Are You a Brick or a Balloon?

Early in my career, I used to get so frustrated when my creative team members went off into la-la-land and had trouble snapping back into the reality of project deadlines, limited resources, and level of effort.  

Then, when I was home cooking one night, my co-chef got frustrated with me because I was casually making up dinner on the fly - no ingredient list, no recipe, no timers.  

The tables had turned!  I stopped in my tracks and thought "oh dear, I'm displaying balloon tendencies, when I clearly am a brick all day at work."

Bricks are the type of people who bring team mates back down to reality.  They focus on logistics, reality, and finite resources.  They are fiercely pragmatic, grounded, and think "how might we be able to get it done?"

Balloons are free thinkers - floating off into the space of "what if we did [this]?"  They are creative, imaginative, and push the boundaries of conventional thinking.  They don't like to be structured or boxed-in.  

Do either of those types sound familiar?!  We usually have a stronger identity with one or the other, but we all definitely have attributes of both.  The thing is, Bricks and Balloons need each other.  Teams need both Bricks and Balloons for their unique skill sets and mental complexity.  

In early stage idea generation or prototyping, it's important to balance your team's brick and balloon tendencies.  Make sure you get "out of the weeds", but don’t get "in the clouds" either.  This balance is especially important when storyboarding and explaining an idea to stakeholders.  I’ve learned that approaching the solution from both the zoom out (balloon) and zoom in (brick) lenses helps tell the actual story of the solution much better.  First, this approach accommodates two types of thinkers - top-down thinkers and bottom-up thinkers.  Second, this helps allocate resources to describing and prototyping the most important aspects of the solution, instead of going too far down a road.  Similarly, I’ve found that an imbalance on either side (being stuck in the weeds OR in the clouds) can get a team off track.  Going down a too-detail-oriented road can limit the free-thinking ideation and creativity.  However, being too visionary and high-level has the potential to garner an unrealistic or un-implementable solution.  

Are you a balloon?  

One way to help your team that may have more brick-like tendencies is to listen to their concerns first.  Often, Bricks feel more safe when they have accounted for risks, concerns, and limitations.  Once Bricks have communicated as such, they will be freer to be creative thinkers with Balloons.  But don't just listen and shrug off the Bricks.  They often have key insights that will help a creative thought take form and become a reality.

Are you a brick?  

One way to help your team that may have more balloon-like tendencies is to take a deep breath and let them go wild for a set time.  Maybe it's a 20-min judgement-free brainstorm, maybe it's a few hours of un-impeded research, maybe it's a moodboarding exercise.  Let them go and only then reign them back in.  If you put so many restrictions on their creative thought, you will risk having a sub-par outcome.