Pivot Pivot: Part 2
(Note: This blog is the second of a two part series. Click Here to read part one.)
Union Chapel
Vancouver, WA
Monday, July 15th, 2019
It was only slightly overcast that morning but not enough to dampen the creative spirits about to enter into the unknown. Cars were beginning to park in front of the Union Chapel in order to drop off their elementary aged cargo. Today was the first day of Design Camp and each boy and girl could hardly wait. Once inside, attendees quickly climbed the stairs and entered the large, open room where their activities for the week would be held. As the students raced toward the tables and chairs set up in the center loaded with supplies for their week’s design work, I suspect their minds were quite fixated upon imagining what creative fury they were about to release upon their yet undersigned architectural masterpieces.
This was the second year of Riff Creative’s Design Camp, a five day period of creative exploration for children ages 7-12. The creative energy in the room was nearly palpable. If excitement were an aroma, I like to imagine the room would have smelled like sweet and sour chicken, the kind where you can’t decide if it’s more sweet or sour, you just know you like it and want more.
Vida Internacional
El Suyatal, Honduras
Saturday, March 14th, 2020
“This isn’t how I wanted it to end,” she thought to herself as she hurriedly packed her bags. Airports and even countries were quickly shutting down and there was no guarantee that Elena could make it out in time to fly home to Washington before the whole world settled into a deep stillness of an unknown duration. She had only just arrived in Honduras on January 13th to volunteer as a 2nd grade English teacher at the Campos Blancos school an hour and a half outside of Tegucigalpa, yet here she was packing her bags and trying to book a flight home. Oddly enough there were no rebel forces advancing upon the grounds, no forest fires, no flash floods.
There was only COVID.
Elena Anunciado had just finished all of her coursework for her degree in Public Relations/Graphic Design shortly before leaving for Honduras and she was eager to knock on life’s door to discover what was on the other side. Now, however, after having been given but a small glimpse at what that might be, it felt like that door had just been slammed shut by a mysterious global pandemic, a pandemic that would soon have her packed into a car on the bumpy road back to the airport. No goodbyes, no tearful hugs, no exchange of cards or gifts or “Muchas Gracias”. Just a lonely car ride that was as solemn as the new reality beginning to open, like a door that, unfortunately, could not be slammed shut.
Riff Creative
Vancouver, WA
March, 2020
Like Elena, many of us found ourselves en route to an ideal preferred future before COVID sucker punched us in the face. Visions had been cast, goals created, and investments made. The only thing we needed from life was for her to keep unfolding in a calm and orderly fashion.
Life then laughed and asked us to hold her beer.
This is where Riff Creative also found itself. Despite all of the success they’d had with Design Camp in the past couple of years and the plans they had to continue it in 2020, it was simply impossible to offer Design Camp the way it had been offered previously due to the social distancing restraints. The team was quick to cancel the event but they knew there had to be another way to continue offering the camp while remaining safe and respecting health guidelines. So, after the team wrapped their minds around the new challenges they faced while exploring the myriad of tools available to them, they had an idea. With all of the different types of subscription products in the world that required no social interaction, there was no reason they couldn’t use that same delivery method for Design Camp. If they couldn’t bring the kids to Design Camp, they would bring Design Camp to the kids!
That’s where Elena comes in. Having recently moved back to her hometown of Vancouver, Elena was now in need of a new job as her previous plans had dramatically fallen through. With Riff in search of a talented graphic designer to bring their new subscription design product to life, it was an obvious fit. It was bittersweet that both Riff and Elena had found their trips to their preferred destinations simultaneously cancelled. Yet while hopes of arriving in one destination had been derailed, life was about to print both of them a new one-way ticket into the exciting unknown.
INTO THE UNKNOWN
While a victim mindset would have been an understandable response for Elena given the way COVID had tread on her, she instead saw a beautiful opportunity to grow her capacity as a designer at Riff. Elena had previously been accustomed to following someone else’s design directives on creative projects, but now she was placed in charge of imagining an entirely new product, a phoenix from the pandemic’s ashes. All she was given was the idea that design camp would now be rebranded as a subscription based experience. From that generic directive, “Into the Unknown” was born.
First, picture a magical snow princess singing and dancing as she stares longingly into the frozen mountains.
Now stop because this has nothing to do with “Frozen 2”.
Instead, imagine an 8 year old girl who just received a box in the mail. It is a brown box with pictures of colorful leaves and toucans scattered on each of the six faces. On the top of the box are the words “Into the Unknown” and underneath that is the word “Jungle”. Excitedly the girl opens the box and gasps with delight as she pulls out…well, I can’t tell you what’s inside because each box is a surprise. But what I can tell you is that inside are all the tools she will need to design her architectural solution to help fight deforestation in the rainforests.
Once she’s finished designing that, she’ll receive another box, except this one will say “Outer Space” instead of “Jungle”, and rockets and planets will have replaced the trees and toucans. In it the girl will be given the tools to design and build a product that will aid astronauts in their extraterrestrial adventures.
Finally, upon completion of those two design assignments, she’ll receive her final box. The “Underwater” box will share with her a road map to aid her in creating a logo for a nonprofit that helps keep the oceans clean. COVID could have easily robbed this girl of her design camp experience but creativity found a way to apprehend the tragedy and restore hope to a tired world. In Elena’s words, “It’s all about how you lean into the pain and discomfort of life to see what your creativity can produce.” In Elena’s case, her creativity produced not just boxes but a small return to normalcy for many of their customers.
“It’s all about how you lean into the pain and discomfort of life to see what your creativity can produce.”
STRENGTHEN
Outside of the tangible fruits of her creative labor, COVID also produced in Elena the strength to make quick decisions and act upon them. In their book “Extreme Ownership”, authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin call this the ability to “prioritize and execute”. In the midst of chaos, the ability to prioritize and execute is imperative. Fear and confusion have a tendency to take our ability to think quickly and rationally and throw it into the blender, leaving us with nothing more than a soup sandwich. Stories of triumph in the midst of chaos almost always involve the rescue of our rational decision making mind. The leader who cannot quickly and rationally identify what fire is most important to put out and then douse it will be left with nothing but the ashes of what used to be.
“Fear and confusion have a tendency to take our ability to think quickly and rationally and throw it into the blender, leaving us with nothing more than a soup sandwich.”
HONE
Elena also took the season of disruption and used it to hone her creative capacity. Riff Creative’s sudden need for a total makeover of their product provided Elena with the perfect opportunity to acquire new skills. Working on the Design Camp rebrand gave her the opportunity to learn how to manage a project, create a marketing strategy, run a product-specific social media platform, and work with a team. While much of what Elena needed she already had from her training in school, there was still room for her to hone her abilities. Unless you also take advantage of pressure to hone your unique skill set, you may find someday that the abilities you possess aren’t enough for where you want to go.
“Unless you also take advantage of pressure to hone your unique skill set, you may find someday that the abilities you possess aren’t enough for where you want to go.”
REIMAGINE
Before working at Riff, Elena had always seen herself as an executor of someone else’s creative vision. However, when Riff placed her in a role of both executing the vision AND creating it, she found that not only was her new role as the visionary strenuous, it was also fulfilling. “I think coming up with the big picture was something that was more daunting to me earlier in the process but as I look back on it now it’s probably the part I’m most proud of.” What she was asked to do was no small feat, yet she and the team at Riff found a creative way to make a hard pivot from what they had created in the past in order to lean “into the unknown” of what COVID held for them and their customers. In situations like this, the difference between a creative and non-creative person is that when a wall blocks the path, the non-creative person says, “What an insurmountable wall that is” and walks away, while the creative person says, “What a lovely bridge that could be” as they kick it down and walk across. Through Elena’s unexpected role in rebranding Design Camp, she found the opportunity to reimagine where she could go in her career. She now entertains the idea of possibly continuing her role as a project visionary, a career direction she might not have considered without COVID.
“The difference between a creative and non-creative person is that when a wall blocks the path, the non-creative person says, “What an insurmountable wall that is” and walks away, while the creative person says, “What a lovely bridge that could be” as they kick it down and walk across.”
SIPPING THE BEER
While Elena still works from home and admits they have no idea what Design Camp will look like next year, stories like Elena’s show us that when life asks us to hold her beer, we can either passively obey while doing nothing or we can leisurely sip the beer while creating something remarkable. Perhaps it feels like the slamming doors and insurmountable walls in your life have stuffed you into a box, but if Elena’s story can teach us anything it’s that even a box can help us strengthen our skills, hone our abilities, and reimagine our future.
Good luck in the unknown.
“When life asks us to hold her beer, we can either passively obey while doing nothing or we can leisurely sip the beer while creating something remarkable. ”