Magic Flying Sticky Notes

We pulled our chairs into a big circle in the center of the room. Time to share. We’d each made two quick drawings, one showing “our journey until today,” one showing “the space we’re in now.”

I held my second drawing up and explained:

There’s this guy. And he’s about to walk off this cliff. He’s got one foot on solid ground and one foot hovering over the abyss. Like in the cartoons. But he’s not too worried. He’s smiling. He’s excited about the unknown he’s walking into. He’ll figure it out. He’ll build the plane once he’s in the air. And anyway, he’s got a net. Except it’s not a net. It’s a giant magic flying Post-it note. And it’ll catch him.

In most contexts, it would feel a little corny to be doing an exercise like this with a group of smart and savvy adults. But we had just spent an intense week together doing some hard work and big thinking, and we’re all engaged in some serious risk taking. Each of us has left behind jobs and schools and familiar cities to spend a year as fellows with the Experience Institute (Ei), with the goal of building an education out of apprenticeships and real-world projects. With all that going on, there’s little room for too-cool-for-school cynicism, and the ordinarily embarrassing task of sharing terrible drawings about our feelings isn’t going to faze any of us.

It should come as no surprise that several of us drew pictures of cliffs. The fourteen members of our cohort are jumping into the unknown, taking crazy risks. (Ei officially calls us “Leap Year Fellows.”) Cliffs make a lot of sense. See also: vast oceans, giant red question marks, winding roads.

Google Image Search results for ‘taking a risk.’ Many cliffs, zero Post-its.

Much more surprising: mine was not the only drawing of a Post-it Note.

Sticky notes aren’t exactly part of the standard visual vocabulary for self-expression, but in this room they could function as a perfectly intelligible signifier. Why? What do sticky notes have to do with the risks we’re taking and the journeys we’re on? What do they have to do with taking a leap? With launching a year of innovation and DIY education?

Kind of a lot, actually.

Not long ago, with the business world chasing after a mythical Paperless Office, sticky notes appeared to be going out of style. But now, stickies are back. And they’re no longer just for bookmarking pages or labeling piles of paper. They’ve gone vertical. They’re up on walls, windows, and whiteboards. Post-it’s have reemerged as a powerful tool for brainstorming, planning, mapping out problems, and communicating possibilities. They’ve become essential to anyone whose workflow or creative process has been influenced by design thinking methodologies.

After a few days of workshops on design, storytelling, and educational innovation at Ei, just about every surface in our classroom had dozens of stickies on it. Some in tidy rows and columns, others in frenzied swarms. Ruby. Teal. Classic office-supply yellow. Statue-of-Liberty green. Inscribed with words, arrows, sketches. Scented with Sharpie.

This was a room full of ideas. And the proof was in the Post-its.

The sticky note revolution may sound a little absurd — I mean, what’s next, second-wave White-Out?—but I’m sold. In college I learned processes for thinking that relied on exactly five things: chalkboards, cheap notebooks, scribbles in book margins, Microsoft Word documents, and great big seminar tables for discussion. I still rely on some version of each of those powerful tools, and I’m adding Post-its to my arsenal.

Proof from Google Image Search that “brainstorming with Post-its” is a thing. A very colorful thing.

What makes sticky notes so great as a tool for thinking?

• They’re tangible. Solid enough to make a thought feel real, but cheap enough that you can risk wasting one. The physicality is satisfying. A fresh stack of stickies feels great in the palm, perfect for fidgeting with during a brainstorming session.
• They invite standing. Up on the wall, they get you away from your laptop or phone, maybe even out of your chair. Brainstorming becomes a screen-free, full-body activity.
• They encourage visual thinking. Why write a word when a doodle will do? Move a Post-it Note around and you can see how an idea connects with, or builds on, or covers over, the thought that came before it. They stack up when two ideas connect. They tear in half when one idea becomes two. They crumple when an idea is ready to trash.
• They invite collaboration. The little squares transfer effortlessly from the intimate space of your desk or hand up to the shared space of the wall or whiteboard. An idea recorded on a sticky note is productively untethered from its source. Colleagues and coconspirators can add, rearrange, stack.
• They’re elegant and adaptable. Different colors and shapes can take on different meanings — blue for headings, red for urgent action items, for example. Whatever you need. Nothing you don’t.
• They stay put, turning a passing thought into something that can catch your eye a few minutes or days later.
• They have a lifespan. A notecard can fester forever in a pile, but a Post-it on a wall has an expiration date. It will stay put, but not indefinitely; there’s only so much stick. (Cue autumn leaf metaphor?) The idea on the note wants to be revised, recorded, written up, taken down, or added to your to-do list.

The physical tools we use for thinking matter. I write different kinds of sentences with my computer than I do in my notebook. Different ideas emerge. I read a book more critically when I’ve got a pen hovering over the page ready to annotate — I could never switch to a highlighter. Thinking with Post-its on a wall is its own mode of ideation. Here the line between my idea and our idea is blurred. Thoughts are made tangible, put out there before they’re made perfect. Words can layer and huddle. Stickies invite fast thinking, and let ideas linger just long enough. And there’s always room for rearrangement.

The Ei Fellows at work.

My year with Ei is going to be about trying out new ideas. It will involve turning thoughts into action quickly. Working more collaboratively. Being open to radical rearrangements. Sharing work before it’s perfect. Finding great places to land—without the pressure of permanence.

In other words, this will be a year that requires sticky-note thinking.