I just finished a book that I would highly recommend you read. The book, Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky. The book was written for creative people who have a constant stream of ideas but have trouble executing them.
Scott Belsky is the Founder and CEO of Behance. Behance makes products and services for the creative industry. Scott’s main focus is helping to organize creative people, teams, and companies.
Before you start to think about whether or not you fit into the “creative” category, let me help you… of course you are! Any high performer in the knowledge business needs and should be considered creative. Of course within learning and development we tend to think of instructional designers or graphic designers creative, but I would suggest that all of performance management are creative and should consider themselves that way. We find solutions to problems. That is a pretty creative way to make a living. Once you read the book, you will understand.
The tools mentioned in this book are so simple and make so much sense. No fancy or high ramp up time to learn how to move ideas and projects forward, just real simple, doable ideas.
I have to say one of the nice things about this book is that it isn’t Getting Things Done. While I like GTD, and have used GTD methodology as well as many others, this one really resonated with me. Scott Belsky’s, methodology is called the Action Method. This is where you focus on actions and moving ideas to completion.
Simple, right? It is simple. Have a conversation with someone, attend a meeting or have an idea, the first thing you do, is decide what action needs to be done. Then log the idea and get it done.
This is all about simple actions, no context, no tags, just simple actions that you can get done. The book was written after interviews and work done with many high level companies. One of the themes is to always move the ball forward.
While this recommendation doesn’t go into enough detail, read the book, it is a quick read.
What do you think?
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