Category: Creativity

While I am thinking about the importance of what and how you write … and what makes an attractive blog entry … I found this. Looks good to my reading ears.

It has been fascinating watching how the discussion on Spheres of Influence has evolved … and even more fun jumping from comment to comment and blog to blog to see how the spheres of influence actually work.

There were links to WebMetricsGuru (actually two trackbacks … perhaps this is something to do with web metrics), comments by Eric Kintz, BobG, Karl Long, Craig Lefebvre, Mack Collier, Nick Rice, MindBlob (whoever he may be), Ed Lee, Toby as well as my good self … not to mention the earlier suggestions and contributions from Ariel, Bryan Person, Matthew Peschong, Lewis Green, Stephen Downes and Seth Finkelstein, and there were clearly some email conversations also occurring. Now, some of these blogs I know and read myself … while others are new to me — and it is clear that there are some fairly high profile bloggers and some relative newcomers all contributing their ideas and energy to this topic. What is PARTICULARLY interesting is the way that the topic has encouraged this diverse range of people to contribute.

It is one thing to read a blog, but quite another to comment … and this goes way beyond influence, as does the result. Clearly the discussion has generated a piece of great new knowledge … but the EXPERIENCE of the process was what made this interesting (see also this from David). As Glen Drury, VP at Yahoo! says, "Wisdom is not online. For one thing, not every book is online. And secondly, some knowledge is only experiential" …

It is the experience of knowledge creation that is part of the excitement of blogging … not the size of your sphere of influence, but how well it taps into the zeitgeist of new knowledge.

It is easy to forget that creativity or innovation doesn’t "just happen". Even if you work in a "creative" team … there is no guarantee that creativity will occur — you need to find ways to boost the chances of your work being viewed as innovative.

Sometimes it takes coffee (in my case, plenty of it), at other times sugar. But in almost all instances, creativity and innovation take TIME and (horror of all horrors) planning.

Brainstorming is often seen as an end in itself, rather than a small step in a creative process. And while brainstorming can help bring out or enhance ideas, the breakthroughs that we look for often occur in isolation, appear unexpectedly and sometimes take extra time and effort to connect with your own thoughts and those of your team. Hmmm … starting to sound strange — what am I talking about?

Before brainstorming

The secret to creativity is preparation. And creative preparation is focused as well as undisciplined (or chaotic). You need to immerse yourself in the world, its ideas, images and trends, but you also need to stand apart. You need to LISTEN to the breathing of the world, get inside the skin of others and look with the eyes of a stranger at the life you live everyday. In short, the best preparation for creativity is LIFE (but from the outside-in). [Actually I don’t know if I really agree with this, but I am going with it.]

You also need inspiration. Not an idea … but breath. Your ideas need to live, they need to take a breath and come to life. So, when you get a brief or a request, take a pad and write down the first thing that comes to mind. Draw a picture if that is what works. Just make sure you do it straight away. Once you have your small piece of inspiration, secret it away somewhere (you will come back to it later).

Now you need to research and think … and you also need to continue to work on your OTHER projects. One of the important parts of brainstorming is deep, unconscious processing — you need to let your brain work through the tricks, memories, techniques, stories, images and anecdotes that you have been storing away throughout your life. This is hard work and really cannot be done consciously. If you try to force it, the result won’t ring true.

Then immediately before your brainstorming, pull together some thoughts, write them up in a form that makes sense to you, grab a coffee and head into the meeting.

In the storm

There are lots of tips and tricks to brainstorming, all written by people with more authority and expertise than I. The one thing that is always important to remember is that NO IDEA IS IRRELEVANT. It is easy to forget about the STORM part and focus on the BRAIN — the last thing that you want in a brainstorming meeting is censure. You don’t want self-censure and you don’t want peer or group censure.

Remember to speak up, and speak up early. The earlier you speak up and contribute to a session, the easier it becomes. Put your ideas up on the board. Let others listen to them and add or change them. DON’T BE PRECIOUS.

Categorise and review the information that comes out in your brainstorm. Find the common threads and bring the ideas together … prioritise them in some way and find ways of linking categories — whether as a pictogram or as a word theme/meme.

Now, remember to write it all down. Make a summary of your notes, thoughts and feelings. Share them with the other participants … and determine the NEXT STEPS … and responsibilities. Don’t let the good ideas go to waste — ensure that you are all clear about what happens next, who is going to do it, and when it is due.

Finally, take the ideas that don’t fit, or are not prioritised, and write them onto a SPARE IDEA card. Place these in categorised boxes. Then, next time, when you are sitting through a idea drought, reach into the box of spare ideas and find new inspiration!

While I think the title of this post is great, I think it is a much better title for book! I found this over at Patrick Syms & Yusuf Chuku’s Staufenberger Repository blog.

The Staufenbergers raise an interesting point … over the last couple of years, debate over "creativity" has been heightened and managed by professional consultants. There have been books, discussions, blogs, articles and so on … but much of the debate has been transformed into consultant-speak, tyrranised by the voice of the corporation, and starved of human touch.

And while I am more than happy to hear about companies trying to encourage creativity and innovation, I am just as interested in freeing creativity and innovation from the binds that turn it into process. My view of creativity is a little more disruptive and anarchic than this … and it is precisely those types of disruptions that I am most interested in.

Long live creative chaos!

S.

Also from Recognize Design, a link through to Marketallica where there is a great mind map of forces shaping the future of entertainment. I have never been a fan of mind maps as a tool for creative thinking … but this one has pulled together some interesting pieces of information.

And as I began to think about it a little more, it made me think about what works and what does not work. It made me really think about the future of entertainment — what will work and what will not. Or, I guess, what is working now, and what is not.

There has been a bit of comment flying around since over the Agency.com/Subway "viral" pitch … with a focus on the BIG idea. David Armano has followed it up with some good digging into the need for BIG execution … but it seems to me that the problem is not necessarily with the gap between idea and execution, but too simplistic a choice of execution. It comes right back to innovation and the need to be able to pull apart media and technology and creative processes so that they can be successfully be rebuilt in a NEW way.

That is what I mean (I think) when I talk about innovation being HARD. We can’t just take one old form and apply it to a new distribution model. We can’t just rely on the BIG idea … because when a big idea gains momentum, you can lose the capacity to DELIVER it. It is not the idea that is important — it is whether it works.

S.

I had never considered this before. Those clever folks over at Fast Company have highlighted the use of agencies to provide insight in the same way that management consultants used to be called in to restructure a corporation’s business model.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon … and there are some out-standing examples of marketers and strategists who can bring together business, marketing and strategic planning skills. Another form of convergence — just one that is more about people than about technology. (Reminds me of David Armano’s T-shaped creatives again).

But does that mean we will end up with agencies becoming the new McKinseys? Or will McKinseys reassert themselves in this space by hiring trend analysts and creative directors? Interesting!

Thanks to Josh Carlton.

S.

One of my first jobs out of university was as an editor. I worked in a legal publishing company where the challenge was to update our legislation and commentary volumes more accurately and faster than our competitors. Actually, this was a secondary challenge — the primary challenge was to make our markup and changes quickly but also accurate enough to pass the review of our managing editor … the eagle-eyed Paul F.

Of course, this was at a time when editing was still done mostly on paper. So there was plenty of "cutting and pasting" … with real scissors and real glue. And each time, as I approached Paul’s office (after double and triple checking my work), I would think "this time I have got him". Each time, such was my optimism, I thought that there would be no errors, that Paul would not find anything out of place, and that I could send my manuscript on for typesetting straight away.

Within seconds Paul would have found an error. "What is that?", he would ask. I would stammer some answer not even being able to focus on the question or the growing amount of green pen on my manuscript. "How did this happen?", he would ask. I would begin answering only to be greeted by even more errors. "The page numbers are out of sequence" … blah blah blah.

Did this make me a good editor? No, I don’t believe it did. Did I take Paul’s feedback personally? Only at first. Then I realised that he was exactly the same in any environment … he even spoke to his mother the same way. Eventually I realised that Paul found it difficult to communicate in anything but a hierarchical way. That is why he liked to work. It is where he felt most in control.

As my career progressed, I found that I was increasingly asked to provide other with feedback, with mentoring and with advice. I reviewed their writing, their planning, their concepts and even their performance reports, and soon I found that it is much harder to give feedback than I ever thought possible. Unfortunately it does not seem to get easier with more experience. But today, Seth Godin has a great piece on giving feedback. His focus is on providing analysis, not commentary.

It is all about peformance. Look at what needs to be improved, focus on the big picture (not the typos) and make sure that, if you find something good, let the writer know. Read the whole post here.

By the way, I did become a passably good editor, also thanks to Paul’s persistence. Sometimes criticism is harsh, but there is an art to giving it, and an art to hearing it. Just because it feels personal doesn’t mean it is not true!

Thanks to Adactio for the photo.

S.

"Difficult people" are everywhere. They are in shops, in restaurants, on the bus and in your meetings at work. They may even be members of your family. You can tell a difficult person because they stop things from happening. They raise questions and ask WHY? But one of the GOOD things about difficult people is that they do say NO.

I was listening to Lisa Haneberg’s fireside chat with Johnnie Moore and was struck by the discussion towards the end that focused on "difficult people". I have always been focused on achieving outcomes, making things happen — often overcoming the problems posed by "difficult people". But Johnnie and Lisa raise some interesting points about difficult people and the way that we label them.

Difficult people are often very passionate and driven people. They are saying NO for a reason — and while there may be a hidden agenda, there may also be very valid reasons. The challenge for marketers is to work through the issues to find a new way of engaging the difficult person. How do we do this?

Johnnie suggests that we start by leaving our own agendas at home. It is easy to forget that we have our own ideas and expectations that we bring to a workshop, to a campaign or a project. If we REALLY listen to the difficult person, we may find that the problems are not with them, but with us. Finding a new way to communicate is the challenge — but the first step is listening to the words that come out of our own mouths and understanding how "difficult" we are being.

S.

If you have read my About page on this blog, you will know that I am a liar. Well at least sometimes, and mostly when it comes to storytelling. And when I started this blog, I was aiming to write all the time, daily even … with the aim of producing 999 creative pieces.
But then the blog took over.
And so I have finally moved the more creative pieces (ok there is not that many of them) onto a different site. If you are interested you can find them here.
Happy writing!

When I was at university I was lucky enough to have a tutor called Martin Buzzacott. He was a lot of fun and quite unconventional, and at that stage he was in the middle of writing his second novel.
I remember asking him what his novel was about and he looked at me rather strangely and said, "I don’t know yet, I haven’t finished it".
This struck me at the time because I was particularly fascinated by the process of writing and creativity (not much has changed), and there was a lot of focus on writing by numbers … define your characters, build a plot outline etc. Martin’s approach was a breath of fresh air.
The reason I bring this up is to do with the importance of writing in the development of strategy. We can all get carried away in running workshops and meeting people and digging into the ribs of business, but the hard work of strategy, and the most creative elements are in the writing of your plans.
It is only when you sit down, focus and start writing that all the elements begin to wrestle with each other in your subconscious mind. And as you continue to write and develop your ideas, you mind will make staggering connections and then throw them up for you to write down. It is almost like magic.
But like any form of writing, it often does not come easily — and you can also fall victim to "writers block". For marketers and planners, at least there is always a looming deadline to kick you into gear!
The challenge is to make sure that as you write up your strategy that you also allow yourself some freedom so that a compliant idea can work its way in.
I think in many respects, blogs are a great way of producing short form strategy. They keep you writing, keep your brain active, and when you are loving the hypertext, you start to behave online in the same way that our brains do. Hmmm … now that has got me thinking!
S.