What are the best practices for Futzing?

 

When Kevin Gamble sent that tweet, I laughed.   Twitter work avoidance.   But Tara Hunt has a different more positive view on it and its called:  Futzing.   

Her definition:

The process by which one wanders around without aim, having conversations (with new and old friends), gathering random information, learning ostensibly useless knowledge and avoiding all tasks/duties clear and present.

Her colleague, Nate Ritter asks, "How do you get someone to pay you to futz?"

She describes and defines "Futzing for a purpose."

For example Client A, who is in the floral arrangement industry, needs a community strategy, so I’ll spend days futzing around with blogs, photos, competitors sites, forums, etc. that are related or bridged somehow to the floral industry. If our futzing leads to the ‘BIG IDEA’ or a super amazing connection. If the futzing is being done WITH the client (sometimes we coach them through our process…or lack of it). In the end, though, the futzing that is paid for leads to some sort of result the client can feel is tangible.

I am struck by the phrase "coach them through the process."  Is there a process or set of steps or is it purely random?

I think good futzers have pattern recognition skills.  So, the seemingly random information may have connections to a larger pattern.

One thing I've tried to do with futzing is use my kids time out timer and put some sort of limits on it.

http://www.horsepigcow.com/2008/01/12/futzing-as-the-future-of-work/

Comments

[Anne Adrian]

Beth, when I read Kevin's tweet I laughed too. But, I think the Twitter question is "What are thinking?"

I really like the idea of futzing. Like Tara Hunt said, the importance of futzing is the possibility of leading to the ‘BIG IDEA’. These concepts are often talked about in leadership workshops.

Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner talk about Challenging the Process in The Leadership Challenge. Going outside of your own business and outside of your own industry to get ideas to challenge age old processes makes a lot of sense.

The futzing is the online version of visiting other companies, shopping at your competitors, and learning about processes in other businesses. Twitter and online futzing give opportunities to do this. Futzing is frowned upon because it appears to be a waste of time, but I think it is important to expand our areas of interest and look to others for ideas--futzing is one way to do this.

Thanks for the post.

[Michele Martin]

Beth, I think you've captured what I do well and what I wish I could have for a business plan. I'd LOVE to figure out a way to get paid for futzing and to position futzing as a legitimate, important activity that adds value. Of course as you point out it has to result in a tangible product in the end, so that's part of it. I'm also not sure that everyone sees value in futzing--it's usually regarded as "screwing around." Look at what happens in organizations if people start randomly wandering the Web or going around just chatting with people.

At any rate, I'm with you on wanting to know more about how you could coach customers through such a process. I suspect that it might have to start with doing some meta-thinking about how we approach the task and then getting that out of our heads and into some kind of format that could be communicated to other people.