“Time-Energy” and the Power of Creative Collaboration

An interview with Matt Stewart by Bárbara Fonseca.
Edited by Ellie Davey, illustrations by Bárbara Fonseca

Matt Stewart is a Berlin-based strategic designer, founder of Metadada festival and Lifesprint, and all around amazing and dynamic creative.

We met while both of us were working together at a Social Innovation company, and we quickly bonded over our love of speculation, and how easily excited we get about new ideas.

Can you tell us about yourself and what you do?

My name is Matt Stewart and I’m originally from Melbourne, Australia.

I trained as an urban planner and somehow before that I was pretending to be an engineer, but I’m definitely quite a long way from that now. At one point I discovered the world of innovation and Design Thinking, which changed my path that was maybe always destined to be rather nonspecific and open.

This new world that was emerging around innovation and new ways of applying design to problem solving became quite a logical pathway in some respects; of being able to not necessarily be an expert, but still get to explore fascinating system related topics.

A lot of my fascination with that came from when I was studying in University in the late 2000s. There was a particularly big wave of climate change awareness in Australia and I was fascinated by the fact that the science was very clear, but nothing was happening. So I went from wanting to work in science to thinking that the world isn’t how we are told it is and realizing that there must be reasons why people are not doing something to change it.

Instead of focusing on the technical side of things, I became much more fascinated by thinking of how to convince people to change within a complex world.

Engineering is usually seen as more of a hard-skilled career path. Were you also motivated to search for a discipline where you could exercise more of your soft skills and creativity?

Totally! Even from quite an early stage, I was someone who had ideas and always wanted to implement them. Through university I would have a task and I would decide that I wanted to do something very different, and then I would have to merge them in a way that led to an outcome that was actually what I wanted to do.

An example was my research looking at the built environments effect on loneliness in cities, where I had to convince my professor who was very much an urban planner to allow me to do something that was more of a psychology topic.

All along the journey I’m someone who has a lot of ideas, gets incredibly excited about ideas and then gets obsessed about implementing them. That’s kind of something that I both struggle with and also obviously enjoy immensely.

We met in a very corporate environment and a lot of the time you think of a creative worker as someone who works outside of the corporate structure, but more and more in the workplace, you’re asked to be creative and come up with innovative ideas. How does that creativity fit the corporate environment?

I think it’s fascinating. A large part of a lot of the work that I do for corporate clients is empowering people who are kind of stuck in the machine of sitting at a computer -not doing what I would consider particularly creative or fascinating work- to feel creative.

I guess I’m torn about it because it somehow doesn’t align or really match up with the true creative side that I enjoy with my own practice in art and design. It’s almost a weird watered-down version of creativity which is still obviously quite valuable, since it is so important to feel that you can be creative.

Reflecting on my own kind of split personality when it comes to creativity, I have the corporate side, which is very much empowering others to be creative and pushing design processes, but I find that with me in particular, creativity itself is a distinct choice. With that choice of being in a space of being truly creative there is also a hypersensitivity, which actually isn’t able to manifest in the corporate workplace, because it’s quite a harsh place where you can kind of get shut down very easily.

I often find that when I’m kind of doing more artistic things, or in that space of where I want to actually genuinely create, I become quite a different person, which is not really someone who’s suited for much of the world that exists now. Once I truly allow myself to become hypersensitive to my own feelings, creativity and new ideas it just doesn’t really align with the more rigid structures of the corporate environment.

Work nowadays asks more and more of people and demands the use of their soft skills and creativity which can’t be disconnected with a certain vulnerability. But somehow companies don’t create the environments that allow for people to comfortably do it.

Right, you’re expected to be able to just switch between being a project manager and getting things done and being creative and open, which maybe some people can do.

I just know that personally, that’s like a very difficult thing for me to achieve.

Being vulnerable in general is something that’s very hard for everyone, and then you’re asked to do it for someone else’s purpose, which is not yours. This is something that we’ve been listening to a lot, that workers are looking for a purpose and that they feel that what they’re doing doesn’t have an impact.

I see a lot of corporate structures looking for it, but I always question how possible it is actually to create these environments and embrace the differences in their collaborators, because then people also become quite critical of the structures and I’m not sure that’s what companies really want.

Adding to that and I guess like the context more broadly, having read a lot of papers, talking about the future, digitalization and robots taking over jobs and other worrying reflections of what the future looks like, I get so fascinated by the fact that is always a footnote or the whole chapter that says that the great thing about robots is that it will allow humans to do the thing that we’re best at, like creativity and not do the menial work anymore.

I actually find it to be disingenuous in many ways, but I see it more as an amusing way of keeping us from being afraid.

Last month, I organized a workshop in a retreat in Switzerland, where we created a scenario of a future where robots had taken control over most things, but they realized that they didn’t have creativity.

We used different creativity techniques with researchers and other people to try to get them to come up with a creativity engine. Our idea was that in this dystopian future, there must be a process by which humans can be the endpoint and robots put their problems into a little stream and humans who possibly live in this beautiful environment by the lake and nature use creativity to basically ship back ideas into the robots themselves.

I think we believe very much that this is the future that’s going to happen and we’re not prepared for anything else. On the other hand we are asked to be more productive, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense if we are preparing for a future where we will stop doing menial jobs and stop being productive in a capitalistic classical way.

Yes, it’s unpredictable. You can’t predict that creativity is 1,2,3,4 times back and you end up with a certain result, right?

People complain that the world is asking so much of them and they’re stuck, worried and scared and they can’t find their way into a world where maybe we don’t work, or we don’t have to be productive. What happens to all of these people who are not being “productive”?

I think this is the amusing thing about the scenario we created, the idea that we gave up the power to machines and in exchange machines just say ‘you know what? We’re going to make you feel useful and be creative because that’s what makes you happy, in exchange for you not worrying about what we’re doing in terms of controlling the world anymore’.

I feel that most of us are already struggling to find a purpose for our existence. Don’t you think that this model of existence could exacerbate that?

At this time, this seems that it’s a particular trend. Obviously, we’re not old enough to know what it looks like in previous decades and centuries. But from what it seems this kind of drive towards needing a purpose is like an hyperdrive version of a very normal and human need to be useful and having a reason for your existence. Globalization, the internet and social media allow you to have access and see what everyone else is doing and your level of what is purposeful or impactful enough has gone from having an impact on the people in your village, which was the biggest thing that you knew of, to suddenly that being relatively pointless.

On an existential level it may give you something in the moment because you are helping people but many of us probably feel that if we don’t have a certain impact, we may have failed.

“Many of us have a need of getting somewhere but often we don’t feel like we’re there.”

You co-founded Life Sprint, a project where you apply design thinking principles to career and personal development. Did that come from a need to be more impactful and have a more defined purpose and share that with other people as well?

I guess so! Life Sprint is the culmination of me and my co-founder Rakesh Kasturi, talking to many friends, whose challenge was bridging the gap of what they wanted to do and actually being able to get there and ultimately being stuck.

In terms of my motivations within it, I think like everything that I do, is a weird combination of desperately driving towards a certain level of impact and this intense, more local and smaller scale emotional need for being creative and creating new things. And then I also just like relating to people in general.

The project in itself is basically a tool for helping people get unstuck in their career or life in general and we use online tools and a few different sessions working in a small group to try to get people unstuck on one sort of challenge.

One really fun thing about the research that we found out is that many of us have a need of getting somewhere but often we don’t feel like we’re there and there are all of these challenges that we have along the way, and we sometimes get really overwhelmed by how large they are. So the Life Sprint reframes your challenge or ongoing feeling, thought or goal, into something that’s actually tangible, achievable, and that makes sense that you can use creativity to try and solve.

It also comes from the angle that we all deep down know what we want to do, but sometimes we just don’t admit it to ourselves because it’s too scary. Ultimately, it might just be too scary to just get started because it’s you become vulnerable, you may not feel like it will fit into your schedule or it may just not work out. We’re trying to help people to take a first small step and then change the way they think about projects into such ways that we don’t get caught on these things.

For us to go where we want to go, we have to be vulnerable; it is part of the process, but not all environments are welcoming to this vulnerability. How do you allow this vulnerability and channel it in a practical way that is helpful for your life and career path?

Yes, vulnerability is a really good to have, especially when you tie it to creativity.

I think it’s like a very similar state of emotional awareness, actually allowing your emotions to have more impact rather than suppressing them.

You become vulnerable so the last bit is definitely about creating safe spaces to be okay with that, and creating a feeling that people are not alone. It’s very simple and obvious but somehow life happens, and over and over again we keep falling into this trap of thinking we are alone,then realizing we are not alone, and then we forget that again.

How do you make yourself comfortable to be vulnerable enough to then go out into the world and say ‘Look, I have this project, I have this thing to share with you’. How do you manage that?

Not very well, and probably that’s why Life Sprint and trying to empower other people is something of interest to me. I think that ties into why I’m quite good at it, which is the sense that I know how difficult every step of that is.

Over my career so far I guess what made me do all these things that are uncomfortable is not necessarily the best process, but just an intense desire to have to do it, I kind of don’t have a choice. Every time a new idea becomes exciting and has potential you’re kind of dragged into it and it doesn’t matter what the consequences are. There’s a drive that doesn’t let you pull back.

Broadly speaking, what I’m getting better at and what I think is really important, is working with other people. I’m a huge fan of interdependence and I think that as someone who grew up male, in an Anglo-society or just generally in the world in the 90’s, being independent was kind of the only okay thing to be. Any kind of fear of seeming dependent was really negative for me.

For me dependency is not good either, but I think that the more we’re able to become self aware of what we need and what we need from other people the better. There’s just tremendous opportunity to not just rely on yourself and the things that you suck at.

You’re trying to achieve your goals, but other people you’re connected to are as well and it always fascinates me how much you can get through that.

Thinking of my journey, all of the projects that I’ve really done only start when I have a partner. I have basically this constant backlog drawer of projects that would never end that I sometimes do and sometimes don’t and my first step is just to send the idea into the world and see if people like it or not. Then it’s always a case of finding someone else who I like working with who steps up and says ‘Yes, we can do this together’. I think that ties directly into that first way of reducing barriers

It’s all about creative collaborations, right? Bringing someone into the project who is involved in the stakes of the project and also that you can be vulnerable with. Can you talk about how you like to collaborate with people?

On a high level, I really like to collaborate in pairs. It is my preferred way of managing things. I’ve always thought of it as your founding team might have from one to two to three members. Three members might be smarter and achieve better results, but it’s going to be much slower and it’s a question of how much energy you have to invest into the project. My sweet spot of where I found true partnership is in a pair.

You talked about investing energy and I would like to go back to it. I noticed that in collaborations, there is sometimes a contrast between your expectation of how things are going to pan out and the energy you can or are willing to put in. I think we need to think about this investment and apply it sustainably the same way we would, let’s say, a financial investment.

I’ve been working on an analogy to help myself be okay with not achieving more with the time that I have which is called time energy, which is my working title for it. Let’s say every week you have 100 units of this time-energy and that’s it. It doesn’t necessarily mean a number of hours but imagine that if you did all the projects that you had to the level you wanted, you probably needed two or three-hundred units of that, and you don’t have it.

That’s why you need to be very strategic with where you put your time, and on what and when you put in those energy units, and what gives a bunch of them back or just sucks them all up? Where are you happy not being perfect in exchange for actually fitting so many things in? Energy is just a fascinating kind of space to explore.

I always had this idea that I have this bottle of creative energy that I need to fill up. Whenever I work on something, I just take some and use it, like an ingredient that I put into stuff. But this bottle needs to be filled up and I need to be very aware of how low it is and figure how do I nurture myself back into full creative potential. Do you relate to this idea? And if so how do you fill your bottle up?

Yes, I love it. I think it’s just a different way of describing the same analogy. I feel in a way where it says limited energy units and you will lose some and you have to try to gain them.

I get a lot of energy from people. I call myself a reclusive extrovert, if that makes any sense to anyone, where I actually do need people to feel energy, but sometimes I get kind of drawn away from certain types of groups. One on one conversations and ideas excite me a lot.

We’ve connected a lot over our excitement over new ideas and new things.

Yes, totally! I think there’s also one area, which probably I have to focus on more in the next few years, which are the obvious boring basics, like eating well, exercising, and so on. That’s something that you just got to commit to and realize that it’s so important.

“Self awareness when shared is an incredibly powerful part of great collaboration.”

There have been so many times where I’m working and I’m thinking like, nothing’s working out, my ideas are not going anywhere right now…and then I realized that I haven’t eaten for like three hours or I didn’t even drink any water. I get so involved with what I’m doing that I forget the basics.

And adding to that as well, and this broader idea around energy, it is important to talk about self-awareness. For me it is vital as you’re describing, for example when your energy bottle gets lower, you are self aware of that and you’re able to actively make a change.

When I think about really powerful combinations and partnerships that I’ve had with other people, I think self awareness when shared is an incredibly powerful part of great collaboration. By being able to communicate some of your weaknesses and triggers to the other person, or the situations where you might lose out or become less productive, the other person is often like a first line of defense.

Because when you are a team, one can say ‘Hey you’re doing this thing that’s a sign you haven’t eaten, so let’s get food’. And when you share the burden of empowering each other based on information you have, I think that’s just so powerful.

Last question! Is there anything that you learned lately that has been making your life so much easier?

Shorter cycles of feedback is an obvious one where it’s really about making sure I have people around to give me feedback and trying not to make anything too perfect before testing it out. My approach often with the Life Sprint and other projects now has become very much about saving energy and how to prove that this is a shit idea really quickly, so that I don’t do it anymore. This is also a really nice way to test something and not be overwhelmed by the fact that it’s massive because it’s only a small thing each round. You’re just trying to prove that it doesn’t work.

Everything that fights through and doesn’t fail ends up being something that you work on longer term. So I think that’s one definitely one thing

Basically readjusting your expectations….

Readjusting expectations and just testing out, testing early, testing often and being ready to drop things. You’ve got so many other ideas that there’s no point wasting too long on ones that don’t catch.

This interview was recorded within the context of the first season of Flexin’, a podcast featuring conversations with creative professionals about their practice, motivations, fears and hopes in our day and age.