Step 4: Harnessing the Power of Iteration

Every creative project is an adventure. It takes diversions before it reaches its end: new ideas join the old ones, you meet obstacles that seem unconquerable, and you have wonderful eureka moments. You’ll have to slay the beast of doubt and offer up thanks and prayers to the gods of digital fortune. One of the best weapons you can carry on that quest is iteration.

“Begin with an idea, and then it becomes something else”

Pablo Picasso

Iteration keeps you flexible, so you can take advantage of new technologies, keep your ideas in harmony and have a bird’s-eye view of the project at any moment. It leads to better, more considered results, and stops you wandering aimlessly in the wilderness.

A typical iteration cycle looks like this:

Imagine · Create · Test · Refine · then repeat

Below are some thoughts on how and why to use iteration cycles in your creative project.

1) The Demons of Doubt

Beware… as you stride out, there are hidden dangers on your trail, and one you’re guaranteed to meet at least once is the Demons of Doubt. Doubt is there for a reason, but too much of it is like Kryptonite to Superman. Without doubt, you might find that throwing yourself off that precipice into a small pool of water wasn’t such a great idea after all. We need to question and calculate, and doubt is the catalyst for both.

As you travel through the creative process, you have to weigh up risk, and without doubt’s say those calculations can end up one-sided. But you also need a way to stop doubt becoming a creeping creature that overshadows your idea and paralyses your creative process.

Doubt feeds on big decisions and on trying to take in something whole. Small iterations break doubt apart into wraith-like smoke and keep those monsters tamed. They give you momentum: you can still see the bigger picture, but it won’t daunt you as much. You fight the demons one at a time instead of facing a formidable army.

2) Start small

When you sit back and look at the scale of the idea you’ve just imagined into existence, it can seem daunting, crazy and over-ambitious. Don’t worry: that probably means it’s a good idea. You just need to work out how to break it down and achieve it. In step 3 we looked at Agile as part of your toolkit, and this is where it and its tools come into their own.

Map the project out and break it into smaller elements. Gauge how easy or hard each one will be, sort them into categories, and once they’re bite-sized, chow down. For a hardware project there are now plenty of prototyping tools, from cheap electronics and microcontrollers to 3D printing, that let you test digital ideas cheaply and rapidly. The idea is to find the pitfalls early: in other words, fail fast.

3) Be the pathfinder

If you were building a website, you wouldn’t start by sending someone final designs to see what they think, would you? Most designers start with wireframes or hand-sketched layouts so they can iterate quickly, cheaply and effectively. Same with video: you’d sketch a rough storyboard before you even turned the camera on. Think of it as sketching in pencil before you go over it in fine ink.

If you fail fast, while you’re still at the sketching stage, changing course is as simple as scrunching up a piece of paper or scribbling something out. With an iterative process, even if you have to step further back in the development cycle, you never stray far from the path. You can navigate twists and turns quickly, you have a map of your progress, and everyone involved knows where you are and, just as importantly, where you’re heading.

4) Work in sprints

In Agile you usually work in ‘sprints’: you give a set amount of time to one element of the project and hit those smaller targets before moving on to the next. That way you quickly have results to show, get feedback on them, and fold that feedback into the next iteration. Development becomes circular rather than linear. You’re not working in isolation, so you avoid the danger of one person’s vision being completely at odds with the rest of the team’s, or the client’s.

If one area is proving particularly tricky, you’ll see which and why very quickly, and can adjust course or call in backup. Your final outcome is the result of a series of smaller successes, each vetted, approved and improved along the way, that add up to a unified whole.

5) Make learning part of the journey

There’s so much online now that you can find free tutorials, videos, code or examples on almost any subject. Use them: consult the experts, get inspired by other people’s ideas, and keep feeding them into your own creative journey to keep things fluid. Iteration means things can change, so if you find a beautiful idea that fits perfectly, you have the power to build it in. Remember your moodboards and social bookmarks, and keep adding to them.

Learning also means handling failure. There will be failures along the way. Say it, accept it, and realise that failure, cushioned by the contained scope of each iteration, isn’t a negative thing. Treat each failure as ruling out a possibility: each one teaches you something and shows you how to improve. To find what works, you often have to rule out what doesn’t.

6) Celebrate your steps

Sometimes the first steps are the hardest. Look at how we humans learn to walk: there are distinct stages. First comes crawling, then ‘cruising’, grabbing for support from anything within reach. There’s a lot of falling down and getting back up, a lot of tears and swaying, and parents watching wide-eyed with amazement and trepidation. But every step is celebrated with cheers, clapping and little tears of family pride, there’s a certainty that you’ll ‘get there’, and everything along the way is a wonderful part of the experience.

Bring that attitude to your project. Screen-grab designs or visuals, set them as your desktop, show them to your family, document them, stick them on your wall. Surround yourself with your ideas and they take on a force of their own and start to become real. That sense of flow and achievement will reassure and inspire you. And eventually one of those steps will be the one where walking feels like a distant memory, and it’s all about how fast you can run, how high you can jump, or what other radical stunts you can pull off with your new-found skills.

7) Reaching your destination

With a constant cycle of iteration, you have to decide when your project can go out the door with its head held high. There are various schools of thought on this. For a personal project, you decide when it’s ready to be unleashed on the world, bearing in mind it can be V1 and the iteration can continue.

For a client delivery, the absolute basic test is that it’s ‘fit for purpose’: it does everything you agreed, and does it well, even though of course you want it to be spectacular.

If you’ve used Agile, seeing when a project is finished is one of its visual benefits. The end point is when all the cards you’ve carefully moved across your boards have passed through ‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’, ‘Complete’, ‘Tested’ and ‘Approved’ and sit neatly in ‘Done’. The other benefit is that working in small sprints means you’ve been deploying iterations along the way, so the final release is one small step rather than a leap of faith across a chasm.

This is part 4 of a 7-part series. Missed step 1? Read A Jargon Free Anatomy of a Creative Brief. Next up: Step 5: Plan for the Known Unknowns – Project Planning.

If you need a hand writing a creative brief, or would like Developing Dreams to help bring your idea to life or run a brainstorm, get in touch.