Is your business a Hot Mess? You Might be in JUST the right place.

Dear business-building dragonfly,

​Creative processes, and design thinking, are at the center of creating any business, whether or not we acknowledge it. When we DO, and feed and water those roots and stems, bold and original creations come out, including brands that deliver their message with crystal clarity, with integrity, and with their values infused throughout word, image and action.

When we DON’T recognize the twists and turns as critical parts of creative process, we can feel like we are doing everything wrong.

The creation of my own business, the Bureau of Tactical Imagination, has followed cycles of creative process and design thinking all along, even in the places I thought it was just a big hot mess.

As I work to outline these processes of design thinking for my new program The Visionary Syndicate, I’m starting to look back see the meaning in the madness of my own business journey. Today I’m telling you part of my story — because I think it explains a LOT about the crises in confidence, plunges into fear, and struggles with uncertainty we ALL face as we build something new that we care about. I’m hoping it will give you some perspective that’s lacking in so much of the business advice around us.

In the Bureau’s first couple of years, I was in the GATHERING and INVESTIGATING phase of the design process. I collected as much inspiration and information as I could, from the business world, the art world, from my teaching worlds, from mass culture and my subcultures, from my own ideas past and present, from my new clients and students, from everyone and everything around me. I bravely faced NOT KNOWING what my business really was or what it would become. I attempted to trust that all the answers I was seeking would emerge as I gathered and investigated — but when I faltered, it was rough. I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, and I actually thought that was some kind of problem! (sound familiar?)

As piles of data and info and ideas and models gathered around me, I began to IDEATE and PROTOTYPE: Phase 2 of the design process. In other words, I now had enough to work with that I found the courage and the material to launch bigger things, more publicly. As some things resonated strongly with my small, growing audience, I took notice and learned from those successes. And of course, there were also failures a-plenty.

I now see that the last 3 years of my business have been largely driven by this prototyping/experimenting phase. My offerings have developed substantially: I have created a varied body of work, and in some ways, it’s pretty cohesive in terms of content. But as a business model, it has changed many times, as I course-correct and let new inspirations take over. That has its obvious benefits, but it has also meant financial instability and not a small amount of stress.

At different points throughout this prototyping stage, I absorbed business advice about scaling, niche-ing, and creating models for rapid profit growth — and often felt I was doing something wrong. Was I lacking commitment? Lacking discipline? Not ”wanting it” enough? Did I need a better coach? Better information? Was it a “mindset problem?”

I have to admit, I wasted some time trying to fix those “problems,” before I realized:

NAH!

I realized that what I was actually doing was intuitively following the only kind of creative process I know how to do — and it turns out, it’s a pretty common and effective form of creative intelligence. I needed to give my work time to develop before locking anything down, and I needed it to stay in the prototyping phase for long enough that when it came time to commit to a primary focus, I could do it successfully and easily, with something that was ready for its wings. Yay Amy!

So this spring, I walked through the doorway into what I call PHASE 3: SYNTHESIS and INTEGRATION. Not a minute too soon, or too late.

Phase 3 began with taking inventory of every single thing I have created in this business. I made one giant wall of a zillion color-coded post-its, and made my entire body of work visible, from 1:1 coaching methods, to course materials, to artistic collaborations, to single social media posts and emails that resonated with my audience and everything in between. I started organizing the piles, noticing themes, and asking myself “what is it I’m really doing here?”

The answer: “I am helping people learn the tools to make VISIONARY BRANDS around the ideas and contributions that matter most to them.”

It is both completely obvious, and an epiphany. Once it became clear, I had the broad strokes of the Visionary Syndicate designed within an hour! And I and was able, for the first time with this business, to commit fully to ONE THING as primary focus of my attention and my business model from now on.

While the Syndicate will evolve over time, it is comprehensive enough to be a container for my continued creative growth as a teacher, and structured enough to grow beyond me. Its a delight and a relief to have found the singular program that can both hold the FULLNESS and the FOCUS I need to grow my business AND make the biggest difference that I can — to YOU, business builder.

So here’s what I have learned: These cycles of investigating, gathering, collecting, experimenting, prototyping, integrating, synthesizing, and implementing are present in all of our businesses. At every turn we are made to feel like we are in the wrong place in the process, or that we are failing if we don’t have solutions yet. What we forget is that the creative process is elegant. It has mystery in it, but we aren’t powerless to the mystery. We get to feed and water those roots and sprouts of the creative process in our work, and watch our work bloom fully when the conditions are right.

If you struggle with always feeling like you should know more, you are experimenting too much, or for whatever reason you are in the “wrong” place in your work, I want you to think about the three stages of design thinking: Investigation/research, Ideation/prototyping, and Integration/synthesis. I’m going to bet that you are rocking out in just the right combo of those phases. Or, you’ll realize that you could dip into one of the phases a bit more to move things along. Synthesis and integration come in their time, but the other parts of the process can’t be skipped. They can be enjoyed, and become a source of pride, not shame.

So where are you in the creative process of building a business?

Come talk about it in the Tactical Imagination Club.

Love,

Amy