This question comes to us from our pal, Carrie:

I am a graphic designer and I had to work in a “cross-functional team” at my office. I had to work with people from accounting to develop a new logo. Don’t ask me why. Here’s my question.

Why is it so hard for two intelligent people to communicate and translate a creative idea into words they both understand? Has anyone done so successfully?

(I know we’ve all been there, how do you deal with this)

Oddpodz citizen, Oliver, wants everyone to weigh in on his question:

Am I uncool if I don’t care about trends?
IMHO, most of what experts spot as trends are just fads, and I’d rather just do my own thing.
-Oliver

So, what do y’all (we’re in Georgia now) think?

This week’s question of the week is based on the thoughts of our current Pole Vaulter, 2thinknow.com’s Christopher Hire. He strongly believes that “too many people equate innovation with change alone.” They are wrong. Rather, “[he and his firm believes], innovation is a change to benefit and advance mankind and civilization.” Furthermore, “If it doesn’t do good, if it doesn’t excite and if it’s not contagious, then it’s not innovative. It’s more fried chicken. And more unneeded change.”

Question: Do we need more types fried chicken? Do little iterative changes matter, or should we push for the big ideas all the time? What qualifies as innovative to you…?
We would love to hear what you have to say.

This week’s question was posed by citizen, Cynthia Woods. She wants to know how to avoid losing your creative side, especially when your job is kind of a snore.

She heard a statistic that while 98% of kids are creative, only 2% of adults are. So, Oddpodz, how have you nurtured your creativity?

If you’re like us, heck if you’re just breathing, you run into obstacles as you go along. But, if you’re an oddpod that means that you are (among other things) clever, creative, curious and tenacious. You realize that challenges will arise, but that they do not signal the end of the world.

Believe it or not, we have encountered a few challenges while building our nation of creatives. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so why would we expect our Nation to be built in 23 hours or less? Why? Because we are so excited about it and about all the cool new people we will meet when it’s completed. So, we hit some bumps in the road. I’m not complaining-this is my dream job. We have a great team and we’ve figured out how to work through road blocks and with some blockheads.

Some challenges we’ve all faced:

1. Meeting a tight deadline
2. Getting someone to say ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’
3. Putting the right team together
4. Muddling through when you can’t find the right team
5. Doing great things on a limited budget
6. Building something that is new and different
7. Telling the world about your cool new product
8. We could go on, but you get the idea

How we’ve dealt:

1. Eliminate the words no, can’t, won’t, don’t and variations thereof from your vocabulary and stay away from negative people and influences.
2. Have ears that are twice as big as your mouth. Also, make sure that you’re all speaking the same language. Communication gaps can turn into dangerous black holes.
3. Listen without judgement, and when you open your yap, make sure you’re not cutting people off.
4, Ask a lot of questions and embrace the iterative process - getting it right will take a few tries.
5. Know where the fine line is between getting WAY off track and considering all the possibilities.
6. Even if you’ve got a tight deadline, take a break from your challenge. Sleep, run, ride a bike or a horse, read something or grab a meal. Your brain will churn and connect the dots while you’re busy doing something else
7. Find good outside sounding boards.
8. No holds barred brainstorming session with the beverage of your choice. Just make sure you have a good secretary to capture the random brilliant ideas.
9. Have a good thinking space.
10. Laugh a lot. Crankiness kills creativity.

So, how do you muddle through the tough spots? We’d love to hear….

This week’s question was posed by Ken Stremsky:

How should we go about trying to fixing the educational system of the United States of America? More specifically, how do we reduce functional illiteracy?

Looking forward to your creative ideas in the comments section…

We like this video for a bunch of reasons.

1. It’s called “Goodbye to the Normals.” Since we are all about ODD, it’s resonated with us immediately.

2. We’ve all attempted running away sometime in our past. I tried when I was 6 or so. I was not as adventurous as this little red head. But, I did pack a suitcase and formed a most excellent plan to depart by foot to destinations unknown and to sustain myself with a tube of Pepsodent toothpaste. Half way down the block and a mouthful of toothpaste later, I realized staying put at home was probably a better bet.

3. Oddpodz is building something that started as scribblings on a cocktail napkin! There are plenty of times given those circumstances when you’d just want to run away. Such as:

-when you need to write something and you have the dreaded writer’s block
-when a design is not coming together
-when someone tells you ‘no’
-when someone tells you that “you suck.” (that has happened)
-when things don’t happen as quickly as you would like them to
-when you’ve had a long, bad day and you have a big giant headache
-when people say they’re going to do something and they don’t
-when a problem seems insurmountable

But, we never did, and we won’t. Because we’re oddpodz. We’re optimistic. We’re problem solvers. And, we believe in possiblities. So, we watched this clip and felt like little Magnus at the end. We’ve got passports in hand and we’re running as fast as we can to build our global nation of creatives and we’re not turning back.

Happy Friday. Enjoy. Tell us about when you’ve wanted to run away. Did you? Didn’t you? Why or why not?