April Dunford published a great post this week

Taking the money away often takes away all of the really obvious options. And that’s exactly where the magic happens. So we can’t just spend more to acquire new customers. Now what? Well, we could figure out ways to engage them to send more business our way, we could figure out ways to sell more to the customers we have, we could figure out ways to improve our customer retention. There are always a thousand things you can do with a small budget.

As someone who has spent his marketing career working for nonprofits and small, scrappy startups, I can definitely say I love the challenge of having to do a lot with a little. Necessity truly becomes the mother of invention.

Do yourself a favor and read April’s whole post.

What our hero, Bicycle Repair Man, shows is that it doesn’t matter if we’re surrounded by awesomely powerful individuals. Our job is to dig down and discover what truly makes each of us unique and what skills we have that we can use in our own distinct way.

So what about you…how do you relate to our hero here?

What did I do with it? Did I bury it under my papers or throw it aside with the bills? Nope. I hung it on the fridge so everyone in the family could admire it. And for Katie, it serves as a visible reminder of her own creative talents.

Isn’t this what social media is…a big whopping refrigerator? Each of us has the ability to create something magnificent and now share with the world. We get to be kids again complete with the same giddy excitement we once got when proudly sharing work.

Now, let’s flip this around a bit. As a company, are you creating a fridge for your customers to post their own proudly created content? Perhaps a video or pictures showing what they made using your product? Or a story about how your service made their day (or work) better? (Nonprofit organizations, you can feel free to ask yourself similar questions.) Imagine how much your customers will feel about your company if you give them a place to show off their best work? If they’re like Katie, they’ll be beaming from ear-to-ear.

I’d say that intuition and innovation are similar beasts. That innovation doesn’t actually happen without intuition. The sooner you get your your clients to realize that they’ve bought not a process but a rare group of people who have the courage, creativity, humility, and perseverence to begin making a thing without knowing what it will be and who have the intuition to suddenly see it when they’ve stumbled across it, your services become way more valuable and way less common than some guaranteed proprietary process.

Sell what truly makes your service marketable – the unique genius of you and your people. All the other stuff isn’t really that remarkable.

BONUS: Rosa Say also wrote a post called When Made to Stick Will. You’ll find similarly intriguing ideas there.

What’s particularly nifty is that as you hover over each element, you see the method in action. And bonus points for using the periodic tables as yet another visualization method. There are over 100 methods here so now I have no excuses for falling into an idea presentation funk again.

Even though Kevin provides a brief glimpse at his methodology, I’m still not sure about the data he’s using. It would be interesting to see it in its raw form.

So, the question I have as I look over this map is what this means for businesses and for creatives. For the latter, it clearly shows where to find other creatives and probably more fulfilling work options.

Some questions to ponder:

Is there a reason why Arizona, Nevada, and much of the west are relatively cool to creatives? It’s interesting that Southern California doesn’t factor into the map. New Orleans is still fairly hot. The area around Cincinnati is positively smoking. Bear in mind that I haven’t really dug into Florida’s core research so I find these trends curious.

Is geography still an important influence? We hear about creative folks ditching the big city scene for the small town or rural environment. And as long as there is a basic supportive infrastructure – I’m going to put high-speed internet/communications toward the top of that list – can’t you just move out to Santa Fe, New Mexico or Fargo, ND for a more creatively conducive environment? Will there be a point where the internet (or another future technology…like teleportation…I’m serious) will make geography an obsolete concept?

Do you see something interesting about the map? Any surprises?

One of the guiding themes behind workplay is cultivating a playful workplace. This isn’t just about creating a working environment where people enjoy what they do. It’s also about creating workspaces that match the need for creativity and inspiration that are essential for success. If you think about it, it’s rather naive to expect a lot of fresh insights and ideas when you’re sitting in a gray cubicle, surrounded by white walls and neutral colored flooring. Which is why I was happy to come across Alexander’s examples of organizations who seem to understand the connection between space and creativity. As he writes:

Physical space matters. It’s easier to be productive, creative and happy at work in a colourful, organic, playful environment than in a grey, linear, boring one.

Exactly. Here’s his post and flickr set.

So, so perhaps you’re thinking, “Hey, this is a pretty good idea. Our folks need a more stimulating, engaging workspace. Where do I start?” Good question. Glad you asked. Here’s some ideas to get us started.

Pimp the Office Day
So, you have boring, white walls throughout your office space. Time to liven them up and what better or easier way to do than through a new paint job. Go to your local home improvement store and pick up some paint. Get employees involved in selecting colors, even themes for different areas of the workspace. Then, tell your customers that the office is closing for a day, turn off the phones, computers, etc, and go to work.

Why stop at just walls? Time to pimp out those mind-draining conference rooms. Need some inspiration? Check out Alexander’s more recent post: 12 Ways to Pimp Your Office. The point here is to start getting folks involved in building their own creative spaces.

Work on Wheels
Even if you have a stimulating environment, it’s hard to be creative if you’re stuck in the same place in the office floor plan day after day. One way to bring out the creative juices is to change your scenery. So, rather than an office space of fixed cubicles, turn your most valuable creative assets loose by giving them the freedom to roam. Give them laptops with wireless connections. toss out the cubes for more free-floating kiosk-like tables. Put file cabinets on wheels. Whatever it takes to get them up and moving around.

Org Chart Milkshake
Creativity doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Sparks of creativity are also generated by shifts in thinking and being around folks who are different from us. So, shake up that floor plan by creating workspace pods where each person is from a different department. In nearly every organization, people are clumped together by their function: marketers sit together, salesfolks sit together, account managers sit together…you get the picture. This may have made sense in the days prior to IMs, emails, and videoconferencing. Now, we tend to do it because it’s mindlessly ingrained in our business thinking. Time to get mindful again. If your organization appears to be siloed and you can’t figure out why, take one good look at where folks sit every day.

There are many more ideas out there. If your organization does something cool and innovative to shake up its office space, I’d love to hear it. The one thing we all need are more business cases to prove what we intuitively know: Workspace matters when it comes to being creative, stimulated, and engaged in our work, which is always good for the bottom line.

A couple of weeks ago, Kevin Holland at Associations Inc. blogged on a recent King of the Hill episode lampooning the workplace entertainment provided by Cold Stone Creamery. If you’ve never been to a Cold Stone, it’s a “customize your own ice cream” shop where the work staff break out into song when they receive a tip (or any other time if they feel like it). All of which I have to say is…great. Why not? I know when I go to my local Dairy Queen, I rarely get a “thanks” let alone a verse or two from Oklahoma.

But the real question that Kevin raises is about what constitutes fun in our work. Not so long ago during the dotcom boom days, fun was the active ingredient that separated the young turks from the old fogies. New, exuberant companies brought in foosball tables, pinball machines, cappuccino bars, and other things that made it a fun place to be. Now it seems that with the bust of those heady days, the pendulum is swinging back to a strict focus on the bottom line and getting results. It’s as if an indictment has been passed that playing air hockey at 3pm rather than bad business decisions contributed to the demise of these companies.

Let’s take another look at fun and its interaction with the concept of play. I wager one of the central issues here is that fun is viewed as frivolous and childish and lead to a general lack of seriousness in a world that takes itself a bit too seriously. And perhaps there is a general fear that if our staff is playing, they’re definitely not working.

As Kevin mentions, fun is a relative term so let me offer an individual perspective and then bring play into the mix. I believe fun is an extraneous concept, and yet, not one to be dismissed entirely. Fun is creating an environment where staff can be celebrated as people, not mere workers. Bring on the birthday cakes, allow for laughter over a lunchtime game of parcheesi, have a beer or coffee afterhours. Each of us brings various levels of intrigue and complexity to the workplace…to assume that we are only here to just do a job and go home may not fully express that depth of character. After all, we are social beings who are eager to relate with others.

If we view fun as a cultural activity residing outside of the standard operations of work, I submit that play is an integrative activity. Play is a rich toolset that allows individuals and groups to bring out their best creative efforts, effectively pool their talents, and focus their energy on challenges. It’s a way of looking at the same old things differently. It’s a powerful method of altering perceptions and unteathering ourselves from conventional thinking. And, unfortunately, it’s a workplace characteristic that is sadly underutilized due to some of the stigmas mentioned earlier.

Final thoughts…Be judicious with fun and don’t overdo it or else you end up just Managing by Serving Cake (Nice, Kevin). Find a way to blend our oft-forgotten humanness into the daily work which can have its own set of rewards. But, be liberal with play and use it whenever possible. Find a way to integrate it into as many processes as you can. Business doesn’t have to be a somber activity. With a little fun and a lot of play, it might just liberate our best work.

Case in point…I read Patti Digh’s 37 Days blog and it’s just fabulous. But I usually read it from my Rojo newsreader. So, today I go and read her latest post and it hits me that her content is just one aspect of the total 37 Days experience. The content might be the most important, but there’s other neat things to find there as well. The whole site personifies her whimsical and deeply soulful view of the world. I liked her mystery carrot award so much I gave myself one.

Guess all of this builds into a somwhat frustrating and confounding observation I have with blogging and blogreading. I’m thankful to have folks like you who read the stuff that tumbles out of my brain. And I’m inviting you to take a deeper look at my blog and the rest of Bailey WorkPlay if all you’ve ever experienced is through your Bloglines or other RSS reader.

And don’t start and end with just me…make an effort to actually visit the blogsites of people who you find fascinating. And let them know what you like. As blogging is a personal pursuit for all of us who take it playfully serious, it’s always nice to know that you’re loved not only for the content of your mind, but for your body as well.

What’s particularly interesting are some of the initial comments from Maish about our learned lack of comfort with being uncomfortable. As someone with children just entering the U.S. educational system, his thoughts run parallel to my own – we either need to worrk to change the system (which is an uphill battle and frought with much despair) or change the way we help our kids (which is something specific that all parents have the power to do). Here’s Maish’s thoughts:

It’s one thing to be out of touch, it’s totally another to do something about it. In this day and age, success, I think, comes to those who are comfortable being uncomfortable or those who deliberately practice being uncomfortable. But many of us shy way from being out of touch. A few days ago I had a chat with a friend who runs creativity courses here and he signaled out the education system as the reason for this passive shyness. Right from the start we are told to draw on the lines and color inside the boxes and this conformity mindset has molded us into being passive receivers. But thanks to the Internet, there is hope.

So, let’s encourage our kids to draw outside the lines, wear clothes that don’t match, make messes, make mistakes, think really big things. Build their confidence to be active generators rather than mere passive receivers. And continue to listen and encourage them when an old, industrial-era teacher comes along to squash these better qualities. Because it will happen at some point either as a kid or as an adult. Creativity is an act of open disobedience against the norms. Creativity is an act of courage