Why aren’t you guys more excited about this?

Have you ever worked on a team project that was doomed from the start?

You know, one of those initiatives where nobody was psyched up about doing it except for one person, and the life force immediately drained from everyone else’s bodies at the mere mention of that project?

Blech. Not fun. And not a productive use of people’s time either. Because if a team has little or no momentum around an idea, execution will almost certainly fall by the wayside. Even when there’s an initial burst of enthusiasm. If there’s just the one person trying to carry the torch for everyone, then the group energy will soon become unavailable, and work will gradually decline into disorder.

As the second law of thermodynamics states, the total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time.

All the more reason to use momentum as the organizing principle for the creative process. When you focus your team’s efforts on tasks and projects for which there is an existing reservoir of energy, you can overcome the natural resistance to progress.

And granted, we all have to fight our disinclination and learn to create productively despite fickle forces like mood and desire. That’s part of being a mature and professional adult.

But there’s a difference between doing things you don’t want to do because they achieve a higher team goal, and doing things you don’t want to do when there is no good reason to do them in the first place.

My old boss was frequently tone deaf to these kinds of energetic patterns. Kelly was smart, creative, strategic and ambitious. But she wasn’t very sensitive to powerful group forces like momentum and entropy. Some days she would bound into the office in the morning, call an impromptu brainstorming session, and then start rapidly murmuring these big ideas into our ears.

You guys, doing this project is going to change everything for our brand. Lots of other startups in our industry are getting great results with this strategy, so I’d love to see our team do something just like it. Here’s the outline I think we should use.

Now, to her credit, these weren’t necessarily bad ideas. They simply didn’t have any energy behind them. The momentum of her projects stopped at the tip of her nose. The team would respond positively and take notes and really try to get excited about the projects, but in the end, it just wasn’t there. Entropy ate away at us.

To which our boss would look at us dumbfounded, as if to say, why aren’t you guys more excited about this?

Because, well, we’re just not. We can’t explain why that’s the case. It just is. You can’t fake momentum. You can’t manufacture heat. If it’s ain’t there, it ain’t there.

Lesson learned, few team metrics are more meaningful than energy.

Use that as your organizing principle, and the creativity process will never be an uphill battle.

Are you focusing on tasks and projects that create a ripple of excitement, or a vacuum of apathy?