Category Archives: Creativity & Innovation

Creativity & Innovation

Get Inspired To Innovate: Ignore What You Know

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In a fairly well-known library journal I came across a column advising librarians on keeping up. There I found suggestions for how to stay on top of what’s happening in the library profession. At least that was the author’s intent. What left me disappointed was the narrowness of the scope of the suggested resources. It was mostly a collection of the same old “popular” librarian blogs. Several of those listed would hardly even help if your real intent was staying abreast of the latest developments in the profession. My other issue with this column’s advice is that it neglects to point librarians in the right direction for keeping up with content that will inspire them with creative new ideas for innovation. That’s why my advice is for librarians to always look beyond librarianship for greater inspiration. That’s where you’ll find the ideas that could be applied to library practice waiting to be discovered.

You’ll find similar advice in Bill Taylor’s blog post Don’t Let What You Know Limit What You Imagine. He reminds us that it’s important that we not let our experience – and all that we know about our industry and what we read about it – limit our capacity to come up with new ways of looking at things. He says we need to have “vuja de” :

The most effective leaders demonstrate a capacity for vuja dé. We’ve all experienced déjà vu Looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve seen it before. Vuja dé is the flip side of that — looking at a familiar situation (a field you’ve worked in for decades, products you’ve worked on for years) as if you’ve never seen it before, and, with that fresh line of sight, developing a distinctive point of view on the future. If you believe, as I do, that what you see shapes how you change, then the question for change-minded leaders becomes: How do you look at your organization and your field as if you are seeing them for the first time?

He uses Commerce Bank as his primary example. You can read more of the specifics in his column, but what captured my attention is that Commerce refused to benchmark itself against other banks. Think about how often we do this in our libraries. We look to see what the other libraries are doing. We develop “comparison” lists so we know which libraries we need to follow. True, it’s a good idea to occasionally ask colleagues in similar libraries how they handle a specific problem (e.g., I recently asked for advice on a particular policy issue), but just following what other libraries do, according to Taylor, is unlikely to lead to any significant innovation in your library.

Commerce’s leaders ignored what other banks did, especially when the talk turned to “best practices”. Instead it looked at totally different industries. So instead of studying Citibank and BankAmerica, they followed what was happening at Target, Starbucks and Best Buy. Taylor concludes by reminding us:

You can’t let what you know limit what you can imagine. As you try to do something special, exciting, important in your work, as you work hard to devise creative solutions to stubborn problems, don’t just look to other organizations in your field (or to your past successes) for ideas and practices. Look to great organizations in all sorts of unrelated fields to see what works for them — and how you can apply their ideas to your problems.

By all means, follow the library literature that helps you to become a better librarian, and that keeps you alert to what’s happening in the world of librarianship. That’s a path to continuing professional development that will help you to keep growing and improving your professional practice. But don’t stop there. When it comes to keeping up, go beyond those traditional library magazines and blogs. Don’t place those limits on your powers of creativity and innovation. If you need some suggestions for resources beyond the library literature, you’ll find some at my Keeping Up Website. In the new year, choose to be more intentional about ignoring what you know in order to discover new ways to design a better library experience for your community members.

Creativity & Innovation

Customers And The Future Of Innovation

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We all want our organizations and work force to be more innovative. If we want to achieve progress, develop new services and create more value for our community members – and especially with constrained resources that prevent us throwing money at possible solutions to our problems – we’ve got to get innovative. Innovation can generally be understood to mean creating something new (or new for your organization) that delivers value. It sounds easy enough but coming up with novel ideas that are within our means and resources to develop and implement, well, it’s not so easy. The organizations that demonstrate a good track record of innovation usually succeed with a structured management approach that helps to build the innovation culture. Innovation management isn’t something I’ve thought about much, so I was intrigued by a new report,from the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, titled “The Future of Innovation Management: The Next 10 Years“. So I took a look and here is what I found.

The report is based on surveys that A.D.Little conducted with approximately 100 CTOs and CIOs. There are five innovation management concepts discussed in the report, but I’m only going to mention the first of them. You can explore the others if they interest you. The first trend to watch is customer-based innovation, and it reinforces some of the important points made about the user experience here at DBL. What is customer-based innovation?

It’s all about finding new and more profound ways to engage with customers and develop deeper relationships with them.

The operative word here is “relationships”. A.D. Little advises its clients to “explore ways of designing an ownership experience”. A car manufacturer, for example, should put as much effort into designing service and support at all customer touchpoints as they do with the design of the cars themselves. That’s the path to designing what is referred to as a “total customer experience.” We need to think more like that in our libraries. A high-fidelity experience should be about totality, not just what happens at any single services point or where usability matters.

A.D. Little sees another trend they refer to as “design-in emotion”. Many products can now offer more features than most consumers will ever use, so competing on features is of diminished value. Instead they should compete on style, design and emotional connection. Apple is the leader in design-in emotion, but other industries are paying close attention. They are learning how to “make an emotional connection with the customer through the design of products, services and experiences, and how to build community, loyalty and advocacy. I recently wrote that libraries will continue to struggle if they try to connect with everyone in the community. Instead focus on the users who are most likely to respond to an emotional connection – and become passionate library users.

I was glad to see that the report reinforces how important relationship building will be for innovation management. It goes so far as to say “As the battle for relationships continues we expect to see a blurring and shifting of sector boundaries…as the basis of competition moves from price and service offering to relationship and customization.” I would suggest that although A.D. Little sees this as the future, it does sound an awful lot like “The Experience Economy“…from 1999.

Here’s another innovation-related item worth a read. The author, Jack Springman, argues that we should drop innovation from our vocabulary. Given how overused it is, maybe Springman has a point. But replace it with what? He writes that “Most innovation efforts, however, are doomed to fail; they direct focus away from what is required to succeed…Creating something new is the goal of most innovation initiatives, but new does not mean valuable. Increasing the value created for customers should be the focus of initiatives intended to generate business growth.” Springman suggests we stop looking at innovation as a cure-all for what ails our economy. Instead, we should focus on the eight ways we can create value for the customers. These include improving our productivity, convenience, speed, choice, feel-good factor, security, low price and gross profit margin (Okay, those last two don’t quite apply to libraries). I do think Springman has some good advice for us:

Thinking in terms of creating value for customers rather than innovation ensures the focus is on customers rather than the company.

So there are two things for you to keep in mind as you go about designing your better library. Manage innovation by building relationships with community members and then focus on creating value for them.

Creativity & Innovation

The Faintest Ink Is Better Than The Best Memory

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You can have the greatest idea ever, but if you fail to capture it then there is no chance it could ever come to fruition. So one of the most important steps in moving from idea to implementation is to have a good system for capturing ideas. This topic has come up before at DBL.

At my library we recently had a follow-up to our summer retreat. It was both an opportunity to keep the conversation going about customer service and user experience in the library, and take on a new project to help ourselves get better at improving our user experience. This particular segment of the retreat follow-up program was titled “Capture An Idea.” It introduced an initiative in which all staff would focus on recording ideas about the library and our services. To help get us started, four categories of ideas were recommended:

* Community member’s user behavior
* Things that are broken
* Complaints and compliments
* Whatever – ideas that pop into your head about the library

The Capture an Idea project was introduced and everyone received a well-designed notebook for capturing their ideas:

This is the notebook for ideas distributed to staff

The notebook was designed and produced by Aaron Schmidt, best known for Walking Paper blog. Schmidt also provides a number of nifty library-oriented creativity supplies through his online shop. To capture ideas you need a good notebook, and I thought the inspirational message on the cover would be a good reminder of why we want to capture them. I think my colleagues enjoyed receiving the book. In fact, it didn’t even take 30 minutes for the first good idea to emerge: get more books for our student workers because they are often the eyes and ears of the library when we are not present. See, we can make a difference. I will look forward to all of the ideas we collect during the spring semester.

Books, Creativity & Innovation

You Know How To Capture Your Good Ideas But How Do You Get Others To Support Them

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Seems like there’s a lot being written about good ideas these days. If you follow what’s been written here in the past about design thinking, creativity, innovation – and capturing your good ideas when they come – chances are you are already improving at coming up with good ideas and capturing them as well. But just coming up with good ideas isn’t enough. How do you get others – mostly your work colleagues – to buy into your good idea? That’s where most of our ideas tend to run into the proverbial brick wall.

Consider this example based on a rather simple idea – a good one on the surface – that a library worker developed that he thought would make a small, but noticeable difference for some members of the library community. What I like about this idea is that it provides a great example of how we can come up with a good idea by keeping our antennae up so that we more acutely observe and listen in our library environment for ways to design a better library. The staff member noticed that in this one part of the library where there was nothing particular going on, students would gather in small groups to study. They would sit on the floor or pull some chairs together. They might make some noise. The staff member thought the library could do better for these students, but knew the library needed great flexibility to make the most of every piece of real estate. The simple observation lead to a new idea for a better library – create a flexible study space by installing a set of folding room dividers. Not only would it give the students more privacy, cut down on noise and make for a better study space, but it could be enhanced with a flat panel monitor on the wall for collaborative work. Great idea, right. Well you know what happened next. Of course, lots of reasons why that’s a bad idea. Too much foot traffic in that area already. Students who like the current setting will complain. The reference desk will be swamped with students asking how to use the monitor. When the walls are closed we won’t know what the students are doing in there…and so on. Certainly the project will require some funding, but it’s hardly what Jim Collins would refer to as an “above the waterline risk”, not to mention that if any of the imagined problems actually surface the room dividers can easily be removed. Still, there is opposition to the idea. Why does this happen and what can we do about it?

First though, back to the matter of more being written about good ideas. Seems there are two new books driving this conversation. I previously mentioned one of them, Steven Johnson’s new book about where good ideas come from. I noticed that Profhacker also had a post about Johnson’s book (if you aren’t reading Profhacker – sign up today). I also noted that Profhacker has a good post, along with comments, about capturing your good ideas – something I wrote about a while back. But there’s another book about good ideas you may want to read. This one, by John Kotter, isn’t about coming up with ideas and capturing them, it’s about the problem described above – how can you come up with simple ways to defend your ideas against the critics so that they have the best chance of surviving and actually getting implemented?

Kotter’s book is appropriately titled “Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down“, and I’ll share a few ideas from the book here. You can also read about it here, and there’s a good interview with Kotter in which he shares his ideas from the book in the October 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review (p. 129-132). Here is a brief summary of some of the key points that Kotter shares that explain why new ideas are attacked and how to instead gain support for an idea. Perhaps the most important thing you can do is to anticipate that your idea will be attacked. Kotter says the attack response is murky mix of human nature and group dynamics. His research showed that the most successful idea champions didn’t respond by trying to put down or marginalize their opposition. Instead they did what Kotter calls “inviting in the lions”. These folks embraced those criticizing their ideas, and invited their opinions. One of the biggest problems in getting support is information overload. Rather than give time and attention to a new idea, co-workers find it faster to just write it off and hope it will go away, thus giving them attention for other projects. Inviting their participation by engaging their attention – even if it is negative – is a good start. Then what?

Of course, there’s more. You need to know the four common attacks and how to avoid them. In fact there are up to 24 attacks (everything from “why change” to “we can’t afford it”) that Kotter and his fellow researchers identified. By being more familiar with what they are, Kotter says you can be prepared to respond – what you don’t want to do is respond by winging it. That usually ends up badly. So where do you learn all this? From the book. If you’re not sure if you should read it, here’s a ten-minute video interview with Kotter that should give you a better idea of what to expect from the book. I’ll be taking a closer look. Good ideas are hard to come by. When I get one, I want to give it the best chance possible of making it past the idea stage.

Creativity & Innovation, User Experiences

More On Meaning And Creative Showering

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No, this isn’t a post about how you get meaning from your creative showering. I want to just follow up on two different posts with some new thoughts and links for you.

My most recent post shared some insights from the retreat I attended along with my colleagues in our public services units. In that post I talked about a conversation I had with my co-worker about meaning, and how an article I later came across shared research that indicated that people derive more meaning and happiness from experiences than they do from material objects. Then I came across this NYT article on virtually the same topic discussing similar research that documents that individuals derive more happiness from experiences than material objects:

Current research suggests that, unlike consumption of material goods, spending on leisure and services typically strengthens social bonds, which in turn helps amplify happiness. (Academics are already in broad agreement that there is a strong correlation between the quality of people’s relationships and their happiness; hence, anything that promotes stronger social bonds has a good chance of making us feel all warm and fuzzy.)

So with all the research pointing to the connection between meaning and happiness/satisfaction, that further reinforces that we can offer our user community members something of value whenever we deliver a great library experience.

Further back I wrote about the importance of capturing your good ideas – even when they come in the shower (and yes, there’s a special notebook for that). I mentioned that some research did show there is something to be said for showers as a creative place. For some reason, many individuals will indicate they came up with a good idea in the shower. Over at the Heart of Innovation blog, you’ll find a list of 20 reasons why people get their best ideas in the shower. Some make a lot of sense, and others are questionable – but intriguing – like showering with a partner and turning the shower into a brainstorming session. But I think it still comes down to reason number 20: Showering is easy. Not a lot of thinking is required to make it happen, which frees your mind to think about other things.

Creativity & Innovation

Idea Lab In The Library

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Librarians like to talk about innovation. We want to be innovative, we believe innovation will lead to a better library future, and we even have a journal dedicated to it so we can write more articles about innovation. Despite all of our talking and writing about innovation, we may be overlooking a more obvious way to create an innovative library work environment. How about creating a physical workplace that is all about facilitating innovation.

What would such a workplace look like? Probably a lot like the Idea Lab at the Stanford University d.school. The Idea Lab is profiled in the June 2010 issue of FastCompany. Perhaps most of what you need to know about the lab is found in this statement by David Kelley, who is a founder of IDEO and d.school, “We’re looking for better ideas – not keep your feet off the furniture.” Can the right environment really contribute to more innovation? According to d.school director George Kembel, “Creativity follows context. If I want an organization to behave in a certain way, I need to design for that.” The article explains how the idea lab, with its open spaces, walls that double as note and sketch pads, its easy-to-rearrange layout, and students are encouraged to add to others’ work, or invite others to collaborate on their own.

I doubt there is any library that has already created an idea lab for its staff. If I’m wrong about that and your library has put together something along the lines of the Stanford d. school Idea Lab, please let me know. Since we have few models for how it might work in a library, I’m taking a shot at it here with a sketch of what it could look like.

idea lab
Possible Layout of a Library Idea Lab

I imagine it having walls/panels that are transparent and could double as space for drawings, notes, ideas, etc. that could be shared and commented on by others. It is easily accessible to the user community; it reduces or eliminates barriers between the librarian and the user – and should promote open innovation with the public. The core of the lab space is a hub that features collaborative furniture where librarians can interact with members of the user community. I’ve been in many libraries where the librarians are tucked away in offices spread throughout the building. A more communal space such as this one where the offices circle the collaborative hub could lead to more group problem sharing and solving – and then more innovation. A variety of technology devices/gadgets could be easily accessible to the staff in the idea lab and it facilitates experimentation. A wall-mounted panel display could serve as a space for presentations, demonstrations and even for librarians to share electronic messages. Maybe there are even some toys and games for visitors to play with – or for the staff whenever they might need a diversion (some of you best thinking comes when you are thinking about something else or nothing at all).

There just might be something to the Idea Lab concept as demonstrated by the folks at the Stanford d. school. Providing the right setting to library workers could indeed promote their innovative spirit, and in the long run contribute to a better library experience for the user community.

Creativity & Innovation

Will What Worked For Groucho Work for Libraries

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Reading this Seth Godin post I had to contemplate the situation librarians have found themselves in as the type of experience the users want has shifted to low fidelity, high convenience. As it exists today the library experience is best described as mostly high fidelity. Our profession is urged again and again to change its practices to meet the current market expectations for information search and retrieval. We’ve heard that convenience trumps quality every time, and that we need to follow suit and go low fidelity.

Godin almost perfectly describes this exact predicament in which we librarians find ourselves:

Perhaps the most plaintive complaint I hear from organizations goes something like this, “We worked really hard to get very good at xyz. We’re well regarded, we’re talented and now, all the market cares about is price. How can we get large groups of people to value our craft and buy from us again?” Apparently, the bulk of your market no longer wants to buy your top of the line furniture, lawn care services, accounting services, tailoring services, consulting… all they want is the cheapest. The masses don’t want a better PC laptop. They just want the one with the right specs at the right price. It’s not because people are selfish (though they are) or shortsighted (though they are). It’s because in this market, right now, they’re not listening. They’ve been seduced into believing that all options are the same, and they’re only seeing price. In terms of educating the masses to differentiate yourself, the market is broken.

At one time we certainly were the kings of information delivery. When our user communities needed anything beyond a basic encyclopedia, a phone call or visit to the library was standard practice. But now all information and those who provide it are the same to the average citizen, and there’s no clear rationale for using the library. As Godin states, we’ve been focusing too much attention on trying to figure out how to get them “to buy from us again” instead of figuring out how to fit into their world so that we are of use to them on their terms – at least enough to build the relationships that can be our bread and butter. But can we librarians make the shift to the next big thing in a seamless fashion – as Groucho Marx did? Godin explains it:

The Marx Brothers were great at vaudeville. Live comedy in a theatre. And then the market for vaudeville was killed by the movies. Groucho didn’t complain about this or argue that people should respect the hard work he and his brothers had put in. No, they went into the movies.

Then the market for movies like the Marx Brothers were making dried up. Groucho didn’t start trying to fix the market. Instead, he saw a new medium and went there. His TV work was among his best (and certainly most lucrative).

It’s extremely difficult to repair the market. It’s a lot easier to find a market that will respect and pay for the work you can do.

That last section should really resonate with us librarians. As hard as we may wish for its return, the old model in which we served as the gatekeeper and primary information intermediary isn’t coming back. We’ve tried to repair the market and it hasn’t worked. How would we replicate what Groucho did in his career? What new service or platform could we move to in creating a completely different environment for library services. In some ways we are doing that now. Students learn in online environments supported by courseware. We are there. People text each other to chat, share ideas and ask questions. We are there. People use Twitter to communicate. We are there. In these ways we are moving on to the new media – just as Groucho did when the last big thing collapsed and he moved on to the next big thing. Groucho was probably highly effective at trendwatching and knowing what move to make next – or he had the right people doing it for him.

So we may have the capacity to change our stripes, figure out where the market is headed and find a way to integrate ourselves and our services. It fails if we only do it when it’s too late, and we get there screaming and kicking the whole way. But there may be something of value in leaving part of what we do in the past. Godin closes his post with a simple but meaningful caveat for librarians:

Please note that nothing I wrote above applies to niche businesses. In fact, exactly the opposite does. You can make a good living selling bespoke PC laptops or doing vaudeville today, even though the mass of the market couldn’t care a bit.

We need to remember that while it’s important to follow the market and trends and be there, there’s value in differentiating ourselves from all the other ways and sources people can go to for their information. Want to get help finding information from a skilled human – that’s the library’s niche. Want to get access to highly specialized information products – that’s the library’s niche. Want to build a relationship with someone who can recommend books and movies – that’s the library’s niche. Want to have a caring person read a story to your children – that’s the library’s niche. It may require us to have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, but if we can play it both ways that’s only going to make the experience we deliver all that more memorable.

Creativity & Innovation

Want To Be An Innovator? Put Up Your Antennae!

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Continuous improvement is an often sought after goal in libraries. We may be doing good things for our community but resting on our laurels is no formula for future success. It’s important to keep exploring for new ways to enhance the library experience for the end user. A simple way to do that is by making sure we are skilled practitioners of listening and observing. When we do this well we may be amazed at the many great ideas for innovative services that are rooted in what we hear from the library users (and non-users) and in the ways we observe their use of our facilities, collections and services.

In user experience presentations I often mention this simple idea of “listen and observe” , but I was reminded of it by this blog post by Jeffrey Phillips over at Innovate on Purpose. In discussing “How Customer Insights Lead to Innovations” Phillips offers some good examples of how this practice can make a difference. Take the Crayola “Crayon Maker”. Phillips points out that for many years parents and children melted down broken crayons at home so they could shape them into new ones. Crayola picked up on this activity and developed a product that offers the same capability but makes it easier to do.

Here’s another anecdote I came across. Makers of body shampoo wanted to learn more about how men use the product. When they just asked questions in focus groups they heard the attendees answer without thinking much about how they really use the products. But in a study where men were observed using the product the market research folks discovered most men used the body shampoo to shampoo their hair. In the focus groups, no one said anything about this. Now when you go to the supermarket you see body shampoo for men that is also marketed as hair shampoo in one bottle. It’s probably the same shampoo it was before, but this innovation based on observation has increased the market share of these all-in-one products.

listen and observe for innovation inspiration
listen and observe for innovation inspiration

While “listen and observe” is easy advice to give, it is a challenge to implement as a regular practice. We are often so used to being in our own little world that it is hard to notice when something different happens that should signal to us that we’ve just seen or heard something worthy of our attention. It is, I think, a personal behavioral trait that makes innovators who they are. They are the folks who have their antennae up, ready to pick up the signals that communicate something important is happening. They are listening and observing. It’s no different with individuals who have a talent for identifying totally unrelated events or trends, and who have the ability to connect them – to put the puzzle pieces together – in predicting new expectations and trends – before people even realize it’s something they want or need.

How to get started? Visualize yourself as that person who has the antennae up and ready to gather the signals. Practice your listening and observing when you are outside the library. Be a people watcher when you go to stores and restaurants. Look for unusual or odd behaviors that indicate people want something that isn’t readily available. When people complain or whine about something, don’t just ignore them or take the fastest, shortest route to making them go away. Instead think about why they are complaining or whining – or simply asking why they can’t do something they want to do at your library. Watch how your library users make use of the facility, the equipment or the technology. It may be only one time out of a hundred or a thousand that you will notice something unusual, but it’s that one time that could make all the difference in the world to you, your colleagues and the members of your library community. So get those antennae up and get out there!

Creativity & Innovation

Library Trigger Points

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Since I’ve previously written about David Kelley of IDEO, I suppose it’s only fair that I dedicate a post to his brother and fellow IDEO legend Tom Kelley. But whereas I shared David Kelley’s insights into how design thinking is changing the way business operates, it’s one of Tom Kelley’s ideas about innovation that I want to promote in this post. Kelley was recently interviewed at IdeaConnection, and I recommend you give the entire interview a good reading. But Kelley’s mention of “trigger points” captured my attention, and got me thinking about how this ideas can apply to our libraries.

The idea behind the trigger point is pretty simple. According to Kelley it is:

the one or two essential elements in a product that are important to your customers. Sometimes you gain a competitive edge by fixing a problem or designing a great customer experience around those trigger points. If you make everything about your product or service continuously better and add more features, you may end up with a product or service that customers can’t afford and don’t understand.

So the trigger point is the one thing, or maybe two things, that really makes the difference for the potential library users – or as Kelley puts it – the offering that gets the person past whatever threshold was keeping them from using the service. What might that threshold be for the typical library, and how do we make this trigger point easier to navigate or how might we build a better experience around it?

It might not be the same for each library. In my own library a trigger point would be the web site and the access it provides to electronic resources. Our 2009 LibQual survey results clearly indicated that for our faculty and students it is highly important to easily find and connect to those resources. If we can do only one thing to create a better experience and loyal customer it would mean a better web site that allows for easier navigation and location of resources. On the other hand, it only tells us what it is important to the user, not the obvious solution. It may be that the solution isn’t a better website in terms of finding and connecting to e-resources. The solution may be creating simpler and more convenient paths to the e-resources from wherever the end user is most likely to begin their navigation path. So we also need to do a better job of learning and understanding how our users want to find and connect to the e-resources they need. It may be we need to better integrate the paths to the e-resources into course management systems or social networks.

And although some might suggest the library building itself is no longer that important, we are learning that our faculty and graduate students currently avoid our building because it is an unpleasant experience for them. They find the undergraduates too noisy. They want dedicated study and research space that better serves their needs and the way they work. For these community members the building and its available study space is clearly another trigger point. We need to create improvements that will get the faculty and graduate students past the threshold that presently serves as a barrier to their coming to and using the library facility.

Thinking more about library trigger points strikes me as one good way to begin a process of understanding the library experience beyond just fixing a series of things that are broken. Yes, it is important to fix what is broken, but no combination of small fixes is likely to tackle the challenge of identifying the one or two trigger points and developing appropriate solutions that will turn a non-user into a library user.

Creativity & Innovation

Capturing Your Creative Ideas

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You often find writers using a quote to start off a book chapter or an article. Most times those quotes are like background noise. It’s there but you don’t notice it. But every now and then it grabs your attention. That’s what got me to take a look at this UXmatters article titled “a practical guide to capturing creativity“. It began with a good quote from Linus Pauling that I’d never come across before: The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. Make sense. Librarians are creative folks. I don’t doubt we all have many ideas. The problem is capturing them and then developing the one that has the most potential.

The main problem, according to author Jonathan Follett, is that creative ideas jump into our minds when we are least ready to capture them. He writes:

When the creative moment strikes, we need to be ready for it with ways to save, preserve, and ultimately use our invaluable ideas, notes, and sketches, so they can contribute to the success of great digital products. Such ideas don’t always come to us in the office environment. I find, generally, that there are far too many distractions in my own studio. In our over-stimulated modern world, with thousands of messages competing for our attention and bandwidth, it’s no wonder creative professionals require time away from their desks and computers to generate new ideas.

The often cited example is the shower idea. There is a well recognized phenomenon that people tend to get ideas or creative bursts of genius in the shower. Why is that? No one knows for sure but one suggestion is that the brain needs to be free of the constant ongoing details that flood each moment. But when the mind is unchained from all those details it can pull together the many disparate puzzle pieces that go into a creative idea. The shower seems to be a particularly good place for that to happen. Follett’s focus is on how you go about capturing the idea when it comes, as it so often will disappear if allowed to drift off. You know how it works. You say to yourself “that’s a great idea and I’ll make a note of it after breakfast”. Then after breakfast you are asking yourself what that idea was you had in the shower. Don’t let it happen to you.

So what do you do? You’ll find some good ideas in this article. Follett’s advice is to keep it simple. He emphasizes the use of easily carried notebooks for jotting down ideas. He has a preference for the Moleskine notebook. I carry a Daytimer and keep it stocked with plenty of notepaper at all times. Even though I carry a smartphone I just find it easier to jot down ideas on paper with pencil – and it’s easier to sketch an idea, another reason Follett likes notebooks. What about the shower? Follett shares information about a notebook and pen designed for writing in the wettest conditions. Try using your smartphone in the shower.

Follett doesn’t ignore higher tech methods for capturing ideas. Voice recorders are an obvious device for this task. I’ve experimented a bit with the voice recorder on my smartphone. It works well enough. The problem is that I forget to use it, and there are times when I wouldn’t want to – such as when I get an idea on the commuter train. You could acquire a specialized voice recorder if that’s your preference. He even mentions using Google Voice to record ideas from a cell phone. Why not just leave a message with your idea on your work voicemail? The advantage of Google Voice is that it transcribes the message so you have a written version, but Follett found that it didn’t always work that well. Still, you may want to experiment with Voice. And if voicemail isn’t high-tech enough for you, consider using a hand held video camera to record yourself describing your creative ideas.

Are librarians creative professionals? It’s certainly not a characteristic associated with the traditional stereotype. How much creativity does shushing people and stamping book cards require? But we know that librarians are indeed a creative bunch. Need examples? Consider the spring 2008 issue of Urban Library Journal that profiled creative librarians and their creative library projects and approaches to service. Capturing one’s creative ideas is a good start, and a good way to make sure that we all have lots of ideas on hand. After all, that does seem like the best way to discover that one really good idea that could make a difference.