photo credit – from moon to moon

When I saw author of “Eat,Pray,Love” Elizabeth Gilbert speak this spring she said “every afternoon I take a silence bath” in which she basically just sits in a room quietly and hangs out with her cat or falls asleep.  “Rough life” I thought “must be nice to be an author with a gazillion readers so that you can take silence baths every day”.  Sometimes I don’t even get to take a real bath every day and  the only silence I get is after I offer up a great idea at a meeting which is frankly less than tranquil.  So yay for Elizabeth and her silence baths.

But the idea stayed in my mind for months.  I wondered if this silence bath was more than lazy meditation or relaxation.  I began to think maybe it was more of an incubation period and perhaps similar to a process I call “marinating”, the secret ingredient to the strategy process.   Also why my bigger projects take me over a month to craft.   Here’s where it fits into the strategy timeline:

1) Read tons of articles.  See films, listen to music, watch plays.  Look at blogs, people’s Flickr feeds, design. Read more articles, go to speeches, watch TED videos ad nauseum.

2) Start thinking of strategy ideas.

3) Marinate.

4) Think some more. Work on other projects.

5) Develop full strategy.

6) Deliver strategy and listen to applause and general adoration.

Though my marinating is far less silent than Elizabeth’s it is still an incubation period of sorts for an idea.  Sometimes an idea marinates for 5 days and there are some I’ve been marinating on (like opening a coworking space) for years.   During the idea incubation process I do all sorts of other things like work on other projects, write content, or develop new processes for my business but it’s still in the back of my mind.  “If I were this or that brand’s audience…..  what would I want to see them writing about?”  This idea of incubation isn’t new but it is frequently skipped because, well, people are busy and being busy to the point of insanity is important at a lot of workplaces.

Sometimes I walk into an office where everyone is uber busy and think “how do people come up with good ideas here?”.  You can tell people are just totally stressed and running from meeting to meeting (sometimes actually running).  In some cases, this busy-ness seems more of an “if you have time to lean you have time to clean” type of thinking where people feel like they have to be insanely busy or they are a complete failure.  I know lots of business owners that feel this way.  They would feel incredibly uncomfortable just “marinating” on an idea and maybe they already have good ideas.

So why is it so important to incubate?

Because coming up with good ideas isn’t really that hard.  Developing them to the point where they are right for the situation, the timing is correct, the resources are there to complete the idea, and a million other factors takes time.  There are so many examples these days of a decent idea in social media strategy and I can tell the team was probably pressed with a 5 day deadline.  No one was given time to draw from their reading, their experience, something they saw that made them connect dots, etc. and it was put out into the world and was unremarkable.   Ideas that are rushed out the door tend to be the most obvious idea and can be full of rookie mistakes.

If you want to try the silence bath, incubation, marinate start by giving yourself two deadlines.  Make your first deadline where you would need it to be if you hurried the process and then make the second one 5 days later.  Don’t use this extra time as a way to procrastinate the project.  Use the extra days to add in some thinking time and maybe you will add some features, an extension of the idea or a partner that will pop into your mind as a perfect fit.  During these 5 days you can and should work on other things but build in an hour or two for your idea and go to a thinking lunch during that time or spend it explaining your idea to someone who isn’t part of the project to see what kinds of words you are using to describe it and what kind of questions it garners, you will inevitably come out with a better strategy.