- Learn by doing
- Take away a sound understanding of new concepts learned at the end of each activity
- Transform knowledge into intuition
- Share your learnings
- Experiment to avoid/overcome procrastination
- Go further, Carpe noctem
- Become literate in systems thinking
- Create services, and products as artefacts of services
- Always consider the surrounding context and environment of your output
- Understand, utilize & harness economics of scale, network effects
- Often the population (of ideas, opportunities & solutions, your network) is more important than the individual
- Again, adopt creation processes which support this approach
- Use the right tool for the right job - make those tools!
- Recognize too that each tool has limitations
- Benefit from these boundaries set
- Encourage creative flow in your process
- Utilize iterative, agile practices
- Constant refinement & refactoring
- Be part of networks
- However peers are not main source of inspiration
- Apply recursion to your process, but don't (give in to) repeat yourself: creatively & practically
- Allow for recombination of ideas by adopting modular development
- This applies personally & globally
- Acknowledge you're standing on the shoulders of giants
- Become your own giant
- Embrace Open Source thinking and practice
- Be open to new influences
- Encourage serendipity in your process
- Evaluate new processes, techniques & technologies, adopt them immediately where beneficial
- Benefit from and accept that you're working towards moving targets (caused by your own doing and that of others)
- Replace fixed, crystallized, pre-defined specifications with a shared vision as starting point
- Be prepared and allow the vision to change
- Define inputs as ranges, not constants, thus allowing your creation to be agile
- Accept failure as part of your process
- However, risk of major failure is drastically reduced in a continuous mode for issues can be recognized and addressed earlier on
- Use clear language without hype & buzzwords
- Be self-critical to promote quality & positiveness
- Ask the important, uneasy questions if you're in doubt
- Don't be afraid to change your opinion if new learnings require so
- Your output & process is more important than your brand, let these things BE your brand
- Attempt to move away from isolated projects towards a continuous flow of activity
- Small steps, more often
- Work iteratively and think modular
- Don't dilute the essence of a thing by giving in to feature creep
- Attempt constant feedback loops
Karsten Schmidt, 2008