Stolen Crocodiles

I was listening recently to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans - the Stanford professors behind the Life Design Lab and the Designing Your Life books - being interviewed on the Happiness Lab podcast. They were talking about formative community: the particular quality of connection that happens when people come together not merely to socialise, and not to collaborate on a shared task, but with the specific intention of helping one another become. The generosity of this concept - the assumption that your growth and mine are not in competition, that by collaborating we all benefit – is fundamental to the principles of Hothouse. It's why I put as much as I possibly can in the public domain for discussion. The podcast made me think about creative work, and about a question that  I've thought about very seriously in the past, when weighing up threats to my business:

What is actually at stake when we work in the open?

When I was a design student, I had a couple of peers who bonded over shared paranoia and a policy of drafting their development work hidden from prying eyes (each with their free arm wrapped around the page). The gesture was instinctive, protective - nobody was going to get see their ideas ahead of presentation day. I understood the impulse, but I watched what it cost them. Design development is conversational by nature. It thrives on the unexpected remark, the question you hadn’t thought to ask yourself, the creative friction of another mind encountering your work in its rough state. We all benefit from a bit of early critical pushback - God knows you'll be getting it soon enough it from your boss, or your clients. These two students opted out of all of that.

And the ideas that were so carefully guarded were, in truth, not especially at risk. The arm around the sketchbook was solving a problem that barely existed, and at quite some cost. 

Later, as a tutor, I encountered a more dramatic version of the same anxiety. A student - let’s call her Student A - was developing a scheme that was genuinely interesting: sophisticated in concept, considered in its execution, and built around the presence of a crocodile. Trust me when I say: it was actually working. A day or two later, Student B, sitting at a neighbouring desk, announced that she too was going to incorporate a crocodile into her design.

Student A was bereft. And as her tutor, I felt for her - it wasn’t a fair thing to have happened. But I was not, for a single moment, worried on her behalf. Because what I could see, from where I was standing, was that the two uses of the same motif had almost nothing in common. Student A’s crocodile was doing complex, considered work within her concept. Student B had borrowed the animal but not the thinking behind it. The idea, lifted without its roots, did not travel. What made Student A’s work valuable was not the crocodile. It was the quality of mind that had put it there, and that could not be stolen. It was patently obvious that she could be relied upon to pull something new and surprising from the bag every time. The crocodile was almost incidental.

I have often thought about that moment in relation to my own work.

When I began writing and speaking publicly about the business of interior design, my first fear was that I had nothing original to protect. Now I feel I've found my voice, but a second fear is subtler: that putting original thinking into the public domain (into newsletters, webinars, free content) is an act of exposure, an invitation to dilution. Someone could borrow my frameworks. My language could be scraped and recycled. The ideas I've worked so hard to develop would circulate without me.

What I've come to believe is that this fear had the situation precisely backwards. The body of work is the proposition. It is not separable from the person who built it. Each piece of thinking I've published is a layer of something that accumulates over time into a recognisable, coherent whole: a record of how I see the world of design business, how that view has developed, and where it is going.

If someone were to borrow themes from that body of work, anyone genuinely drawn to those ideas would eventually find their way to the original. And they would feel the difference immediately. Stolen crocodiles are arresting. But on their own, they aren’t enough.

I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with a client. She was describing a new and genuinely exciting approach to business development: creative, technology-forward, very much her own, typical of her mind and output. I asked, partly out of curiosity and partly to test my own thinking, whether she worried about others copying it. She considered the question for a moment, and then essentially dismissed it. Not out of arrogance, but with the clarity of someone driven by ideas and forward motion. Her instinct was to manifest her ideas in the world as quickly as possible, to enjoy their evolution, and to keep moving. The conversation, the response, the iteration - these were the point. Hoarding was not a strategy she recognised.

My client is operating from exactly the place that Burnett and Evans were describing. The flow of becoming is forward-facing. It is not consistent with the arm around the sketchbook.

This is the conclusion I’ve arrived at, and I offer it gently to anyone who feels the pull of creative self-protection: secrecy is not the safer choice. It is the more expensive one. It creates delay, misses moments, obscures you from view. What makes your work yours is not the motif but the intelligence behind it, and that intelligence only deepens through exposure, challenge and use - through the conversations it generates, and the thinking it provokes in others that finds its way back to you. Working in the open is how you evolve and accelerate your very best ideas.