Start before you are ready
by Steve Xoh

I recently went on my first ever trip to Canada. I’ve always wanted to visit but, for one reason or another, it has never happened. I was invited on this trip to give my strange keynote talk entitled “9 Wonky Projects, Interspersed with Thoughts on Creativity and the Human Condition (Featuring a Bingo Machine)” at a conference. It is a talk I have deliberately constructed so that: a) I simply tell stories about weird projects and invite the audience to make sense of them in their own context and b) it can never be delivered the same way twice because my little bingo machine decides what I am going to talk about. Not only has it become my most favourite talk to give, it has also turned out to be one that people seem to enjoy. Over the last few years I have delivered it, or more accurately a unique version of it, at festivals, conferences, galleries, creative seminars and for organisations across the public, private and charitable sectors.

I would love to say that the origins of this talk involved months of robust academic research and careful planning, but the reality is that I came up with the title before I had any idea what the talk would entail. In the summer of 2020, a company I was interested in working with got in touch and asked whether I could give an online keynote. I really wanted to work with them but felt a sense of despondency at the thought of either writing a brand new talk or dusting off one I had already given elsewhere. So, without thinking it through too much, I replied to their email saying that I would like 60 minutes for a talk entitled “9 Wonky Projects, Interspersed with Thoughts on Creativity and the Human Condition (Featuring a Bingo Machine)”. They replied almost immediately to say it sounded weird and wonderful, and we set a date. I then sat back and thought to myself, “I’ve absolutely no idea how to do this.”

The mantra of “leap then look” has become increasingly important in my work. I know how easily I can fall into the trap of overthinking or over-designing something to the point that I drift away from the messy, intuitive idea that sparked it in the first place. I also know that many of my spontaneous ideas initially appear rather nonsensical. If I spend too long scrutinising them, I will almost inevitably conclude that they are ridiculous and abandon them before they have had a chance to become something more interesting. Over time, I have come to realise that if I want to nurture the more spontaneous part of my creativity, I often need to act before I have had time to talk myself out of it.

The Sound of Silence podcast is a good example of this. On a run one day I followed a chain of thought that somehow ended with me deciding to host the world’s first silent podcast featuring special guests. The first thing I did when I got home was register the domain soundofsilence.org.uk and announce to the world on social media that I would be launching it a month later. I also declared that there would be a total of 100 episodes, all recorded face to face and released every Tuesday morning. Only then did I sit back and think to myself that it was a rather stupid idea and that I had absolutely no idea how to go about doing it. But having made a public declaration and financially committed to it by paying for the domain, it became a little harder to back out. Over the next two years I recorded and broadcast 100 episodes of silence with special guests that were listened to by thousands of people around the world.

Many other projects have started in a similar way. The Imperfect Portrait Experiment happened because I wanted to feel more confident drawing portraits and less anxious about doing them. So the next day I went to London’s Trafalgar Square with a large sign that simply said FREE PORTRAITS. Even some of the bigger projects in my life began in a similar fashion. Leaving a “normal” job, for example, started with me handing in my notice with no particular plan other than a sense that it felt like the right thing to do and that something would work out. (I should probably add that the way I have written about this makes it sound remarkably calm and confident. The reality was that it felt utterly terrifying for quite some time.)

The concept of rapid prototyping emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an innovative approach to design and product development. Organisations such as IDEO helped popularise the practice of beginning with a crude, often imperfect concept in order to test, learn and improve. I like to think of rapid prototyping as the practice of starting before you are ready with the sole objective of failing cheap, fast and happy. (As opposed to spending huge amounts of time, money and effort perfecting an idea only to discover that it doesn’t work.) In many ways, leap then look feels grounded in the same philosophy. It is the practice of responding to an idea, opportunity or question quickly and simply, before I have had time to overthink it, in order to discover what happens next.

This feels like a very important part of any creative practice. Many of the creatives I work with seem to get stuck in the planning and strategising phase of their work, waiting for the elusive moment when something finally feels “ready” to launch. But the reality is that if we are doing something we have never done before, it will probably never feel ready. Or, perhaps even worse, we end up spending so long making an idea feel familiar, safe and less scary that we gradually round off the unique brilliance and wonkiness that made it interesting in the first place.

The American philosopher Donald Schön wrote about the importance of what he called “reflection-in-action”, the process of learning in the very moment of finding ourselves in a situation we could never have fully anticipated. He argued that it is difficult to understand a situation in the abstract and that understanding develops through our interaction with it. As he famously put it, “The situation talks back.” Whilst this can be somewhat anxiety-provoking, I have come to adore discovering what a project is about through doing it, rather than knowing exactly what it will become before I begin. As Søren Kierkegaard famously observed, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

I once again turn to the natural world for inspiration and guidance in this. Nature is a perpetual rapid prototype, constantly responding to what it encounters and becoming something new in the process. Nature is never in a rush, yet everything is always exactly as it needs to be. And even though I know I am part of nature, I have come to realise that readiness is largely a human obsession.