A few weeks ago, I was invited to a DisruptHR event in Cardiff by my good friend Jayne Jones. I’ve been trying to expand my work outside practical design and sculpture, having spent a year lecturing with the Graphic Communication dept at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

One of the modules I taught at the college was called Bandwidth. It’s a loose dip into a variety of topics, searching for resonance and symbolism across disparate ideas. The purpose behind it is to get the students thinking laterally, and flexibly.

With all the talk around AI, and its impact on the role of creative designers, I have begun banging the drum about the importance of having a wide gamut of knowledge across a variety of subjects. Of being interested, as well as interesting.

Through conversation with Jayne, it had become clear that my ideas about creative thinking often manifest through workshops and exercises, and she felt that Disrupt HR might be a useful place to road test some of those, as being taught to think creatively is vital in all aspects of business, not just design.

So attend we did, and a lot of fun it was. As we walked in, I noticed a familiar face - someone from a section of my life that requires just as much creativity, flexibilty and resilience as my design career. I turned to Jayne and said, “There’s one of the mums from the school gate.”

As I went over to say hi, the lady introduced me to her colleague as “one of the dads from the school gate”.

We’d reduced each other to a singular indentifying integer - “X, from the school gate”.

It got me thinking about the school gate. It’s chaos. Imagine trying to influence the Brownian motion of steam from a cup of tea. You could do it with gravity perhaps, or wind, certainly. The school gate is a cup of tea, and the Brownian motion of steam is a few hundred children bouncing off each other like ball bearings in Satan’s Bagatelle (thick and fast with the metaphors and similes today.)

Instead of using a single, unified force to affect this Brownian motion, each particle of steam drags along it’s own affecting force. I’m going to call it gravity, because that’s what we’re really doing - dragging our kids back to earth.

Several hundred particles of steam, with several hundreds micro-gravitational forces acting on them discreetly. It’s a wonder any teaching gets done.

But there we are - “X’s, from the school gate”. Deploying a child at the school gate confers a significant skillset: Punctuality, organisation, trustworthiness, patience…. in the case of dads, I’m sorry to say that it also, way more often than it should, bestows a ‘helps out with the kids’ badge.

It’s chaos, but it all works, because as parents, we’re used to managing multiple points of focus while maintaining awareness of everyone else’s points of focus. I’m a micro-gravitational force, guiding a particle of steam out of the teacup while making sure that it doesn’t bump into any of the other particles of steam. I’m also tacitly watching out for other particles welfare - telling other X’s where their children are; helping children who’ve taken a tumble; picking up dropped stuff etc etc.

I’m currently on a course to gain an accreditation as a Learning Support Assistant. It’s run (for free) at my son’s school, so every Friday I join some other “X’s, from the school gate”, to learn about methods of learning and the role of the LSA in the classroom. It’s not a job I intend to take up, but understanding how children are taught might well help when I’m designing my workshops, especially if I plan to do some of them in schools (which I do).

This week we discussed the skillset needed to operate as an LSA. Straight away we all chimed in with “well we’re parents, so we have loads of skills - punctuality, organisation, listening, supportive etc”. That got me thinking. The things that I say and do to achieve any modicum of success in wrangling my kids wouldn’t have a place in the classroom. The cajoling, systems of reward/ punishment, the drill sergeant briskness. Probably breaking every educational regulation there is.

I’m able to get my kids to do stuff because I’m allowed to bend the rules. I can respond to the chaos without having to submit a financial case, or a risk assessment (other than the lightening fast one that I do automatically, becasue I’m a parent!), or meet a KPI. I can try different tools out without worrying about the greater curriculum.

Being a parent doesn’t actually make me good LSA material. It makes me a maverick who needs re-educating. To paraphrase Yoda (again), I must unlearn what I have learned.

When I was an engraver at the Royal Mint, My desk was always strewn with tools, seemingly without order. My take on organisation was that wherever I put a tool when I’d finished with it was probably the most natural place for it to be. Over time, muscle memory and instinct made this an incredibly efficient system - I reached out my hand, and the tool I needed was right there.

When I became Chief Engraver, and moved into a more strategic role, my brief was always “design faster, design cheaper”. However, this brief came alongside established administrative KPI’s and processes that made it hard to experiment with process and strategy.

Ironically, it was only when I left the Mint that I was able to achieve that brief - exploring software from VFX and video game industries, adapting my processes to suit each customers needs. Always focussing on delivering maximum creative value within budget and time. Designing faster and cheaper.

The Millenium Falcon was always my favourite spaceship. I love it’s asymetrical design, and the chaotic nature of its cockpit. Whenever I describe my office to anyone, I usually say “Think Millenium Falcon, rather than Starship Enterprise. I love the idea of a pristine, designer’s dream office, but I know that within a week or so, it’ll be chaos. Well, not chaos, just organic organisation.

Anecdotally, over time, the USS Enterprise seems to have uffered much greater structural damage than the Millenium Falcon. Han Solo just hits things, or dives into a hole with a spanner and that seems to get him out of most scrapes. The encumbent of the Enterprise bridge asks lots of questions, gets lots of answers, and spends way too much time pontificating, which has resulted in the ship being totalled with embarrassing regularity. I’d hate to see Kirk’s insurance renewal quote.

Kirk (and his successors) are hamstrung by protocol and regulation. Han Solo is free to adapt in any way he sees fit. He’s chaotic, but in a way that’s focussed on the priority - survival. Kirk has to filter this priority through Starfleet regs and the in-ship chain of command.

As Terry Pratchett said,

“The forces of chaos will always defeat the forces of order because the forces of chaos are better organised”.

Creativity and inspiration should be Brownian - ideas and forces bouncing around, pinging off in new directions, colliding. And like steam from a cuppa, when you step back, there’s a larger pattern formed from the random movement of the steam particles. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

There is always a need for regulation and control, but so often that regulation is inward looking; the boundaries of the ‘box’ that businesses seek to think outside of become barriers, rather than mirrors.

By embracing organic responsiveness (chaos), exciting ideas emerge. The trick is to find a space for this within the controls and order that business needs to observe.

I’m a chaotic designer and parent; or I’m a dynamically responsive designer and parent. Maybe I’ll discuss this at Disrupt HR one day….

“Would it help if I got out and pushed?”

“A deep ocean of secrets…”

“The martians are coming. Grab your pencils"…”