My next favorite concept to use when collectively sharpening ideas is the bullpen. I discovered this ritual through YouTube's [Shishir Mehrotra](https://coda.io/d/Rituals-for-hypergrowth-An-inside-look-at-how-YouTube-scaled_dtrl4NzUguc/?ref=content-technologist.com): "[The bullpen was] a creative experiment that turned into a hallmark of our process. The time was intentionally unstructured…  Many of these discussions would have naturally become ad-hoc meetings, and instead got handled in a timely manner."   I host a monthly bullpen between the creatives of product and marketing, cause [[Creative ops is culture, not just process]]. At the most basic level, it's a way to get like-minded people from different worlds into a room together and see what happens from the collisions. It's a chance to understand how creative decisions get made in another area of the org and get functional expert input (or just moral support) outside our own team. Some days it's show and tell, with a fallback bank of questions like "What are you excited about or experiencing challenges with?" In our first meeting, our product writer brought up an SEO idea related to image search from his journalism days. It bumped up an idea that had been collecting dust for months but was worth revisiting now that our SEO strategy was ready for more creative execution. In the next meeting, we walked through a new feature the product team was working on — and also the challenges of adoption. It's an age-old conundrum: spend months to ship a new feature or campaign, just for your stakeholders to... not even use it. I had recently gone through a similar exercise with a new marketing campaign, and working more closely with the sales team on content training to prepare for launch.  It led to me sharing my experience: I reached out to a core sales leader at key brainstorm and pre-launch points of the content process. The goal was to give him an exclusive preview and get his take on how he'd use it, to both optimize the content for impact and utilize his stories as examples for his peers. It led to the highest engagement we'd ever seen from the collective sales team.  That created an aha moment for the product team to think of creative ways to involve their internal stakeholders in dialogues beyond user feedback, pushing the conversation toward the bigger goal: user adoption. These stories were all a lesson: [[Honor the speed of human adaptation]].