S06.EP06 - Unlocking Innovation: How Play & Creativity Drive Success with Melissa Dinwiddie

0:03Hello and welcome to Just Branding. The only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies. Hello and welcome to Just Branding. Today we've got an incredible guest with us, Melissa Dinwiddie. She's an innovation strategist, a keynote speaker and author who's all about helping people and organizations unlock their creative potential. Melissa's background is anything but ordinary. She's been a professional artist, a calligrapher, an improviser, and even a jazz singer. So she brings a truly unique perspective to creativity and business.

0:48She's the creator of the Create the Impossible Framework, which is a simple but powerful three-step process that helps drive innovation by embracing play, imperfection, and fast learning. in. She's worked with companies like Facebook, Google, Uber, Salesforce, never heard of them. She helps team break through creative blocks and builds cultures that thrive on innovation. She's also the author of The Creative Sandbox Way, Your Path to a Full Color Life, a book that helps people rediscover their creativity and bring it to their work and lives. So get ready for an inspiring conversation on creativity, innovation, and making the impossible happen.

1:27So let's jump in. Hello, Melissa. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Melissa, your journey is quite incredible, like dancing and calligraphy, jazz, you know, corporate innovation. Can you take us through how you went from like believing you weren't creative at all to making creativity your career? Yeah, thanks for asking that. You know, it's really funny because people look at me with my history of going to Juilliard in the dance division and having a 15-year career as an artist and performing and touring as a jazz singer and songwriter. And they think that I must have, you know, always have been brimming with creative confidence.

2:07But that is not actually the case. I have spent a lot of my life thinking that I was not a creative person. And I have struggled with creative block. And, you know, I really relate to those people who think of themselves as not creative and who struggle with creative block because I have been there. So my story is that I was like pretty much everybody. I, we all are born creative and, you know, kids just play in sandboxes and love to play with crayons and love to jump around and, you know, try things. and that was me as a kid. I was always drawing and singing and doing all the stuff that comes naturally.

2:51But as early as first grade, I started noticing what other kids were doing and comparing my own work to other kids' work, like falling in what I call the comparison trap. There was a kid in first grade, Aaron Brody. In fact, I saw him at a reunion just a couple months ago, and I was able to tell him this story. And he drew race cars. And he drew these amazing race cars that were so realistic for first grade. And I remember thinking to myself, I can't draw race cars like that. Now, I actually had no desire to draw race cars, but I couldn't draw the way that he could draw. And so I built this story in my head that I wasn't as good as he was.

3:38Therefore, I wasn't as good. Now, I didn't look at my work through the lens of what I could do. I looked at my work through the lens of I couldn't do what he could do. Therefore, I sucked. And it just sort of progressed from there until around age 13, when I just bought into the lie that other people were creative and I was not. By the time I was in college, I really believed that I was a non-creative person. And I basically quit doing art at 13. I quit doing music at 15. I did take up dance and that was my creative thing. And I ended up going to Juilliard. I took a year off after high school in order to dance really intensively.

4:29and went to UC Berkeley for a year. And then I went to Juilliard for a year, and then I got injured. So that was the end of the dance career. But in any case, I sort of fell backwards into when I rediscovered my creativity in my late 20s, I kind of, did you ever see The Wizard of Oz, the movie, The Wizard of Oz? And it starts off all in black and white, right? And then Dorothy gets swept up in the tornado and she lands in Oz and she exits the house that the tornado sweeps up and everything's in Technicolor. And that was my experience when I finally came back to creative pursuits in my late 20s.

5:12It was like my creative spirit had been sort of locked away in a closet and I started taking art classes and creative writing classes and doing all kinds of creative pursuits that I had not allowed myself to do because I had bought into this lie, this story that I was not a creative person, therefore I didn't get to do these things. And so finally, I let myself do these things that just gave me so much joy and I didn't get stuck in the requirement that I be good at them. And here's the thing, we get good at things by doing them. And we, you know, if you let yourself suck at something and just do it, then guess what?

5:55You start to get better at it. So I sort of fell backwards into a career as a professional calligrapher and artist and did that for 15 years. And that's how I made my living. ironically as somebody who thought i'm not an artist i'm not creative and i ended up making my living as an artist i love that yeah that metaphor of visit of oz like the black and white to color it's a full kind of circle moment i guess and i kind of leave to your framework which is what perked my interest when i came across your profiles like create the impossible and it's such a strong line right so let's break that down if you don't mind just you know the ideas of playing hard, making crap, learning fast.

6:39Can you walk us through each of these steps and explain why they work? Absolutely. So my Create the Impossible framework, so it might sound really simple, but it's built on decades of research into creativity and innovation, plus my own experience working with teams across different industries and my own life experience. So step one is play hard. And that is about embracing your inner four-year-old. People often hear play hard and they think, oh, go to Vegas and get wild. That is not what it's about. It is about following your curiosity, experimenting, exploring, and not being concerned about what other people think, about making money, about winning awards.

7:27It is just about being in that playful state where our brains actually function differently. Play activates multiple brain networks simultaneously, and it reduces activity in our fear center, which creates the ideal conditions for innovation. So that's step one. So when you say play, what's your idea of play? What does that actually mean? How would you define that? If you imagine a little child in a sandbox, and when they're playing in a sandbox, they're exploring, they're experimenting, they're asking themselves, what would happen if I tried this? What would happen if I tried that? What would happen if I poured water on this structure that I just created?

8:20That's what I mean by play hard. It's asking those what if questions. it's following curiosity, it's experimenting and exploring. And that can take lots of different forms, but it's that general space of following curiosity. That's what I mean by play hard. All right. And then make crap is the next one. Yeah. So, the second step is make crap. This is where most people and organizations get stuck because we're so afraid of making mistakes that we end up making nothing. That's perfectionist paralysis. That is fear of taking risks. That's fear of looking bad in front of your colleagues. That is a lot of organizations don't pay people to fail, right?

9:16They don't want you to ever fail. But here's the thing. Innovation requires experimentation. Failure is part of the process. We need the crap to fertilize the good stuff. You can't get to the good stuff without the fertilizer. And of course, experiments often fail. This is what people fail to understand about, say, the scientific process. They want the vaccine without all of the experimentation that gets to the vaccine. And the scientific process is all about a whole lot of iteration. Like this is where we are now, but where we're going to be a year from now is going to be different. So what we say is the right thing right now is going to change a year from now or six months from now or five years from now, that's a scientific process.

10:11So making crap is all about letting it suck right now, lowering your standards so that you can make something so that you can get to the next thing, which is going to be better. There's a saying I like to say, which is it takes a lot of crap to create a beautiful flower, which comes back to the fertilizer. Exactly. Yeah, we're on the same wavelength. Exactly. Yeah. Every failed prototype, every terrible first draft, every bad idea, they're not wastes of time, which unfortunately is how so many organizations see them, but they're actually essential stepping stones to break through innovation. I've got a little question so in this process how much time percentage wise would you stay would you say would be worth somebody spending on step one and then how much time would you suggest they spend on step two and I know we've not got step three yet but is there like would you spend more time in the first step or not like what's your thinking on on focus I guess Yeah, that is a really great question.

11:25It's a continual process. So I haven't broken it down in terms of percentage of time, but I do see it as a continual process. So you're going to be playing hard, making crap, those sort of go together. And then step three, which we haven't gotten to is learn fast, which is going to take you back into that playful place so that you can make more crap so that you can learn from it. So it's just this constant cycle that you're going through. All right, let's get to step three and then we can perhaps open Pandora's box up again. By the way, my role in all of this, as usual, is just cause absolute chaos with questions I've not prepped.

12:12We've not prepped Melissa for. So apologies. Carry on. Keep going. Let's get to That's great. I love that. I'm an improviser, so bring it on. Okay, so step three is learn fast. And this is about turning every experience, especially the failures into valuable data. So instead of getting stuck in perfectionism or analysis paralysis, innovative teams create rapid feedback loops that accelerate learning. So, and again, we're just, it's going to go back to that play hard space. So, you don't just get stuck in learn fast, you're going back to playing hard, going back to making more crap and learning fast from what you've made and playing hard again.

13:01And it's just this continual cycle that's going to generate your breakthroughs and innovations. Okay. So that's kind of like the theory behind each of the steps. So I'd love to hear an example of how that actually came to fruition, perhaps someone you've worked with or a team, for example. Yeah. So one of my favorite examples is a research team at Meta. So they were totally brilliant. These are genius level IQs with advanced degrees, but they were struggling to get their insights heard and implemented across the organization. So they're not being very effective because they've got these amazing insights, but nothing's happening.

13:47So the manager came to me and asked if I could help. The problem wasn't that their research wasn't valuable. It absolutely was. The issue was one of what I refer to as the three C's. The three C's that I typically help organizations with are connection, communication, and creativity. And their big issue was communication. Tends to be a big issue for a lot of organizations. They were so focused on getting every detail perfect that they were either communicating too late after decisions had already been made, or they were just overwhelming their stakeholders with like a fire hose of information.

14:37There were other issues that were happening as well, but those were a couple of issues that are specifically relevant to the Create the Impossible framework. So we applied the Create the Impossible framework starting with Play Hard. And I introduced exercises that helped them approach communication as a creative challenge rather than a technical one. And this shift in mindset was really crucial. And then we moved to make crap. So instead of waiting until they had perfect analyses, which is a tendency for these folks, they came from academia and they had this very particular way of operating, which tend to sort of mire them in perfectionist paralysis and getting stuck in that analysis place.

15:24Instead of getting stuck there, they started sharing rough draft insights earlier in the process. And this was really uncomfortable for them at first, because of course, they're perfectionists, but they pushed through. And then the learn fast piece came in as they gathered feedback on their early insights, And they started seeing patterns in what resonated with stakeholders versus what fell flat. And the transformation that happened was really remarkable. Not only did their research begin having more impact across the organization, but managers started recommending my program to their friends in other departments.

16:11And I even had one participant tell me that they were able to salvage a meeting that was going sideways by applying a technique that they'd learned in one of our sessions. And that is one of my favorite examples. And what I really love about this case study is that it shows how this framework applies even to highly analytical work. It's not just for, you know, the creative departments. It's essential for anyone looking to innovate and make an impact. Which should be everyone right like ultimately otherwise otherwise you're gonna you're gonna stay stay stale and you're not gonna progress and you're not gonna see opportunities or be able to seize them so yeah brilliant let me go a little bit deeper on that so how is this actually working right if you go into an organization and you're saying they're working together or playing hard together what's that actually look look like and how are they coming together getting feedback and so forth or is it like a workshop like are they all in the room together and you know they converge and then go out on their own and then come back?

17:13Yeah. Well, typically the way that I work with organizations is I go in and I lead them through a series of workshops, or if it's a long-term engagement, it might be a series of workshops, leadership retreats, keynotes, that kind of thing. So then I'm helping them develop skills, essentially build muscles, that then they, and I like to work with them long-term because it's akin to going to the gym to develop physical muscles. You can't just expect to go once and emerge with a whole bunch of muscles, right? You got to go consistently for a while to really develop those muscles over time. So I go in, I lead them through a series of activities.

18:03I can give you some examples of how I might work, like specifically what kinds of activities I might do. Let's do that. I think folks are super curious. I mean, if you're willing to share like just one or two. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So here's an example of a communication activity that I often use with groups. Like for example, this research team or several research teams that I've worked with at Meta to help them communicate for greater impact and influence. One activity that I love to use. I call it time traveler. This one is incredibly effective for helping them understand, apply empathy and helping them understand how to communicate with somebody who has, comes from a different background, has different context than they do.

18:50So I pair people up and I've done this in virtual sessions and I've done this in in-person sessions, same activity. So in their pairs, one person is from the present time and everything is normal for them. The other partner is a time traveler from 500 years ago. So first we do as a group, before I send them off into their pairs, we do a little bit of brainstorming about how is life different for that time traveler from 500 years ago. It's 1525. So what is life like for somebody walking around on the planet in 1525. And people popcorn, you know, oh, there's no electricity. There's maybe no running water.

19:41They, you know, how did they make their livings? You know, oh, they farmed. They, you know, they didn't have modern medicine. They, you know, they just talk about various different things, right? How life actually was different for somebody in 1525. And maybe they're in different parts of the different parts of the planet. So then they, they, before I send them off into their pairs, they get a task and their task is the person from the present time, their cell phone just rang and they have to explain what this device is to their time traveling partner. But remember their time traveling partner, there's a high likelihood that they're going to think that they're a witch because this is clearly witchcraft to somebody from 1525.

20:31So, they're going to have to not only explain what their cell phone is, but also convince their partner that they are not a witch. And they have two minutes to do this. Now, this is an impossible exercise. But that's the task. So I send them off in their partners. They have two minutes. There's a lot of laughter. It's impossible. I bring them back after two minutes and I ask them, okay, how many witches are in the room? Half the hands go up because nobody succeeds at this exercise. However, some people maybe did something that was sort of effective. So I say, okay, hey, time travelers, what did your partner do that was effective?

21:19And we pull the room and we discover what was effective. And invariably, the people who did something that was effective, they found some kind of common ground with their partner. And they used some kind of an analogy that their partner could understand that made sense to their partner according to their context from 1525, right? So then with that, you know, understanding, we then switch roles and I give them a different task that's, you know, similar, but not exactly the same. So they go off again, and they have a little bit better success this time, because now they really understand, oh my God, I have to find common ground with my time traveling partner.

22:04And I have to use some kind of an analogy that they're going to understand. What I have experienced when I run this exercise is that people then go off into their real lives and they meet other people. They have interactions with other people. For example, Laura from one of my meta workshops went off and had a meeting with a cross-functional teammate and was trying to explain something to him. And he didn't understand what she was talking about. And she was getting frustrated and getting really annoyed. And then suddenly she realized he's not being a jerk. He's not stupid. He just has a different context.

22:46He doesn't have my expertise in my area. I have to think from his perspective and his context and explain it using an analogy that he can understand, just like the time traveler exercise. And that's exactly what she did. He understood. He was able to bring an insight that she hadn't even thought about. And it was this amazing experience. And she brought that back the next week to share with the rest of the team. And I get that kind of feedback all the time from that exercise. Now, that is an example of the kind of thing that I do with teams. The exercises that I do are all different, but that's an example where I send them off or maybe it's a group activity where we're all doing something together that feels like play.

23:40Sometimes it might feel like it has nothing to do with the topic, whether it's communication or leadership or whatever it is. It might feel like we're just playing this silly game. It's getting people laughing and connecting. And then I bring them back together for a debrief discussion that connects the dots between their daily work or whatever the topic is, and the light bulbs over their head start going off. They have these amazing insights, these aha moments, and the learning is so powerful because they create the learning themselves. Rather than me sitting up at the front of the room and lecturing at them, which would make the learning go in one ear, and out the other.

24:38Such a powerful exercise. And as you're saying that, it reminded me of how I asked ChatGPT and AI certain questions, like explain it like I'm five. So for example, I asked like quantum computing, like explain it like I'm five because I still don't really get quantum computing. And they literally explain it with an analogy. They're like, imagine light switches as on and off, right? With quantum computing, it's neither on and off, it's both at the same time. And I was like, that's when the light bulb literally went off. I was like, okay, I kind of get that idea based on that analogy for like a five-year-old.

25:12But I think just it comes back to that middle ground, like that common ground. You have to get on that level, bring it back to that level, understand what their knowledge and then, you know, reframe it. Exactly. I had a medical appointment the other, just last week. And I was so impressed with physician's assistant that I was dealing with, because he was, he did exactly that. And I told him, I gave him an appreciation for it. He used an analogy. And I was, I said, this is what I teach when I work with these corporate teams. And you do, you did such a brilliant job of it. Because so often, you know, a medical person or a technical person will spout their jargon at you and you just glaze over and you either feel bored or powerless or you don't understand it and it's not helpful.

26:05All right. I have a lot of follow-up questions, but I want to kind of switch it around here and kind of play devil's advocate because there may be some leaders in here listening, well, play sounds well and good, but it kind of like sounds nice in theory. How would you kind of like, what would your argument be against that for like a business environment? it? Well, first of all, I would say I absolutely understand that concern completely. In fact, I hear it all the time, especially in tech, where deadlines are really tight and competition is fierce. So I would validate their concern right off the bat.

26:37But here's the thing. Play is not a distraction from productivity. It is a catalyst for it. When we're under pressure, our tendency it's to double down, work harder, get more serious. But that approach actually activates our stress response, which literally shuts down part of our brain that is responsible for creative thinking and innovation. And play does the opposite. It activates the brain's networks that are associated with creativity while at the same time calming down our stress response. It's actually the most practical approach to innovation in a fast-paced environment. And I've seen this firsthand with tech teams on impossible deadlines.

27:33Just 10 to 15 minutes of intentional play can completely reset their thinking and lead to breakthroughs that might have taken, I don't know, days of grinding to achieve if they even achieved them at all. So I would tell that skeptical leader, don't think of play as a nice to have luxury. Think of it as a strategic tool for getting better results faster because that's exactly what it is. And also, the way that I use play with teams, it's not just as something that you do outside of work. Like, I bring play in as the work. This is how we get the work done. Not, we're going to play and then do the work.

28:23We're going to use play as our method of doing the work. it's a bit of a mindset thing it's not work or play it's kind of together right yeah together okay so how would you say is a simple way to bring this into like a team environment if you're talking to a leader for example first of all the key is to start small and focus on activities that feel relevant to your team's work right so here's some really easy ways that you can begin. You can start your meetings with a quick and playful check-in. So instead of, I don't know, typical check-in might be like, how is everyone today? So instead of doing that, you could try something unexpected.

29:09For example, if your mood was a weather pattern, what would it be right now? Just like a tiny little switch. It doesn't take any more time than your usual check-in, but it's a playful way of doing a check-in. And it immediately shifts the energy because it gets people thinking in a more playful manner. Second, I'm an improviser. I haven't been improvising my whole life like some people have. I just started improvising in 2013, but it is a huge part of who I am and how I operate and what I bring to the work that I do. And if you've ever heard of improv, then you probably have heard of the phrase yes and.

29:58And yes and does not mean agreement. It means accepting offers and building on them. So validating other people's ideas and building on those ideas. So the second thing I would say is to use the yes and technique from improv. So when somebody shares an idea, practice building on it, validating that idea and building on it. It doesn't mean if they bring you some crazy off the wall idea that you know is never going to work. It doesn't mean that you're actually going to implement it. It just means that you validate that idea, which means you're validating them for bringing an idea to you and build on it rather than immediately evaluating it, dismissing it, or blocking it, right?

30:47And this is going to create a more playful, generative conversation. And it is also going to ensure that that person is going to be more willing to come to you with ideas in the future. I 100 % agree with that. I've run creative teams before. And I used to always think that the number one killer of creativity was fear, right? Totally. If you've got a team of people and, you know, someone has a wacky idea and they announce it to the room and they get shot down and made to look stupid, Next time they have a wacky idea, which actually could be an amazing, brilliant, off-the-wall idea that no one's ever thought of, they're going to think twice about voicing it because they're worried that they're going to look stupid.

31:27So, like, I absolutely agree with that. I think that teams need to think about this very seriously, right? If you're going to say that should be anyone in any team in any business, no matter how small, you know, if you want to become more efficient, if you want to create more value, you need to be thinking like this. and it's rare isn't it's funny as human beings we kind of get into this kind of I don't know we get we get institutionalized don't we and then we start worrying about our next promotion we we're worried that we worry about all these sorts of things and that that's like not what we need in business we need people who are fearless who feel like who who within you know with obviously within reason who can who can therefore you know come up with ideas and see the opportunities or at least open themselves up to exploring them with others and I think what that's what you're talking about here right like it's that exploration let's go play let's find out new ideas let's has anyone else else got any thoughts to add to this you know how could we do this and I think that's beautiful yeah yeah it is it's a re there's a reason why whenever I do any kind of you know workshops or programs around whether it's communication or creativity it doesn't matter I am always starting with exercises around this concept of yes and.