David Lecours interviews Craig Atkinson, VP of Communications and Strategic Services at The Walsh Group about keeping creativity alive as an A/E/C marketer.
This episode runs 41 min, 04 seconds.
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Mentioned in This Episode on Keeping the Creative Fire Burning
David’s theory is that many A/E/C marketers choose marketing because they enjoy expressing their creativity. The reality is that much of A/E/C marketing doesn’t feel very creative. So, A/E/C marketers end up creatively frustrated. This episode is about how to keep your creativity alive.
- Importance of having creative hobbies outside of work
- Don’t let fear stop you from being creative at work.
- Suffering is a choice. So is happiness.
- Fear isn’t bad. It’s our relationship with fear that can be bad.
- Craig’s Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/craigbatkinson/
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
— Martha Graham
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Read David’s Conversation with Craig
Read the Episode Transcript
Announcer: Welcome to PSM, The Professional Services Marketing podcast. It’s insight applied.
David Lecours: Hello and welcome to PSM Show, the podcast for AEC marketers. I’m David Lecours and I’m joined by a special guest, Craig, Aka “Cheb,” Atkinson. Our topic today is keeping the creative fire burning. Our sponsor is SMPS, business transformed through marketing leadership. You can find out more about SMPS at smps.org, and you can find out more about our show, including the show notes at psm.show.
Announcer: This is PSM. It’s insight applied.
David Lecours: Craig, well, welcome. Glad to have you. You’re calling in from Chicago today, right?
Craig Atkinson: That’s right. Chilly Chicago. Thanks too for having me.
David Lecours: Yeah, it’s great. We met at SMPS Build Business 2018, and you taught a great session that I was fortunate to sit in on a titled What Taking Photos With my iPhone Taught Me About Life.
Craig Atkinson: That’s right.
David Lecours: And that was awesome.
Craig Atkinson: Cool. That was a fun one to do. There was a good crowd there too.
David Lecours: That definitely helps. Your current position is VP of communications and strategic services at The Walsh Group.
Craig Atkinson: That’s correct.
David Lecours: It’s amazing. You’ve been there 18 years. Maybe you could give our audience a brief origin story of how you got there, how you joined this wonderful world of AEC marketing and just bring us up to speed in a couple of minutes.
Craig Atkinson: This is a classic story of what amazing things can happen if you have no idea what it is you want to do, because then you don’t really have any limits. I went to Illinois State University, graduated in the mid … when was that? Jeez. Early ’90s, with a bachelor of fine arts. I came to Chicago initially with the thought that I was going to become some art star. I did show in some galleries and some things like that. But of course I needed a job and my first-
David Lecours: What was your medium?
Craig Atkinson: My favorite medium was photography, and still is. But at that time I had also expanded to include some more sculptural, multimedia type, installation type pieces. I had all these aspirations, but I also needed to make money, and what was wonderful is that the Field Museum of Natural History loved to hire artists to build their exhibits. My first job out of college was working there behind the scenes to build exhibits, paint murals. We did a lot of painting of murals and a lot of building of rock forms and other things like that. I held a succession of roles there.
Craig Atkinson: It was a great place to work, and it was a lot of other artists also working there. The challenge was that those positions were all based on grant money, and it was hard to predict from year to year to year, whether or not you would still have a position. That was fine early on, but then had I started having some kids, I needed a little more stability, and transitioned from that. By that point, it would have been 1996 or so. I was a project manager at that point, overseeing a variety of projects, both out on the exhibit floor, but also behind the scenes to upgrade the collections themselves, to organize things better and to make it easier for researchers to come in and do the important work that they do there. It was a lot of fun, but it was time to move on.
Craig Atkinson: I took a job as a project manager at Northwestern University, overseeing very small renovation and construction projects on the two campuses. I did that for a number of years. Also a great place to work, and I loved the academic setting. But I would say there, I could see that my career progression was going to be pretty … not very dynamic. That I could probably spend my entire career there, and it would be fine, but I wouldn’t really move the needle too much for myself. And I had bigger aspirations than that.
Craig Atkinson: I knew someone who worked here at Walsh, and they got me hooked up for an interview, and I came in. In 2000, I joined this company, and initially I worked … and then what happened from this point on and now, is that I have held a variety of positions. It’s like I changed careers without changing companies over the last 18 years. I was in estimating and operations, in IT, then I started up our training and development department, and then most recently transitioned into our communications and strategic services, which is primarily internal and external communications and marketing.
David Lecours: Walsh Group is a GC? Is that correct?
Craig Atkinson: Very large construction services provider. One of our primary things is to actually do the construction, but we also have a hand in the design and planning, financing, and the ongoing maintenance of various facilities as well. It’s a large company. This is where I ended up in a high level position at a very large company, in a corporate setting. I would never have predicted it. I think many people told me that getting an art degree was not a path that would lead me to something like this, and basically not a good idea. Turns out it was probably the best thing that I could’ve done because I think that it taught me a different way to think. I think that’s been very valuable for me over time.
Craig Atkinson: I’ve been relatively unbounded in terms of following a path and coming to a fork in the road and making decisions and seeing where that will lead me without a whole lot of worry attached to it. I find myself today overseeing a group of about 30 people, and we manage the proposal process and the engagement with clients, and then we also manage the general public relations for the company, and I love it.
David Lecours: Awesome. Yeah, I get that impression. It seems like during the session that I took that you were leading, I pretty instantly could sense that, oh, this guy’s got the heart and soul of an artist, and it comes through in the way you communicate and what you talk about. And I think that’s not entirely unique of AEC marketers. Everybody’s got their own path and yours is certainly unique and super cool. But it seems like so many AEC marketers come to marketing almost by accident. They have a degree in art, or they’ve got a degree in design-
Craig Atkinson: Yep. Design.
David Lecours: … few of them-
Craig Atkinson: Journalism. Some are on the writing side. Just so many of us are like refugees from the Humanities, is what I say, whatever the path is.
David Lecours: As a result, a lot of us we really enjoy expressing our creativity. What I found is a lot of our jobs is really not all that creative. The topic that I want to explore with you is how AEC marketers can keep that creative fire burning, because I think it’s really essential, even if we’re not doing creative tasks. Would you agree that that position or assessment is true?
Craig Atkinson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Lecours: Have you found that to be the case?
Craig Atkinson: Yeah. I actually think that’s the case for pretty much everything in life. That there’s always an element to every aspect of our lives that is “the grind”. It’s easy to tell ourselves that there’s these … it’s like these dead spaces, where there’s no need for creativity. We’re not being called to be creative, and so therefore, we’re not. Unfortunately that can grow. I’ve seen it happen, that people feel like suddenly they’re at a role where there’s nothing that they’re doing that is “creative” or at least creatively fulfilling. Yes, I think that’s common in a lot of places in life, and definitely in what we do.
David Lecours: I’ve even found it true from my firm, which we are a branding and digital marketing. By definition, we’re supposed to be a creative firm, in that we’re doing naming or doing logo development. So much of the job is not the actual creation. It is that grinding. There’s lots of ways that we can explore creativity. One of the things that I think you’ve done so well is making sure that you have hobbies outside of work that also feed your creative soul.
Craig Atkinson: I would’ve told you earlier in life that if someone had said that one of the keys to happiness is to stay connected to a hobby that you’re passionate about, I would have said that that sounded silly. There’s no possible way that that’s going to be it. I’ve come to discover that in fact … and what I tried to present at the SMPS conference was that actually … I couldn’t have been more wrong. That it was in fact, the key to staying creatively alive was to stay connected in some way to a passion, “a hobby” that wasn’t necessarily something I was doing to make money, it wasn’t necessarily something that was directly feeding my production at work, but it ended up expanding my life overall, and it keeps me dialed in to my creative spirit, even in those moments when I’m just plugging stuff into a spreadsheet.
David Lecours: What are some of those hobbies that you do to keep you creatively connected?
Craig Atkinson: The main one is photography. What’s wonderful is … I know that these days there’s a lot of … we get a lot of stories in the news about how dangerous and damaging and limiting and distracting our smartphones are because they take up so much of our attention. I agree that that may be true, but I also think that in that conversation we’ve lost the fact that there’s also something amazing here about this. I carry with me a very good camera and an entire production studio in a means by which to distribute the images that I take, and it all fits in my pocket. What it means is, is that I have a tool that does allow me to stay connected to my creative spirit regardless of where I am.
Craig Atkinson: I more recently in about the last two years, really started to challenge myself to use my camera every day. It wasn’t a hard and fast rule, like I had to take a picture every day, but it was more like I had to use it every day. The end result might be images that I wanted to keep or they might be images that I didn’t really want to keep. That wasn’t important. It wasn’t important that at the end of a year, I had 365 images, one per day. What was important was that I had tried every single day to capture something meaningful. I am using Instagram is my means by which to share that project. That also, had no boundaries on it in terms of how many images I may put up there. I don’t really care how many people are following me or if anyone follows me. The point was to do it.
Craig Atkinson: What it’s allowed me to do is I carry this camera around with me and I stay very connected to what catches my eye, and capturing things in the moment, and then processing it later to understand a little bit better, why did it capture my eye? One of the things that I do when I keep an image or put it up on Instagram is I attach it to some quote or a saying or a piece out of a piece of literature, a poem or something that I’ve written because it’s also for me. Part of the reason that I’m really trying to lean in on this is I’m trying to notice what it is that I notice. Why did that catch my eye? And try to go a little bit deeper and connect the image in some direct or even sometimes indirect way to a thought.
Craig Atkinson: Then taking those two things together said more than any one of those elements by themselves. And then once a collection of these images are up there, together they actually begin to tell a story that’s quiet. But if one were to go through my feed starting from about October of last year through now and gave it enough time, you’d get a good sense of what’s been going on in my life. Both in my head and in my life itself. So there’s a little autobiography happening there that’s not very explicit, but it’s definitely there. What I discovered-
David Lecours: There’s something-
Craig Atkinson: Go ahead.
David Lecours: I was just saying, it’s really powerful, this combination of word and image, and you alluded to that earlier, this one and one equals at least three or more. I know you’re not looking for more followers per se, but if it’s okay with you, I’d love to list your link in our show notes-
Craig Atkinson: Oh, yeah. Sure. Absolutely.
David Lecours: … to your Instagram feed, so people can see visually what you’re talking about.
Craig Atkinson: You can get a sense of what it looks like and how it works, which is … and so what happens is I’m in a continuous collection mode. I’m collecting images all the time. I’m taking pictures of things constantly. I’m also, in parallel, collecting or writing. I’m writing things or I’m collecting scraps of quotes or pieces of poems that connect with me. I’m just always collecting these things. And then I spend a lot of time in the post production, not just cleaning up the images and optimizing them, but regarding the image and asking myself, why did I take this, and why do I want to keep it and why do I want to share it? What is it about this beyond “that it’s interesting” or pretty that is bringing some value to me?
Craig Atkinson: Can I connect that to some quote that I’ve written or collected that when you put those two things together, man, now there’s a little conversation between the word and the image going on here. [crosstalk 00:17:53]. I can do this from anywhere, and do. I found a way to build this flow into my daily life.
David Lecours: I love it. One of the things you said in the session was that you don’t have to be an artist to be an artist. You said, “Be intentional about how you experience the world,” and what I’m hearing you say is that by having this intention of trying to go out and capture an image a day and being aware of your surroundings and always looking for joy and beauty and all these things, it ends up making your life better. It almost changes your worldview, if I can be so cool.
Craig Atkinson: It’s about a mindset, and it’s about the tendency. What I discovered through this … and then later as I was doing some … really getting interested in this little bit more and doing a little more research into it, is that we as a … it’s part of the human condition to have a negative bias. Human beings have a negative bias, and we are more inclined to observe, frame and experience the world in negative ways. If we wake up in the morning and we’re going to our job where it’s not creative and I’m not being able to be creative and it’s not fulfilling, and that’s what’s in my mind, that is the job I’m going to have that day. I’m absolutely setting myself up to experience exactly what I’m asking the universe to give me, which is a boring, non creative job that’s not filling.
Craig Atkinson: There’s this big piece for me that … what this has been about is about shifting mindset, not about artistic talent. That’s what I think is so awesome about these tools that are available to us is I don’t think it’s a tragedy, I think it’s a joy that you don’t have to be a photographer to be good at photography. I don’t have to have a great deal of artistic talent to be an artist. It doesn’t mean I’m going to make my career out of that. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to drive my life with it, but it does mean that I can live with greater intention. In a few minutes, I can tell you where I landed with all of that. What did that intention give me, that I think is valuable even in the workplace, even when I’m not doing the “creative” parts of it? For sure. This is definitely about a reframing.
Craig Atkinson: I think part of it was to experience my emotional state and my thoughts, and process them in a way without judgment. That’s what this whole little practice allowed me to do. Whether it was a happy thought or a sad thought, a positive thought, or a negative thought, it doesn’t really matter. I captured this image, it speaking to me for a reason. If I spend some time really thinking about why I took this picture and why it’s meaningful, I can start to become very aware of my own emotional state. That really, in the end, was what was the most game changing thing for me. I ended up on an acronym, C.R.E.A.M, C R E A M. This is what this process has helped me shift to.
Craig Atkinson: I would say to anyone that if you want to be an artist, this is what is needed. I would also say, you could very easily take this and translate it into, if you want to be a good partner, if you want to be a good brother, if you want to be a good employee, if you … this is what I think … or a leader. You want to be a good leader. Here’s where I think we’re really called for. This is what emerged for me. This acronym is five states that I think are … they have, for me, become really important. I’ll tell you what they all are, and then if you want to go back through and piece through them or whatever. Tell me how you want to do this, but … so it’s curiosity, resilience, empathy, action bias and maturity. That’s the acronym, C.R.E.A.M. This is where the shift in state has led me to. This is what I got out of this whole process.
David Lecours: What I would love to do is go through each one, particularly as it relates to maybe working in maybe what people perceive as an uncreative environment. How they can use those tools.
Craig Atkinson: To the extent I can do that. Absolutely. Or when I’m dealing in those moments where I’m having to do things that aren’t fun and creative, which would be in my nature to procrastinate on. The first one is curiosity. To me, this one’s … they’re all important. This one’s really important because to me, curiosity is the antidote to fear. I think fear is really the thing that limits people. It’s the thing that we tell ourselves. The are negative bias in the way we look at the world, the way reframe things are really all built around a lot of fear, and curiosity is a way to approach the unknown with less fear and more interest. A curious mind state, why? Why is it like that? Why is it not like that?
Craig Atkinson: To be genuinely curious about how all of this works, or why something was successful or why something wasn’t successful is really, really important. And also, there’s a certain humility to it then, because to be curious means you have to say to yourself, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” That’s why I’m curious. There’s something unknown in front of me, and rather than rejecting it or being afraid of it … and I might still be afraid of it, but I’m going to actually try to face it with some interest and a desire to better understand. I have to acknowledge my own limits. A curious mind state is a big deal.
Craig Atkinson: Right behind that is … and so, same thing with anything here in the job setting. This is boring. Do you know what I discovered for myself? I would imagine it’s the case for a lot of people, is I never took the thought farther than that. I passed judgment on a particular activity or on some aspect of my job that I found unpleasant or boring in some way, and I never asked myself to explore, why? Why is it boring? Why do I feel so negatively about it? What is it about this that is unpleasant? A lot of it had to do, again, with my own … often came back to fears. Some of it sometimes it’s just … there’s a rope. Stuff we have to do that is not the fun part. But oftentimes, I’ve found myself, it was more about being afraid that I was hitting some area of my limit of my ability or my expertise.
Craig Atkinson: And then that leads right into the R, which is resilience. You’ve got to be able to face setbacks, failures, less than you expected, unexpected result that wasn’t necessarily a good one without losing enthusiasm for the journey. You got to be able to take a hit.
David Lecours: Yep. Keep going.
Craig Atkinson: In the creative process it is baked into it. That failure is part of the way that you learn. Failure sometimes is the part of way you discover a door to a new answer. So you’ve got to be ready that you’re not going to get it on the first take. My own daughter is … my youngest daughter is 10, and she likes to write stories. I’m trying to work with her on this mindset that she thinks she has to write the whole story in one sitting. The reason that we do revisions is because we don’t get it right and perfect on the … we fail the first time. We don’t often think-
David Lecours: Yeah, you got to give yourself-
Craig Atkinson: … of it as a failure, but you’ve got to give yourself room.
David Lecours: You’ve got to permission … there’s that great book about permission for shitty first drafts, and then you refine it and make it great.
Craig Atkinson: If you put that together with the curiosity, I think those two in tandem are really powerful because now it’s like, wow, that is not the outcome I wanted. So then you can start to say things to yourself a little bit differently with a curious mindset. Instead of saying, “I’m not good at this”, you could say to yourself, “What am I missing?”, Or “What am I missing in terms of knowledge, resources, ability that I need to gather in order to get an outcome that’s closer to what I’m looking for?” Rather than saying, “You know what, I give up.” It’s saying, “I think I need to use a different strategy. The one that I’m using isn’t working, so I need to get curious about a different way to do this.” Rather than saying, “This isn’t good enough.”, say, “I’m going to ask myself, is this really my best work?” Rather than believing, “I can’t make this any better.”, “Of course I can make it better, and maybe I need to seek help from others in order to see what it is that I need to change.”
Craig Atkinson: We tell ourselves that, this is just too hard. Rather than saying that, just say, “This is going to take more time than I realized.” I made a mistake. Mistakes are great ways to learn. Telling yourself, “I’m not smart enough. I’m not good enough.” Just tell yourself, “Well, I need to learn”, and if plan A didn’t work, there’s still 25 other letters. You take resilience and curiosity together, and it allows you to explore the unknown with less fear and less prejudgment.
Craig Atkinson: I think that opens the door for the next letter in this acronym, which is E, empathy. I have a lived experience that has created a filter through which I look at the world and I experience the world, and it is going to be vastly different than others around me because they have had a different lived experience. Their experiences no more valuable or valid than mine. It’s just different. It doesn’t mean I have to accept or agree with everybody, and it also doesn’t mean that there aren’t hateful ideas that we need to resist. But what it does mean is that I need to allow myself the opportunity to be more open. That someone else can look at the same information I’m looking at and see it very, very differently than me.
David Lecours: I think one area where we could be more empathetic is understanding that probably the owners of the firm have a good reason to be risk averse. The AEC industry, we build things, and we have to manage risk because we’re creating buildings or bridges that the public … their lives depend on. They have to get it right, and they can’t be entirely risked. Of course, our challenge is that a lot of times that mindset of risk aversion translates over into marketing, and that’s where, I think, we get into trouble is because we need to take some risks to be able to connect with our audience on an emotional level.
David Lecours: But if we’re empathetic of like, “Look, Mrs. Owner, I understand you’re worried about this because your background is such that you’ve got to get the specs on this bridge correct. But in this case, we can’t afford to be a little more risky because we’re going to have another ad that’s going to come out in the next month and we’ll connect. Just bear with us.” And so, yeah. At that empathy part is super relevant.
Craig Atkinson: Absolutely. You’re also making me think that … the other thing that I often encounter is when I’m working with a team … one of the things that I do these days on the career side is a coach teams that are going to interviews. A pitch to a potential customer. It’s very common for me to hear someone say something like this. “I don’t even know why we’re doing this, all that really matters is the number. And as long as we get to the right number …” This is just a bunch of bullshit, that we have dog and pony show, [inaudible 00:32:51].
Craig Atkinson: That is actually a fear based statement, because most people don’t enjoy public speaking. Most people don’t like public speaking, especially in a situation where there’s some consequence attached to getting a job or not getting a job, but they’re not actually going to say I’m afraid. What they’re going to say is, “This doesn’t matter.” Because all that really matters is the dollars because this is a business decision. Empathy is an element to explore here because behind every business decision there is an emotional decision as well for that customer. That customer is also feeling the pressure and facing the risk to choose the right construction services provider, the right teammates.
Craig Atkinson: There is always an emotional element to every business decision. It is not just about the money. The reason that we’re having an interview is often because we are trying to understand better what it’s actually going to be like to work with these people. Who is this team and how can I connect with them on an emotional level and better understand and predict what’s going to happen when I’m working with these people and things aren’t going well, or something unexpected happens? It is not just about the dollars, it is also about this emotional element. That’s why we’re having an interview. You also have to understand that most people don’t enjoy this process. They don’t enjoy speaking in public, and they’re going to … their fear response is going to be dismissive of it as an exercise.
Craig Atkinson: I’m often working with teams to help them draw out their story, and make sure that we’re hitting the emotional notes, not just the technical notes or the financial notes when we’re doing a pitch.
David Lecours: Absolutely.
Craig Atkinson: Empathy is a big one. And then action bias is … I would like people to default more towards doing something rather than hesitating. I would say that I saw that in myself as well. Fearful pause, procrastination, which really oftentimes is not laziness. It’s just another expression of fear. I would like to draw people into … if we’re curious, resilient and empathetic, we’re going to be more likely to take action rather than hesitate because … especially as leaders and influencers in the marketing world, we’ve got to get people to do things. That’s the reason for our jobs.
Craig Atkinson: We’re trying to get customers to make decisions. We’re trying to get business partners to choose us. We’re trying to influence the customer to maybe alter the way they’re thinking about how they want this project to be built, or guide them through a process they’ve never been through before, or a project of a scale that they’ve never experienced before. The response to that is oftentimes that people will resist making decisions and taking action. And that is action decisions are actually the fuel for every project.
Craig Atkinson: If you were to ask most people, “What’s the fuel for any project?” They would say money. It’s a very common answer. Money is not the fuel. It’s decisions. It’s action. Most of the time when you see projects that are in jeopardy, money is an issue. But what happened was the decision making process broke down in some way, whether there was a loss of trust, some hesitancy on the client’s side, unexpected events. Something broke the decision making process down and decelerated it, and that’s what kills a project. So we try to … trying to get people to take action. To get into a habit of making decision, taking an action and then quickly evaluating whether or not the results were what it was we were expecting.
David Lecours: Nice. And M, tell us what M means.
Craig Atkinson: Maturity is not about acting grown up-
David Lecours: Damn right.
Craig Atkinson: … because heaven knows I don’t. I define maturity in this fashion. Maturity is when I completely own my role in what’s not working. Not that I take all the blame, but I very openly and honestly own my role. Whatever I’ve done that has contributed to what I’m not happy about in my life or what’s not working here on this project, rather than push that off and blame it on a bunch of external circumstances. That’s maturity. When it comes to leaders, I believe that that is actually the most important quality. It’s this ownership of what’s not working. We celebrate what is working and what we’ve done successfully in appropriate ways that are motivating for people, but we also take ownership of what we have done and are doing that’s contributing to the things that we’re unhappy about and that are not working.
David Lecours: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love that. It’s a great acronym, and there’s a ton of great info here. We’ll list that in our show notes. Craig, I have one more question. What I found is that creative output is directly proportional to creative input. In other words, you really can only pull out what you put in. So you’ve got to feed yourself well, whether it’s reading or going to movies or conferences or things like that. I’m curious what you do to solve the input part to keep yourself creatively nourished.
Craig Atkinson: That was a little piece of wisdom that struck me earlier in my career. What happened was … I’ve worked very intentionally to become a good public speaker over time. But early in that process, I remember asking … there was a gentleman who was a very good public speaker that I admired a great deal, and I asked him, “How did you get to be so good at public speaking?” I asked the question … I already had an answer in my mind that I thought I was going to get, and I didn’t get that answer. What he said was, “Oh, that’s easy. I read. I read a lot. I read everything.” He said, “You’ve got to build a database.” He said, “It’s about the database.”
Craig Atkinson: If you want to be good at public speaking … now I’m going to extend this to say if you want to be good at the output, whether it’s public speaking or generating written words or images, graphics, whatever-
David Lecours: A creative proposal.
Craig Atkinson: … it’s about the database. He said, “You’ve got to build a really big database because you’ve got to be able to … you got to have all that stuff in there so you can start to create associations and metaphors.” And a lot of what we do in our proposals is we’re laying out technical information and some straightforward things. One thing we’re always trying to do is figure out ways to render things graphically. That can be a more efficient way to show how a team is going to be structured or how a process in particular is going to work. To be good at that, you have to be good at metaphor. And to be good at metaphor, you have to build a very large database of stuff that can collide together.
Craig Atkinson: That’s why my practice of image and text, is I’m always collecting and then later figuring out how could things fit together in ways that are novel, interesting or compelling? It doesn’t have to be novel or new, just that are compelling. The same thing is true when you’re putting a proposal together, or when you’re trying to think of like, “Okay, we have that we have to make a chart of a safety process. We could cut and paste the one we used on the last proposal. Or we can find is there a better way to show this that would be more efficient and more compelling, and do a better job of giving our client the assurance that we totally understand what this is all about.”
Craig Atkinson: The best way to show someone you understand what it’s all about is to be able to explain to them clearly what it’s all about. Even if they’re not. You were absolutely right, that this is about … for me, it is about reading, and it’s about reading both industry related information for the knowledge purposes, but it’s also about reading poetry and some other things that are a little more abstract or a little more esoteric because those are in the realm of metaphor. Sometimes when I want to write, I will go read a chapter’s worth or something or five or six poems from someone who I think is a really good writer because it dials you in to, “How do I put words and thoughts together?”
Craig Atkinson: You’re absolutely right, that good output is based on good input. But I think that early on about creating and nurturing a database was really important.
David Lecours: That’s golden. Hey readers, listeners, if you want to read something inspiring, we’re going to include a couple of inspirational quotes in the show notes and hopefully that’ll get you going. Well, Craig, this has been fantastic. You’ve been really generous with your time, and you’re full of knowledge. I know our audience is going to get a lot out of it, so thanks so much.
Craig Atkinson: Oh, absolutely. I love this topic, because I think at the end of the day, this is … the spark of life really comes with the ability to “create”, which doesn’t always mean making something new. It could be solving a problem, or putting a connection together or making a friend. I always appreciate the opportunity to talk about this and share a little bit about what I’ve learned. Hopefully people will find it useful.
David Lecours: Oh, for sure. If you guys have any questions out there, or you have comments, you want to reach out to Craig or I, you can get the information at psm.show. You can scroll down and there’s a contact form, and we’d love to hear from you. That’s it for this episode of PSM Show. Thanks to our sponsor, SMPS, and thanks to Craig Atkinson. From myself and my co host, Josh Miles, keep the creative fire burning.