Reprinted with permission from You Need a Manifesto: How to Craft Your Convictions and Put Them to Work by Charlotte Burgess-Auburn and Stanford d.school, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Join Charlotte on her CreativeMornings FieldTrip to write your own manifesto on November 17!

^{(Photography credit Patrick Beaudouin.)}

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Creative work—the work of bringing ideas into the world, whatever kind they are—is hugely powerful. It is a particular kind of power: the power to generate, to make something where before there wasn’t anything. The power to improve, to build on the work of others, and reach closer to an ideal. The power to influence, to engage people in new beliefs, activities, and behaviors. And the power to change it all. Making things better may have always been a part of creative work, but now we are much more aware of how hard it is to design products and systems that produce fair outcomes for people across the globe and for the planet itself—and how easy it is to fail to account for the potential impact of our great new ideas.

How can you find the right spot for your individual kind of creative work within a larger context of positive change, in a culture and environment that is constantly changing? The world is as wide open as it ever was.

To feel less unmoored, you need to create strong anchors to your values, develop ethical navigation tools, and describe honest destinations.

A modern manifesto is a statement of purpose and a script for action that will allow you, as a citizen of the creative world, to recruit yourself to your own cause, navigate bravely, and share your unique position with others.

Take an Inner Road Trip

A practice of self-awareness equips every maker, creator, or problem solver with an essential understanding of their own relationship to the process of getting work done. Know yourself, and everything will work better.

Let’s do some internal warmups to become familiar with a few key parts of your system of moral navigation: your goals, values, ethics, and biases. Consider your manifesto a compass; in this landscape, you might think of goals as your destinations, values as the gas you need to get there, ethics as your steering wheel, and biases as well-worn paths and ruts in the roads.

Get to Know Your Destinations

Goals are destinations. The journey to them can be more short-term, like “write this book,” or more long-term, like “bring up my kids to become healthy, thoughtful, productive adults.” They are a conceptualization of a place, a moment, or a state of being where you want to arrive. Goals are a great way to plot a deliberate course through your life and work. However, as with all things set in the future, we need to regularly reexamine that course in relation to the present.

Taking time to consider your goals—the ones you’d like to have as well as the ones that you’re actively pursuing—can help orient you toward work that is meaningful to you and that you want to do well. The only way to truly know your goals is to look inward. Get to know yourself. Dig around to see what goals you might already have in your backpack.

Put Gas in the Tank

Values are simply what you value in your life. They help you determine what is important to you in both the long term and the short. These underlying beliefs influence your behavior and motivate your actions—the ones you take and the ones you don’t take. Your values are changeable. What is of value to you today may not be in ten years. (In fact, let’s hope not.) Your values are also personal. I can’t tell you what values to have—they are yours, not mine. What I can tell you is that you need them. Why? It’s gas in the tank. Values motivate you. They push you. Let them. Get good at letting them push you.

Values matter because they are present in everything we do, but they also hide in our actions — they are not always self-evident and not often self-examined. By airing your values as part of the work of creating your manifesto, you have the opportunity to examine and evolve your sense of purpose as you gain experience and wisdom. Examine your daily pursuits as a way to discover what you value beyond the obvious. Start with the behaviors, actions, and objects that are important to you and extract your values from them.

Where’s the Steering Wheel on This Thing?

If values are the accelerator for driving toward your goals, then ethics are more like the brakes, the steering, or the lines on the road. Ethics are the rules and restraints we establish for ourselves to keep from running all over the place, squashing everything that’s in our path. Without an accepted set of rules of the road, you can struggle to know how and where to stop, especially when your vehicle can take you far beyond where it’s safe to go.

Ethics are your rules, whether they are personal guides to your own behavior or a collective set of laws that keep all of us on paths safely. Built in line with your values and responsive to your experiences, they indicate your boundaries and the ways you get to your destination. They govern the behavior you’ve decided is okay and the types of actions that you want to avoid. Ethics prevent us from doing and saying things that are contrary to our values, that we know we will regret.

As you are creating your manifesto, use the opportunity to ask yourself if there are any guardrails in there, any brakes, any limits. If you’ve got your personal ethics in place, you’ll be better able to tell when you, your organization, or your field is heading in the wrong direction.

The Ruts in the Road

Biases are the predetermined preferences that we hold; they can be favored routes to travel—or ruts in the road. So often we make choices based on instinct, but it is important to understand and examine the ways in which your preferences have developed. Understanding your preferences can help you see where you need to push through unnecessary or unjust boundaries imposed by convention, negative influences, and systemic or structural prejudice.

Everyone has biases — they are a product of a learning brain. They form because the brain categorizes new experiences based on prior knowledge. Our brain connects new ideas, new people, and new things to categories we’ve formed from all of our earlier experiences and then responds to them the same way it does to other things in that category. This means that we have all had personal experiences and been exposed to cultural norms that are influencing our decisions and actions based on bias.

While some of these biases are very useful (to keep us from walking into oncoming traffic) and some are harmless (like “sour cream and onion chips are just better than barbecue”), some are incredibly harmful both to others and to ourselves. Stereotypes passed to us from our families, the cultures we grew up in or are living in, and the media and information we consume can predetermine our ideas about ourselves and other people based on race, cultural background, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and so much more. They can make us jump to conclusions about other people’s values, beliefs, ethics, and goals.

Prior experiences or teachings from people we respect can predispose us to judge new experiences and new people based on only this earlier knowledge. While it’s not possible to live a life with no biases at all, it is critical to know that they exist, to become aware of what yours are, and to bring them into the light so you can spend time and effort to change when you need to. By exposing your implicit biases, you can make more deliberate choices.

Get On with It

All this talk of values and ethics and goals can make writing your own manifesto seem like the stakes are too high. You might be worrying, What if I can’t identify my values? What if I don’t have the “right” goals? If you are worrying, it’s okay. The beauty of the approach you are about to take is in its flexibility. You’re not setting anything in stone. Your first manifesto is going to be a prototype, and so is your second and your third. Free yourself from any sense of obligation—you don’t owe anyone anything. Trust your intuition. There’s only one person your manifesto can and needs to be totally true for, and that is you, right now.

Copyright © 2022 by The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University on behalf of Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
Illustrations copyright © 2022 by Rick Griffith

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