The Post-it is mightier than the Pen

Imagine that you’re running a meeting or a workshop, designed to crack a complex strategic issue – for your team, your function, your division, your whole company, etc. You’ve invited 12 to 16 people, and they are already arranged in smaller teams. What do you do next? Get people to stand up.

Most people have working habits that physically don’t help during strategic problem solving. Indeed, most people spend their days working alone, sitting down, at their laptop, and often in silence. As you become more senior, you still find yourself sitting down for most of the time, but instead of working alone in silence you might spend your days in meetings, listening to other people – and waiting for your turn to speak. I simplify drastically but this is not far off reality.

Sitting-down desktop work is quite good for linear, productive output, and sitting-down meetings can be quite good for collaborative decision making. What both these approaches are not good for is right-brain, intuitive and creative idea generation. Nor for left-brain, structured and planned idea generation either.

Firstly, most creative endeavour notoriously comes from a different body position: slouching or standing up, not sitting down. Many a great song was started with a musician nonchalantly strumming a few chords on their guitar while slouching across a sofa during a late-night session of merriment. Likewise, many a creative blockage has been unpicked by a walk in the park, a run or a shower.

On the latter, Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin takes up to eight showers a day. The author of West Wing, The Social Network and The Newsroom has installed a small shower unit in his office to keep his creativity flowing, after realizing that he often got his best ideas in the shower. He says, ‘I take six to eight showers a day. I’m not a germaphobe, it’s not like that. I find them incredibly refreshing and when writing isn’t going well, it’s a do over … I will shower, change into new clothes and start again.’

Most of us don’t have the luxury of installing a shower unit in our office, but we can draw inspiration from one insight: a lot of new ideas come to us when standing up. The other insight should be that no idea ever comes to us in a fully formed fashion. After the first flash of inspiration, the contribution needs to be revised, altered and polished, again and again.

Pretend you have just arrived at a first draft of a pyramid exercise, as below. You are the project leader, and a team member has just suggested something that will alter the structure. What do you do next? Your reaction is likely to be a function of both the quality of the suggestion, and of the physical support of your current draft.

Imagine that there are three versions of the mini-pyramid below: one written with pen on paper (Paper), one written with erasable marker pens on whiteboard (Board), and one with Post-its stuck on a window, wall or Miro/Mural board (Post-its).

Changing the Post-its version is physically straightforward, and therefore there is a really low quality threshold to embracing new team suggestions. Any suggestion, however marginal, that strikes you and the team as an improvement to the current draft output will be welcomed. Writing a new Post-it with the suggestion on it, moving a few other Post-its around, et voilà – a new draft in 10 seconds.

In the case of the two other physical supports (Paper, Board), altering the current draft has a higher price. Ugly scratch marks on a pristine draft (Paper), or having to wipe away and rewrite whole sections to make way for the new comment (Board). I have seen countless times how a facilitator will push back against the same marginal comment if the physical support is painful to alter – creating a higher threshold for embracing team suggestions, and disappointing contributors more for the same level of contribution. The same issue applies irrespective of the technique used (Happy Line, Mutation Game, Payoff Profiles, etc.). The choice of physical support on which the team captures its work-in-progress has an impact on the team dynamics and the ultimate quality of the final product. And so does the choice of body positions.

In summary: the Post-it is mightier than the pen – all the more so when used with everyone standing up! - IRL or o Miro /Mural

Abstract from my book "How to Be Strategic" (Penguin Business, 2020)