What does the Artist's Way have to do with a Voice of Customer community?

If you’re like me you probably have a latent, and possibly starved desire to create. This is largely because I come from a family with one brother, who is a ceramicist, and the other brother is a set designer. I work on a computer. And typically I have held the more common ways of creating: painting, making music, drawing as the more ‘real’ types of creativity. But I think I’ve been looking at it all wrong.

I’ve been wanting to read the Artist’s Way for several years. I was curious to learn what the ‘way’ is and what it meant. So as part of a Christmas gift to myself I ordered a copy and there was a sentence from one of the first pages and it made me sit up, put the book down for a moment and really think what it meant and how it applied to the work I do and the community we are trying to build.

The sentence was “Creativity flourishes in an atmosphere of safety and acceptance”.

This sentence made me rethink and reframe what creativity means within the context of product marketing and product development and how creativity is critical to generate ideas for new solutions. I also thought about the work we do with Voice of the Customer where we are building a community of trust to learn, share and grow. But now that I think more about it, I’d extend that thinking a bit to suggest that a Voice of the Customer community is a catalyst for creativity.

In product marketing or development, we are imaging the future and attempting to create the solutions we might need to address challenges or take advantage of possibilities. I can’t predict what’s going to happen next week at times but to push and work through where we’d like to be, recognizing we can’t possibly know what’s coming next month never mind next year takes original thinking.

At most of our VoC events, we talk about our roadmap and ask the community to prioritize where we should put our time and resources. But one of the most insightful parts of the exercise is when we ask the group, “what’s missing”, '“what haven’t we thought about”, or “what are we late on”?

Of course, getting to this point of creativity requires more than just adding a ‘brainstorming’ session to the event. In fact, I don’t know of any other sure-footed way to douse an adult’s creative spark than to suggest a brainstorming session.

So instead of saying “what’s most the most important feature we should be working on?” we ask the community to visualize “What do you need to be successful?”. And that’s when things get interesting. Because not only do the capabilities critical to our customer’s success appear but solutions we had not considered or perhaps had backlogged show up with frequency and sometimes urgency across the community.

These exercises in creativity are part of our VoC events and are effective because we consistently listen and adapt to create an “atmosphere of safety and acceptance”. But what I like most about these exercises is that they tap into that desire in all of us to be creative, to think originally and extend our imagination into how we innovate and change how we work.

You need trust to create a community of learning

How do you build a community or any relationship based on trust? And how much confidence in that trust must people have before they beginning sharing their challenges and goals?

I lead the Voice of the Customer community where I work and have been thinking on what are some of the key ingredients to a dynamic and robust community. Some of the ingredients are likely trust, confidence, empathy, a certain selflessness, expertise, amongst others. But I’ve think about, chew on the idea of trust recently because of an experience I had at our most recent voice of the customer event.

We know that there are events in an agile transformation that are both critical and challenging yet necessary for success. And by most, these events are viewed with reluctance and some dread. Some brave members have made attempts with different degrees of success and others are just beginning. What all share in common is a desire to hear what the other members of the community are doing. To a person, they all want to hear from everyone else. In fact, we conducted a survey and the request to hear from others was most highly rated.

I’ll only share when it’s perfect

So, I thought let's have a couple of our members share what they’ve learned. The few members I asked to participate were hesitant to share because:

• they didn’t think they’d done it right

• they were just getting started

• they thought it was likely they might have to redo it

But, of course, this is exactly what their peers wanted to hear—that they weren’t alone in their struggle to get started or go back and improve.

Ultimately, I was able to convince a few members of our community to share. I chatted with each person and assured them that they weren’t alone either—that their community wanted to hear from them because they wanted to learn. They were bringing their expertise and we (the VoC team) were creating a space where they could feel confident and trust that their story would be respected.

More people sharing = more flow = more ideas

The vibrancy of any community or relationship is a show of trust and respect. And I think the confidence people have in their personal connections within a community are what enable the flow of ideas, knowledge, and creativity. If I don’t trust the group I’m a part of, I’m unlikely to share my knowledge or expertise. Why share my hard-earned wisdom with

I read an amazing book about the flow of ideas by Alex Pentland called Social Physics—get this book. It’s both horrifying how much data can be linked together and amazing because Alex tracks how ideas flow within teams, communities and countries. He also goes into detail about what types of groups generate better ideas than others. Think back to your last meetings. If only two out of a team of 8 or so are talking then you have a problem with idea generation and flow.

These ideas and are own surveys and observations will be used to build further confidence and trust so as to create the conditions for more sharing. The next step is to ensure more voices are heard.