us two things:
First, we take ideas knowing that we must improve upon them to make them our own. Solomon may have said “there’s nothing new under the sun” however if every idea is already in existence then our job is to synthesize old, disparate ideas and combine them into a new manufactured mode of design thinking. This is fascinating to me.
Second, to give back means that the process of constantly taking from each other (stealing) to gather new techniques, perspectives, and strategies is only the first part of the exchange. The second half is to share this knowledge with others. Once we have realized that we are all in fact “borrowing” (i prefer this over stealing) ideas and re-purposing them – then our sense of ownership begins to change. The secret workflow sauce is no longer sacred, but something to share.
Imagine if we all started looking for ways to give away our ideas, our ways of thinking, and most importantly our experiences. Think of how our teammates, our colleagues, and younger professionals would benefit. We don’t know, what we don’t know – therefore a seasoned creative mind would start to offer wisdom and give away ideas to make other people better.
This is a productive creative cycle – a give and a take. One in which looks to serve others with our collected wisdom while continuing to learn the profession ourselves.
I am confident that almost no one practices this way – which is why Renzo’s advice seems so appalling at first. But, we certainly could with a more thoughtful and intentional mindset.
What Piano is teaching us with his advice to steal is to be more aware of the the wisdom and lessons all around us. This posture causes us to be humble and admit we don’t know everything. Solitude for our design ego.
To close, here are a few tactics I use to steal and give back. I hope you will find them useful – maybe even try one and let me know what you think:
- Draw great plans by hand – I have learned a tremendous amount by drawing plans from my heroes – Williams + Tsein and Peter Zumthor are a great start.
- Print cards – Don’t just pin everything to Pinterest – while this is useful, you seldom remember all the images you have collected. Tom Phifer gave this amazing lecture at GSD recently where he talked about this process of compiling cards of images to pin up and have avaiable all the time. These were not overall images of buildings, but details of materials, or joints, or surfaces. All of which, inspire his amazing work.
- Take notes on how people present their work – don’t just sit at a lecture or conference and write down notes. Be more active – how are the slides organized? what is the graphic design like? how is their delivery? are they engaging, why? Provide a short critique of what worked and what didn’t.
- Make lists of ideas to steal – whatever you listened to , or watch, or read, always have a running list of things to look up, read, or research. I find that goodreads is a great way of tracking books I want to read and using the simple post-it on my desktop is a useful (and dumb) way to keep tabs
- Mentor up and mentor down – learn from someone ahead of you and find younger folks to serve
- Write a blog and share all the lessons you know 🙂