The five steps to
Doing Different
Things Differently
“Think differently” is easy advice to give. Knowing where to start is a lot harder.
The five steps to Doing Different Things Differently™ are a process for moving beyond familiar answers and unlocking breakthrough ideas. Five steps to help you notice opportunities, decide what to change, imagine another way, and bring it to life.
Step One
The Fixation
Notice the thing worth changing.
It might be a problem everyone has learned to work around, or a possibility that keeps catching your attention. Either way, the first step to creative change is looking closely enough that something familiar becomes a question again.
Step Two
The Shift
Choosing what to do about it gives you a direction.
Do you want to fix what's broken? Change how people see it? Make a new version? Strip it back to its most important elements?
Step Three
The Vision
“That's not how we do things” can end an idea before you've had a chance to explore it.
The same expertise that helps you do your job can also narrow what you think your job allows. Before we work with what we have, we have to let ourselves imagine the boldest possible way to bring about the shift we want to make.
Step Four
The Canvas
You've got your vision. You've probably also got a deadline, a budget, and a limited amount of energy.
Those limits don't have to be reasons to stop. The canvas is where the idea has to live, and this is where we get resourceful about the tools and constraints available to us to make our idea real.
Step Five
The Sketch
An idea in your head can stay perfect forever.
A first attempt gives you something more useful: a chance to discover what works and what doesn't. The sketch is the small, imperfect experiment that gets us infinitely farther than another hour of thinking would. You're not trying to prove that your first idea is brilliant; you're just giving it a chance to become something greater.
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