Speaker 1: We associate creativity with, you know, painting or writing a song or poetry, but creativity is essential to every agilist from the product owner to the team to the scrum master because creativity is how you're going to solve problems. Creativity is required anytime you can't move a team or you can't clear a blocker. Anytime you need a new approach to something that's persistent and sticky and holding you back, keeping you from being better or doing more, you're going to need creativity to solve that problem. Creativity is required to find the kernel of an MVP, to better understand or ideate or innovate in a way that we create something that a customer is willing to pay for, a customer finds valuable in the smallest unit of work or the shortest period of time. Creativity is required by leaders for new ways to inspire people. Creativity is required to find new applications for agile principles or scrum values or scrum procedures or portions of the framework. So creativity is a continuous process and because of the way creativity has been pigeonholed in society, we also have a belief that creativity is like a strike of lightning, that we have to wait for the muse to hit before we can access the gift of creativity. But creativity is a habit. You can't ask the muse to come and visit you. You have to invite her in and you invite her in by being creative, receptive to the idea, continuously sitting down and not only writing out ideas, even though most of them we know will go to the wastebasket. The idea is to write and write and write. Cherish the empty page. Don't be challenged by it. Don't be afraid of it. But rather write and you'll find that after nine bad ideas, suddenly the tenth one that comes is a really good idea or a serviceable idea and that's how we invite the muse. Also don't forget to listen. Be aware and be awake to the things that are happening maybe in your industry on social media or in your industry news. The conversations that you might hear in the subway, the conversations that you hear amidst peers, LinkedIn is such a great source of this information because you should be involved in conversation and virtually network with people who do the same thing that you do, probably have the same problems that you have. So when that happens, the different sparks of ideas that come from other people will eventually ignite something in you. But if you're not receptive, if the antenna is not up, you aren't going to be getting the station. You won't get the broadcast. So that means every day, you know, having access to a pen and paper or a voice recorder is easy, cheap, and ubiquitous. So the moment something happens, you should be writing things down. This is how all genius works. You look at the great comedians, great writers, the great screenwriters, scriptwriters of all time. They're always carrying around a book where they can jot down things the moment it hits them. But sometimes it helps to just sit there and noodle, right? Just fill a blank page with nonsense because you get in the practice of being fearless with your creativity. That's what's missing for most people. And because that practice is missing, most people miss the opportunity. When lightning strikes, they're not ready. When lightning strikes, they don't know what lightning is. So they don't know what to look for. So they don't know what to do when it happens. Remember one thing, you're also going to have to go back. And this is the labor. This is the hard work of creativity. You're going to have to go back and you have to groom those ideas. So just like a backlog that we're always admonishing our product owners for not grooming, we too will have to go back through our creative backlog and choose things that are like, this is a good idea. This will wait. Maybe this is for later. This is a patently bad idea. But remember, never throw the bad ideas away either. Keep them at the bottom because you never know when that bad idea will find new life because of a new challenge or the changing times. So this is a practice that you have to foster. You can't just wait for it to come to you. When people say, I'm not a creative person, it's because you haven't adopted any disciplined creative habits.