"The puzzle trap" and 2 other things that sap creative thinking

Building vibrant relationships with the people in your network — folks you probably don't know very well personally — is going to take some significant creative effort.

Not only do you have to develop a sense of who they are and what they care about; you also have to figure out where that overlaps with something you care about: your mission. You have to formulate a pathway toward the place where those two overlap.

This is much more than simply asking, "Who are the people who came to my last training even?" or, "Whose membership is about to expire?".

It's more along the lines of, "Who's most ready to give $500 this month?" or "What's the best way to help our program graduates to stay involved?"

Problem is, most of us have plenty of obstacles in our daily lives that work against our efforts to think creatively about such things.

For example, I'm betting that at least one or two of these sound familiar to you:

1. The puzzle trap

Some puzzles are fun and leave us feeling energized.

But when your brain is stuck on solving a problem that should be solvable, and needs to be solved soon, and is indeed almost solved, but is stubbornly refusing to be solved, that's neither fun nor energizing.

Even after you finally solve it (if you do), good luck turning from that frustrating experience to more open-ended questions like, "How can I reach the people who'd love to volunteer for our next service project?"

That mental switch will probably require some time and a change of environment.

But who has time for making that switch? It's much easier to just look for another puzzle to solve, because the mind is already in that mode.

And that's when the puzzles become a trap.

Don't fall for it.

There will always be problems to solve. You'll never solve them all perfectly.

And meanwhile, you're missing significant opportunities in your constituent relationships by forgetting to put in the creative effort.

2. Interruptions

An email from a colleague, celebrity "news" alerts from your phone, those random "just curious" questions that your brain constantly asks ("Wait, does that film have the same director as this other film? Gee, what would it cost to upgrade this office chair? Ooh, Billie Eilish dropped a new single?").

Between living in a hyperactive world and carrying a hyperactive brain, there's a lot of distraction going around.

And it's sapping our creativity.

I suspect this is why folks get some of their best revelations in the shower, where (hopefully, so far) even their cell phones can't interrupt them.

3. The need for certainty

Creative planning and strategizing are going to uncover a lot of ideas that don't work. Most of the ideas won't work.

Creative thinking is risky. You often won't know whether something will actually work until you've tried it.

And by 'trying it," I don't mean sending a blast email to every contact in your CRM.

I just mean spending time to validate an idea. To flesh it out, see if the pattern holds, test whether the data supports the hypothesis.

That's an investment of time and energy. Sometimes you'll go back to the drawing board; sometimes you'll find a real winner.

And to find those winners, you'll have to chance some losses.

And the more you do it, the more practiced you'll be at sniffing out the potential winners sooner and more accurately.

Here's the thing:

Building healthy and productive relationships with your constituents is not like solving a puzzle. It takes more than a few minutes of uninterrupted creativity. And it will involve some trial-and-error.

Embrace the uncertainty.

Escape the interuptions.

Leave the frustrating puzzles for later.

You — and your constituents — wil be glad you did.

All the best,
A.