Looking back on my notes from last night’s Firestarters I can see a faintly disquieting collection of home truths.
That, perhaps, as agencies we’re more comfortable talking about innovation than actually living it.
It’s a powerful idea for us, certainly. But not necessarily a state of being. Yet.
The insights and provocations came thick and fast.
That we are more comfortable with the how of innovation rather than the what.
That we find it easier to talk about it on our clients’ behalf than undertake it on our own.
That we find comfort in pretending to be so certain individually, because collectively we’re entirely uncertain about what the future holds.
That we allow ourselves to feel superior by gravitating towards what we think is significant, rather than what real people might find important.
That our own business model inhibits us from executing genuinely disruptive innovation within our own agencies.
That the only true way to disrupt our own business is by working from outside it.
And, most alarmingly, that disruption is inevitable; the only salient question is about who gets to it first and when.
Antony Mayfield shared my favourite quote of the evening, from Ted Sarandos, Netflix CEO (and MEC client, disclosure-fans).
Our strategy is to become HBO quicker than HBO become us.
That’s some strategy for the modern business.
It’s highly specific but incredibly ambitious. Convergence and disruption are assumed. It’s a very real deadline but it’s not something you can put in a calendar.
Substitute agencies for Netflix in that equation, though, and who’s the other party?
Antony reckoned it was McKinsey. He’s probably right.
But for last night demonstrated it could come from anywhere.
Luckily, for a planner, there was also bucketloads of great insight on what to do about it.
Pats broke down the characteristics of disruption, getting us thinking again about our clients’ business and the opportunity that exists in re-imagining an agency’s remit within it.
Glyn showed how agencies shouldn’t be built around skills or even disciplines, but by mindsets. Flexibility and perspective are the new art direction and copywriting.
Graeme contrasted the two natural laws that govern an agency’s world. Moore’s Law moves too fast for us to predict what’s coming – and yet it’s where we spend so much of our time. The glacial pace of Darwin’s Law gives us an opportunity to understand the stuff that doesn’t change – people and their motivation.
Phil reminded us to concentrate on ends not means – agencies should be the voice not just of the consumer but also of our clients’ commercial purpose. Big nods all round there.
Anjali articulated the role of innovation within an agency very nicely indeed – to harness technical developments and deliver stuff that’s useful with minimal wastage.
These were potent talks loaded with ‘ways in’ for people to grab hold of.
This was before the days when we could deliver engineering constructions – and mass global sporting circuses – successfully, and on time.
I read the other day that it wobbled because of something that wasn’t supposed to happen. (This was in a book review in the LRB – yes that edition).
Or to put it more accurately, because of something that happened but that the engineers hadn’t planned for.
It wasn’t the volume of the people.
It was what they did.
They fell into line.
They walked in synch: left, right, left.
This communal pattern did a funny thing to the way everyone’s weight was distributed through the fabric of the bridge.
It meant too much weight was being put on the bridge at one time, and was being done so in an unwitting rhythm.
So the bridge wobbled.
Turns out, this is something that bridge designers had used to guard against.
Bridges used to have signs advising people to walk out of step. It was that well known.
But apparently engineers have a habit of collectively forgetting lessons that were once very well known.
Technological advances mean that everyone looks forward, forgetting what their forbears learned through expensive failures.
The writer of the book being reviewed has calculated that this process of collective memory decay takes about 30 years, about the length of a professional career.
After this, new engineering cohorts will have to learn mistakes for themselves.
And this was one of them.
This habit – and the inevitable sense of responsibility the engineering profession feels for such mistakes – led to one fascinating corrective case study, in Canada.
Since the 1920s, Canadian engineers wear iron rings on the little finger of their writing hand.
The rings were fashioned from the remains of Quebec Bridge which collapsed in 1907. It’s supposed to remind each engineer that their hand could be the one that draws the wrong line and caused a collapse.
They’re made of steel now, but back then the iron was left to rust and go sharp – an un-ignorable reminder.
The strange thing about all this (the mistakes, the forgetting, the sense of responsibility) is that, when a lot of these old bridges were built, no-one really understood how bridges and weight distribution really worked.
No-one knew for sure the actual paths through the constructions of steel and stone, taken by that individual loads as they transferred downwards.
The engineering maths didn’t exist then.
So engineers were working with factors they didn’t even fully understand.
So, what can we learn from all this?
1. As with the Millennium Bridge, people can’t help fitting into a social pattern. It’s just very difficult to predict when, where and why that will happen.
2. There are thousands of people in our industry who have experienced failures and mistakes. We have an awful lot to learn from people who did our job a long time ago, in supposedly simpler times – if we only bothered to listen.
3. Sometimes you need more than just an idea, or a memory, or a message, to communicate effectively. To change behaviour, in the right context, sometimes you need real-world objects that people can unconsciously carry with them.
4. People have designed things way more important than ad campaigns without understanding the factors at work. Sometimes we are allowed to accept that we simply don’t yet know what we don’t yet know. We can still create brilliant, effective, aesthetically pleasing constructions even if we don’t quite understand what’s happening.
It’s taken me far longer than usual to write up my response to Firestarters 7, and I don’t only mean getting around to it.
If this post has ended up a bit rambly, then it’s because I’ve trying to find a way through a bunch of thoughts that seem related (at least to me), but haven’t quite settled into a comfortable shape until now.
I’ve chunked it up to order my thoughts.
This is stuff I’ve been thinking about for a while, but it’s useful to start back at Firestarters last Tuesday.
The premise
At Firestarters this week Kirby Ferguson told us that Everything Is A Remix.
Planners tend already to be either students or proponents of combinatorial creativity, so it maybe wasn’t that revelatory.
But Kirby’s story was wonderfully researched and beautifully rendered.
It was a warm bath of cultural references and a gently iconoclastic tug at that Romantic thread that stretches from Beethoven to Dylan to the modern-day ECD.
He believes that creativity is more a function of discovery than it is imagination, and can therefore be accessed by anyone.
New ideas are already contained within familiar ideas. They are revealed through an unending and exponential process of re-contextualisation, waiting to be chanced upon by those curious and insatiable enough to copy, transform or combine what already exists.
Kirby’s apparently throwaway phrase “talent is simply interest” seemed initially to encapsulate his position.
On reflection it has also been his most contentious statement.
I liked it at first. It was provocative. I’ve defended it on Twitter. But some very smart people have questioned it as an over-simplistic reduction and I’d be foolish to ignore them.
Because new ideas don’t just happen.
Creative people do need something other than a pre-disposition to smash disparate elements together in the hope of something new.
As an MEC colleague said to me afterwards, someone can be as interested as they like in becoming a singer, but without the talent it simply won’t happen.
And, as Phil has argued, there is more to idea creation than mere curiosity in things that already exist.
So, to concede the point formally, talent ISN’T just interest.
But perhaps, to flip the phrase, interest is actually a talent.
This feels to me like it has more value in achieving what Kirby wants to do – which is to elevate interest, not do down talent.
What do I mean?
Three reasons interest might be a talent
First, while creativity is a process which can be identified and described, taught and applied, I believe that interest (or curiosity) is more of an impulse, a behaviour.
It comes from within and is difficult to inculcate.
That could make it a talent, couldn’t it?
Second, interest has a qualitative side to it.
Some people are just better at it than others. They’re interested in more things, in more diverse areas.
We are all of us now curators and combiners of the world around us.
We are all natural remixers. We curate, combine and re-contextualise everything.
We curate our own music albums, TV schedules, photos and films.
We share, link to, pin, filter and tumble things we like, things we don’t like, things we want people to think we like.
We effectively curate our own lives for others through the way we represent it digitally.
And, to quote The Incredibles, if everyone’s special, then no-one is.
So if we’re going to do this stuff professionally then we’d better be better at it than everyone else.
Which is presumably what we mean when we look for people who are talented at spotting trends and patterns (as opposed to fads and stuff on our own doorstep).
Third, and most importantly, while it’s never been easier to catch hold of new and interesting stuff via the internet, the very abundance of information now places a premium on the variety and quality of stimulus that you choose to play with.
As the internet’s ‘filter bubble’ continues to exert its influence, it becomes ever hard to, in Maria Popova’s words,
leave room for abstract knowledge and for the kind of curiosity that invites just enough serendipity to allow for the discovery of ideas we didn’t know we were interested in until we are
Coincidentally, on Wednesday, the day after Firestarters, Radio 4 broadcast a lecture from Maria called The Architecture of Knowledge, on just this subject. The introduction hailed her as someone who can help guide us through a world where “everything’s available and nothing’s obvious.”
There’s a few useful comparison arguments to draw on.
While it feels like a default setting for most planners and creative types, curiosity – and the impulse to curate the world – requires commitment, inventiveness and something else innate, not particularly definable.
In fact, the line between creativity and what we might as well submit to calling ‘curatorship’ is becoming impossibly blurred.
In a key phrase, Maria says in her lecture that
the quality of our creative output depends on the breadth and diversity of those mental resources.
This requires what she calls ‘associative indexing’ – the meta-data of memory, information and stimulus of any kind that enters our realm.
She quotes Charles Eames, who said that “everything eventually connects” given time. (So Kirby’s Remix idea isn’t new – but then, he has his defence built-in.)
Eames said that what counts is the quality of connections.
And the convergence of knowledge across multiple domains.
So, curiosity feels like something we should celebrate.
But perhaps more precisely, we should celebrate the discernment and creativity with which people pursue their curiosity.
This is central to why flipping Kirby’s contentious phrase started to help me work out why I’d been so attracted to it.
First, I’ve realised I believe that taste matters. And it matters more than ever.
Second, most exploration and curatorship is largely pointless at the time we find things out, because the application of knowledge is largely unpredictable.
We don’t know when and why the most fruitful collisions of ideas will take place.
It’s a great irony, but in order to put knowledge to use, we have to spend our lives continually acquiring entirely useless knowledge.
That kind of vision beyond the immediate here and now is also something you could call talent.
Really? Who says? (Part 2)
Kirby used some musical examples at Firestarters. In thinking about this post I’ve been thinking again about the creativity in hip-hop and how it offers a fantastic model for what I’m talking about.
Hip-hop’s magpie mentality made for innovative music that existed entirely of re-contextualised recorded performances. Records are comprised not composed; lifetimes’ worth of listening with the snippets and shards of other people’s are re-imagined to make something new.
Paul’s Boutique. Three Feet High And Rising. It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.
But more than that, hip-hop had built in its own ‘discernment curve’.
Because fresh sources of inspiration were imperative. Ever more esoteric and imaginative samples became re-contextualised. Interests that had originally had nothing to do with being a hip-hop fan became relevant, valuable.
Not for nothing was there an underground collective called Diggin’ In The Crates - that was the literal job in hand.
Influences became more disparate. The domains got more diverse.
Like Shaolin Kung-Fu philosophy, movie soundtracks, library music.
Or this, for example.
You”ll remember Sour Times by Portishead.
Well, now check out this piece of incidental music from the Mission Impossible TV series. It’s by Lalo Schiffrin. Listen to the first 10 seconds, and the five seconds that start at 1m 33s.
Sounds inevitable now, doesn’t it? But spotting the potential of those two breaks takes time, skill, recall and a breadth of soundtrack knowledge.
Of course, it requires the kind of creative ‘diagonal’ leap that Phil talks about.
But you have to be listening in the first place.
You have to listen to enough music, first of all, to know that using it would be ‘new’. You also need to listen to enough source music to know what will work and what won’t. Most of us think in relative terms, and artistic innovation is no different.
In short, it takes the sort of attention and interest you can only call talent.
Joining it together, sort of
Appropriately, the last question from the floor on Tuesday night was about an idea from Simon Reynolds’ Retromania. It came from Glyn.
(Digression: as a fellow Reynolds nut I introduced myself to Glyn immediately. It’s the sort of lovely serendipity for which I’ve come to cherish Firestarters.)
The question was about the diminishing quality of remixes in a culture where remixing has been made easy.
Joining the dots to all this, I went back to something Brian Eno said, quoted by Reynolds in Retromania. In a 1922 interview for Artforum, Eno said this:
“Curatorship is arguably the big new job of our times: it is the task of re-evaluating, filtering, digesting, and connecting together. In an age saturated with new artifacts and information, it is perhaps the curator, the connection maker, who is the new storyteller, the meta-author.”
This is Eno’s vision of the artist as “the connector of things”, analogous to “the editor, the compiler and the anthologist.”
The contemporary artist is someone who
“perpetuates a great body of received cultural and stylistic assumptions, he re-evaluates and re-introduces certain ideas no longer current, and then he also innovates.”
This is the line between curatorship and creativity blurred forever.
Does this mean that ‘diagonal’ thinking is less needed? No, of course not.
But the more self-conscious our remixing tendencies, the more judicious and discerning our connection points need to be.
We need to become connoisseurs at curating our chosen realm of culture.
In hip-hop/music terms, very few have been better at this than Massive Attack. Not for nothing did The Guardian recently call Blue Lines the blueprint of UK music.
And, of course, their own magpie brilliance makes them ripe for deeper engagement in the information age.
Because you can now hear directly where their inspiration came from, thanks to Spotify and other, ‘interested’ listeners.
In the week since I’ve become completely energised all over again by the license we have in his line of work to make our own future.
We can genuinely make something from nothing. In our work environment. For our clients. For ourselves.
We just have to have the right attitude.
We have to stop being so sensible.
In the book Grant talks about uncertainty, what ifs, experiments, trends.
And also what he calls the ‘innovation paradox’.
The paradox is this: we don’t yet know that we need what we will need.
We cannot predict the future. Therefore we cannot plan for it either.
Culture – and that means business, marketing, trends, priorities, stuff – is inscrutable. It is brought about through experiments. We probe the possible, often with very little idea of what will happen, or even what it means to do so.
This is Think Small writ large. It is Labs thinking with a playful edge.
It is improvisational. It is guesswork. And it makes things fun again…
So that was Wednesday morning.
Coincidentally, that evening, after work, my team had its first scheduled experiment with Powerpoint Karaoke.
You get 10 charts you’ve never seen before. And you use them to tell a story.
We had no real idea about what it would mean, or what this experiment was for.
Presentation training? Confidence building? Storytelling? Thinking on your feet?
It hadn’t been intended as anything so formalised as that, but afterwards someone described it as having felt like some kind of shared learning.
To me it was startling just how hard people fight to sustain a story.
Everyone had been nervous, but they embraced the trepidation to not only have fun, but also create spontaneous narratives in a way they simply don’t even think of when delivering most work ‘presentations’.
The stories we utter nonsense, of course.
But it felt like something.
The parallels with Grant’s talk were obvious, and some us are thinking about where the experiment might go.
More of the same? A wider group? Publishing the presentations?
We took notes of everyone’s reflections the following day, so we could capture the mood.
But the stories themselves remain fragile. And that feels like part of the charm. We don’t want to kill this thing by affording it too much significance.
We want to keep it as a thing, not the thing…
Because that’s been the real lesson for me since Wednesday.
A liberating sense of trying something out in the moment, rather than obsessing over what it’s supposed to achieve.
This is the Culturematic credo. Do things because they feel interesting. Avoid strategising each development.
But also trying lots of things has begun to feel exciting again.
I’ve realised I need more projects on the go.
Lots of bets.
Because we innovate the things we will need by playing with what we have now…
All this was Wednesday.
Then on Friday I went to Playful for the first time.
It’s by DH Lawrence. I’d put it away in my mind as frivolous, perhaps not in keeping with the serious nature of what I thought rocknroll should do.
Serious overthrow of the establishment. Not getting fooled again. All that sort of stuff.
But it makes a lot of sense right now. So I thought I’d share it.
A Sane Revolution
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,
don’t do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.
Don’t do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.
Don’t do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.
Don’t do it for equality,
do it because we’ve got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.
Don’t do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.
Don’t do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let’s abolish labour, let’s have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it’s not labour.
Let’s have it so! Let’s make a revolution for fun!
A year ago, when I presented at Firestarters 3, I confessed my love of folk music.
Perhaps this was unwise, but I love the idea of folk music.
It’s built on the belief that there is no such thing as an ‘original’ version of a song.
The source is not important.
Folk songs exist in a state of perpetual renewal, you see. What counts is the interpretation.
It’s not the original version but people’s transformation of them that make up the substance of the song.
And at Wednesday’s Firestarters 6, Matt Locke made a compelling case for storytelling in the digital age being much the same.
Transgression, he said, is the true mark of effective storytelling these days.
Ideas change. Memes mutate. The story is what others make it.
Accept and design for that, he said, and you’ll harness the new models of attention that define online behaviour.
Give people the language to propagate the story for themselves.
Overall there was a powerful sense on Wednesday of traditions being reclaimed, supposed rules being revealed as mere conventions of recent history.
Because this ‘new’ model of story-telling isn’t new at all.
Yes, new technologies create new patterns of attention.
But from music halls to camp fires, stories have always been transmitted by groups. The ‘one big number’ mentality that ruled broadcast media was just an anomaly.
Ajaz Ahmed made a similar point about agencies. Their place in the creative process now – “factories that make 30″ TV ads and DPS’s” – belies their genesis as “ideas companies”.
And that’s something everyone at Firestarters would want to see return.
So, we’re back to – or at least prepared for – a world where storytelling is as much about listening and responding as it is talking.
Attention is the new currency. Recognising the new behaviours of audiences and adapting to the feedback is a critical part of remaining relevant.
And this takes work.
Matt Heiman talked compellingly about the agility required in digital storytelling. The story unfolds as the relationship develops between the assets (the content at our disposal) and the incoming information (the way people respond to it).
His job – and ours – is to create working processes that make joining these elements up as simple and efficient as possible.
It’s a modern-day call and response.
And it’s not just as it happens. This stuff takes preparation.
Matt H cited Milton Berle, a comedian who’s first five jokes would elicit signals from the audience that would define the rest of his set for that night.
When Matt L addressed Phil‘s question on balancing this need for both story structure and adaptability he gave perhaps the most practical and useful answer of the evening.
Have two plans.
A structured plan. One where you’ve outlined the beats you want to hit, and identified the key components that will generate attention.
And a responsive plan. One for contingency scenarios like too little or too much attention.
That adaptability takes groundwork, but it’s not something that an audience will – nor should – ever give you brownie points for.
In fact, as Ajaz suggested, it’s down to brands and producers of stories to inconvenience themselves for the benefit of audiences.
And as digital continues to disrupt itself more than it does anything else, the key evolutionary characteristic of innovation is simplicity.
But innovation is more than just a succession of developments that improve on what came before.
In fact, Ajaz told us that the best sort of innovation can create a “never-ending story” for a brand or company.
This entails not just product innovation, but social innovation – some form of “enduring mechanism” that creates a legacy and a self-perpetuating story of creativity.
Disney’s invention of the creative department. Ford’s innovation of the assembly line. Edison’s formalising of the R&D function.
These are innovations that don’t just change things once.
They set the initial conditions for perpetual renewal and for generations of stories even as attention patterns and behaviours change.
Just like a good folk song.
And perhaps too like the inspiring talks from both Matts and Ajaz.
Because once again, as thanks goes out to Neil Perkin and Google for organising another fab Firestarters, the next stage of the story will be what others make of it.
I’ve just this morning dropped my son off at pre-school nursery.
It was a big day for him, his first at the school where his big brother goes. For the first few days parents normally hang around a bit so the kids cab get used to the place, and the situation.
Today I watched him flit about the tables. He would briefly pick something up, pronounce something to me or his mum, then move on.
He was taking it all in. Getting the measure of the situation by touching, interpreting, and assimilating as many things as possible.
He was playing.
He soon gravitated towards the ‘home corner’. Here he went deeper. The imaginative play became more prolonged. The scenarios became more thought-out.
He made himself at home.
The notion of ‘learning through play’ is widely discussed these days. It breeds confidence. The effort/reward dynamic is a productive one. We find new realms of activity we wouldn’t otherwise if we stuck to rigid rules.
But in advertising we seem to discuss it largely in terms of brands and communications.
How we can gamify a campaign. How we can incentivise people. How we can make an experience ‘social.’
The benefits of play are not something we formalise enough for ourselves very often.
I think we could make more of the ‘play ethic‘ in our industry - defined as it is by creativity, learning about what’s possible, and assimilating new ways of doing things.
Imagine if instead of a to-do list we started off everyday like my son did this morning: just exploring some new stimulus
Or if instead of ‘learning the ropes’, the beginning of our career was marked with a similar period of exploring the different corners of the business.
Where we discovered what we were good at and what made us feel good.
Where our imagination was the main criterion and we were judged on what unimagined opportunity we could invent.
Not which existing mold we fitted best.
When I went to the Bauhaus exhibition a few weeks ago I saw how a philosophical commitment to play can foster creativity exponentially.
(This isn’t as esoteric a segue as it appears. The Bauhaus ultimately included advertising as one of its core disciplines.)
Looking back today through the notes I made, the theme of play and exploration clearly emerge.
One tutor, Josef Albers, encouraged the approach of ‘purposeful play’. Students would be encouraged to experiment with simple materials to “explore their inherent functional and constructive possibilites without stated practical aims”.
Understanding the different characteristics and qualities of wood, paper, fabric and glass developed wide-ranging creative skills that students could apply to their chosen vocation.
Assignments often fused art and play. Many of the major artists who taught at the Bauhaus had children themselves, so one year the students produced toys like this.
Ultimately this is about allowing people to tap into their creative imagination. Play lets us do that.
The tutor said: ” I struck a blow to the old tradition of the nude and drawing from nature, and I am leading all creative activity back to its roots, to play.”
The word that I remember most from the exhibit – one of those composite abstract nouns that only the Germans have – was Gesamtkunstwerk.
It means ‘total art work’.
You approach life as you would art. And vice versa.
I think if we want advertising to remain an exciting, vibrant and creatively fulfilling realm in the future we need to encourage more of its proponents to think like this.
That everything is material.
Looking around me at work I see young professionals 15 years younger than me working and communicating largely with powerpoint (or keynote, of course).
This depresses me, not because I’m anti-powerpoint (I know it’s unfashionable, but I actually think ppt has had an amazing democratising effect on people’s capability to express ideas in public).
It depresses me because anything so widely used leads to homogenous results.
It reflects badly on us.
It means we’ve shown generation upon generation of new thinkers that in our industry that
a) there is a way to do things, and
b) that way is exactly the same as every other sector in business.
I’d like to think that as experts in communication we wouldn’t always default to the same mode.
We have a world of different materials at our disposal.
Appropriately enough, later in the morning we had a great discussion trying to articulate the way conversations spread between children and parents, between school and the home.
Visiting the Tate Picasso exhibition recently, it hit me how ego and creativity are inextricably linked.
Faced with such genius, it became obvious how maintaining the creative urge – and feeling like you’ve fulfilled it – is often a curious mix of intense intoxication and deep inadequacy.
Not least because what inspires you can dwarf your own efforts.
Happily, this time at least, I came away suitably inspired. It wasn’t just Picasso’s radicalism, his influence, the way he made us see the world anew that got me (though it was mainly that). What was also awe-inspiring was the vast range of styles and the sheer volume of work of which Picasso was capable.
These seem like rather obvious things to point out about a giant of 20th century art. Nothing damns like the faint praise of admiring someone’s ‘prolific’ output.
But the ability to just keep doing it, the habit of creativity, has always been attractive to me. And among the contemporary artefacts was an edition of the Cahier D’Arts, the bible of art criticism. Two excerpts of a 1960s essay leaped out at me. They centred Picasso’s creativity in his ability as a stylist, suggesting it was precisely his comfort in many styles that propelled him to such a prodigious body of work.
I managed to sneak a couple of photos, but don’t tell anyone.
This first excerpt leapt out at me: “if you have a strong enough conception of life it will not matter…whether you [paint] in one manner or another”.
The exhibition genuinely captured Picasso’s “all penetrating vision” and made it clear the adopted style was secondary. For many artists the style is their identity; for Picasso it was merely the means to a more expressive end.
But the second excerpt nailed it: “the uncertainty as to which direction to choose paralyses most men with hesitation, but it has proved Picasso’s most powerful motor. He flings himself into each new course, as though that alone were worth his faith”
A revelation
Reading this was a revelation.
It hit me that a style, or an approach, is only that – merely a way to arrive at the problem.
‘Flinging ourselves into each new course’ is what allows us to make the approach work, not the approach itself. We can’t all share Picasso’s genius, but we can all practise the art of committing fully. It shows again how critical it is simply to start, and to keep on starting.
Procrastination, not inability, is the killer of creativity. We need to pick a form, or a process, and trust in it. Submit to it. If it turns out to be wrong, very well. Chances are something will have come of the attempt, and last time I looked something is still better than nothing.
True creativity, I think, is habit. It isn’t self-conscious. It doesn’t worry about being wrong, or looking silly. It wins out over self-doubt.
I feel I should add that this is not an uncommon occurrence.
The radicalism of Side 2 struck me, in contrast to the music of Bowie’s career so far, and to the music on Side 1 of the same album.
A true stylist, Bowie’s music isn’t dependent on sounding like Bowie. Its innate Bowie-ness will “shine through”, just as Picasso’s vision does whether he’s sketching or painting, aping the Impressionists or stretching the limits of Cubism.
Equally, Bowie trusts in his chosen forms – it’s probably what made Low possible. He was coming off the back of a period of writer’s block, so Side 1 is full of fragments and broken English because that’s how he felt. Side 2 was constructed, rather than written. Bowie and his collaborator Brian Eno actively chose to discard work that was well-realised, but familiar. Instead they looked for the accidents and mistakes from which they would build new ideas. That was their chosen MO and they stuck to it, and in so doing they uncovered work they would never had got to otherwise.
I love the boldness of this approach. A huge star with writer’s block still has the the confidence in his process and his artistry to actually throw stuff away in search of innovative work. He doesn’t really know what he wants, but it needs to be new.
Sounds like something we could do with in advertising.
We’re not artists in advertising, of course. We don’t follow a muse, or have to rely on our own motivation in the same way. An artist’s decision to adopt a new style is to create stimulus or constraints. Our stimulus is set for us (the brief), so we have something to react to.
In advertising, though, we also have to keep someone else happy. The brief often comes with a deadline, and we frequently have to work hard against our instinct to find ‘the’ answer, as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Why work against it? Because there isn’t always only one answer. And because better answers come from finding new ways in to the problem. And because making a habit of digging deeper helps make innovation a habit too, rather than something we’d like to aim for now and again.
What worked for Bowie/Eno was just to keep going. What might seem entirely profligate (discarding good work) is actually a potent way of uncovering untapped ideas.
David Shrigley recently came to speak to MEC.
He told us that he only ever keeps 25% of anything he makes. I wondered about the impact that has on your mindset not just after the creative process, when you’re editing.but during and before it, too. If you know ¾ of what you make will eventually be binned, the filters come off. You are freer just to get stuff down on paper, and more able to worry less about it being ‘right’.
Anyone who’s been in a brainstorm or idea workshop knows the obvious needs to be extracted quickly to get to the gnarly and sometimes scary job of suggesting riskier, less heard/thought ideas. You may not be actively prioritising the mistakes, like Bowie did, but you’re setting the conditions for surprising ideas to emerge from further within your mind, and from the group.
You’re also less likely to be easily satisfied with what you come up with. I suspect a lot of us in advertising are quite self-satisfied. Putting undue pressure on ourselves is clearly A Good Thing, even though it might be uncomfortable.
Especially if it’s uncomfortable.
What I like about the Bowie and Shrigley models is that they aren’t precious in any way. They acknowledge the reality of creativity – that a lot of you what you come up with will be rubbish – and thereby detach the ego, at least for the important bit.
I received another lesson in this approach when I met Bill Buxton recently. I was lucky enough to be invited to a dinner at which Bill spoke, by Microsoft (where Bill is principal researcher). He spoke eloquently and widely about technology, design, creativity, music, computing and, er, canoeing.
Before dinner I found myself in conversation with Bill about UX and sketching. Turns out he has a profound belief in sketching as a principle. Not just pencil drawing, but a more generic approach to low resolution prototyping. This could encompass photography, modelling, CGI, video, whatever. He’s even written a book on it.
He went on to tell me that he instructs his teams not to come to him with proposed solutions unless they have seven – yes, seven – different designs to share. Not only that, but they had to be seven different solutions about which you felt equally positive (or negative). Having one obvious winner and six less favourable options was not a way round this.
Why was this? Partly the focus on such a broad output from each team member yielded far greater opportunity for new ideas.
But the real reason was it made the evaluation of ideas more constructive. As the designer you’re more likely to defend those ideas you like, with a less objective eye. As the team leader it’s very difficult to evaluate the design without making the designer feel implicated – if you’re judging across a team egos need to be left at the door. Being obliged to have seven ideas makes it almost impossible to have a favourite.
So what can we do with all this?
Here’s some of the methods I’ve tried to apply to the way I work. They’re not exhaustive, but as this is all stuff that’s been flying round my head for a while, I’ve found it helpful to organise it into something (hopefully) coherent.
Find 2 or 3 approaches to a creative problem that never fail to get you started. Whether it’s just you or a group, try to get used to techniques that you can throw into the mix that just get things moving. I always find a book, ask someone to pick a page number at random and read out the first word. Then I people to word associate till I have 5 or 6 words, which become the springboard for answering the question on the table. Totally arbitrary, and gives everyone permission to disown their first thoughts – a crucial step in leaving the ego behind.
Don’t just do the usual. Making creativity a habit doesn’t mean allowing routine to seep in. Get out somewhere. Find a different location. Use different people. Work in a different medium. Only draw your ideas. Give yourself a time limit. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter – creativity requires constraints and new contexts, so create them for yourself.
Define ideas more holistically, but develop more of them. Somewhere between the level of post-it vagueness and finely honed engagement idea is a world of lost opportunities. We all know the difference between a potent post-it idea and a dull one – get in the habit of sifting good stuff as you go. Make the 60 seconds’ worth of effort it takes to work out whether you can extrapolate something interesting/huge/rich out of the good ones and seeing how else you could build on them. I love the work that John is doing in this space.
Practice facilitating groups as well as being part of them. It’s hard investing of yourself in service of an idea while remaining dispassionate about its qualities. Acquiring the skills of being a participant well as a facilitator keeps you leap seamlessly from big picture to critical detail in the moment. Knowing how to continue ploughing a particular creative furrow while ensuring the thinking remains clear and relevant.
Look for the stuff that everyone else takes for granted. There’s a great Eno quote about what Bowie was reacting against with Low. ”Nobody wants you to step off the tracks and start looking round in the scrub around the edges because nobody can see anything promising there.” What is everyone discarding that could become invaluable? What’s happening at the extremes? What always comes up that has become wallpaper but with fresh eyes might reveal new potential?
Risk feeling inadequate. Most of this post is based on recognising the parallels between people I admire, in different fields (art, music, technology) and being inspired by it. But sometimes we don’t like to, because brilliant people can be intimidating. We can also worry about other people thinking we’re weird for trying new stuff. We shouldn’t. Any agency not rewarding/enabling this kind of behaviour should be viewed with disdain. (The current series of Mad Men portrays genuine creative ambitions in acting and writing looked down upon by people who don’t understand them, and I’m not always convinced we’ve come that far).
Don’t fear an idea changing. ‘Eureka’ moments can be as misleading as they are exciting. Perhaps the best image I know is (I think) Wittgenstein’s rope of multiple overlapping threads. None of the threads extend over the rope’s full length, yet they still form a single cord. Ideas can emerge in such a way that the final thought might not have even made contact with the first, but the chain is what gets you there. Always think about how each idea could be a platform to the next (and possibly better) one.
Writing this, I’ve started to see how balancing instinct and persistence is central to the creative impulse.
Like with Bowie, whose songs would form their identity by discarding the elements with which he’d begun.
Or Shrigley, who knows that creativity is about pushing though and editing later, because the long haul is as important as the flash of inspiration.
Or like with Buxton, who knows that designs can only be collaborative if individuals are happy to let go of their own stuff.
Or, of course, with Picasso, who knew that being prolific was the key to articulating whatever it was you wanted to say.
Recently I was invited to give a presentation on Behavioural Economics to the good people at Which? magazine.
As experts in consumer rights they’re naturally interested in the reality of how consumers behave, and how the advertising and marketing community use insight to communicate effectively.
Yesterday I gave the presentation, and it ended up being quite a sprint across quite a bit of ground. Of course there’s the initial ideas behind the theory of behavioural economics and a few examples of how advertisers have applied them. At heart, I think, brands have started, rightly, to focus on generating behaviours rather than merely seeking to change attitudes.
I also wanted to reflect the the importance the coalition government have attached to ‘nudge’ theory, and the influence of the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team in cascading the value of insight through government policy and communications.
I’ve also given a nod to how the application of behavioural theory is developing, and more explicitly concerned with social norms and the contagiousness of ideas. Gamification, too, is clearly built on BE principles, and technology altogether is extending the ways brands can get people ‘doing’ in response to communications, rather than merely ‘thinking’.
Around the new year I was asked to write a piece for a think piece MEC were creating for their global network. The premise was to pit me (a planner) against a data analyst-type and ask us each the same question(s): why is data talked about so much in the industry, what’s its significance and how is it best utilized in marketing communications?
It’s been published this week as part of MEC’s Review:Preview document, as “A right brain/left brain look at what data in marketing actually meant in 2011”. I thought I’d share my original submission (with the occasional addition) here
Data makes us comfortable, doesn’t it? Aggregating multiple sources and tracking more behavioural data than ever gives us a supposedly complete picture of our communications. Data insight promises to make us optimised, better targeted and more effective.
This application of data insight is still based on the old ‘push’ model of advertising, however. Data is another sphere where control is shifting to the consumer – we operate in a reputation landscape, built increasingly from consumer-created data. Merely honing the old ‘push’ model of advertising with data won’t match the new expectations consumers have, or the new reality of consumer empowerment.
A new paradigm took hold in 2011: ‘pull’ data communications – customer data creatively re-interpreted to add value to others. This means data being used at the outset as a jumping off point for creativity, not just at the end as a measure of success.
This isn’t entirely new. FAQs and Amazon’s ‘people who bought this…’ algorithm prove that people find other customers’ activity useful.
But technology can now make data itself the draw to deeper engagement. Real-time participation data can create congregation points for brands and deeper relationships with consumers: Heineken’s Star Player app enhanced the football viewing experience with match data; in the UK Orange customers voted in the BAFTA Awards using the Flickometer, a data visualisation tool that displayed the support for nominees in real-time.
We’r able to access more personal realms of data, too. Nike products provide feedback on fitness and performance as motivation to keep trying harder. Health-related apps really took off in 2011, too – most notably for me The Eatery, which is building a crowd-sourced picture of the healthiest meals, restaurants and habits from photos, reviews and recommendations.
Such online engagement raises privacy concerns, and data usability might well become the next big issue. The UK Government’s ‘midata’ project asks organisations to return customer data in “a portable, machine-readable and reusable form”. Forrester identifies personal data management as “creating a major shift in how marketers access and use customer data”. And a World Economic Forum report noted that companies “are realising there is money to be made from helping individuals protect, control and manage the information they need to manage their lives”.
Embedding innovation-friendly practices in the day-to-day isn’t easy. But getting the right building blocks is absolutely critical.
The idea of everyday innovation is very appealing – the small things that add up to something substantial. But firestarters need support and encouragement and this is where a sustained approach to learning and development can help, I think.
The best training can give you a different perspective, and allow a fresh take on familiar problems.
It can be a bit like taking a holiday, really. Beforehand you’re looking forward to a break from the usual routine. During it you attain a perspective and distance which affords you a glimpse of what’s really important – you maybe wonder why things can’t be like this all the time. Immediately afterwards you’re still buzzing with what it all could mean, but once you’ve been a couple of days and everyone’s asked you how it was everything seems to get re-set to how it was before.
But making even the best training count back in the real world isn’t always easy.
At MEC we have a history of embarking on what I’d call statement training programmes. Everyone does them. They are relevant to all specialisms. They galvanise everyone with a common purpose. This doesn’t mean individuality and cultural entrepreneurship are no longer welcome. In fact the opposite is true – the common experience provides a shared reference point, a platform on which individual talent can shine. People enjoy a shared language, a shared culture, and a shared stake in making the training count back inside the business.
So, fresh from finally having been a delegate myself, here’s my six recommendations on how to get the most out of this sort of innovation-focused experience, and ensure that as much of it as possible travels back to the office with you.
1. Remember that hypothetical exercises can generate highly relevant solutions to real problems
Most training includes a mix of theory and practical learning. The best fuses the two into exploratory scenarios that feel salient and valuable as you are doing them. One of the best ways to retain those feelings is to try and replicate the scenarios.
The briefs for practical exercises are likely to be short, clear and simple. You’re not given much time. You’re working with people not usually in your team. The technique you’re trying out is likely to be a new one. You have to quickly articulate your ideas and be subject to immediate feedback once you’ve presented them.
All these factors encourage or force out creativity – re-creating them is hard, but if you can remember a few specifics about the way the exercises worked that might be all you need. Taking home the flip chart you all stood around might provide you with triggers that remind you how you felt coming up with all those great ideas.
Remember the type of question you were asked. At DA2 I remember being asked specific but open questions that yielded really rich results from hypothetical questions even on very familiar clients. Questions like: think about why a community exists and then explore how the brand would engage them on that basis. Or: how would you use crowd-sourcing techniques to launch a new product from the brand?
It’s quite possible that in 15 minutes you got to some really interesting ideas. They won’t be fully formed, of course, but I bet they have some potential, and I’m also pretty sure that they’re pretty true to what you think the client should be doing anyway – when the office mentality goes you also lose the editing voice in your head telling you what the client wouldn’t like. These ideas can be used to flush out the briefs the client should be giving you, but doesn’t realise they can.
2. Remember what it feels like to learn new stuff
Learning stuff is pretty intoxicating. You’re making connections between things you know and things you’ve just heard for the first time. That kind of combinatorial creativity is pretty addictive, so keep mainlining it when you’re back at work.
Make sure you get out and get inspired by things. My suggestion for the IPA’s Fast Strategy app was the suggestion to just go and talk to someone, go to a gallery – anyone/anything for a snippet of serendipitous stimulus. It’s then when your brain is left alone to get on with the hard work of thinking
But also look into how you could continue more active learning. It being a digital workshop talk inevitably turned to coding – and there’s plenty of free online tools around to help with that, not least codecademy. I also realised how little I’ve really engaged with optimising this blog – another resolution.
If you’re inspired to just get taught stuff, though, I can recommend you try places like Open Yale, or look into MIT Open Courseware, where you have access to fully developed courses that would satisfy any enquiring mind.
3. Think about applying your new knowledge to something you actually have control over
I have this notion that, as agencies, we’re far better at solving problems for our clients than we are for ourselves. We’re also better at making recommendations to clients on communications than we are taking our own advice.
When you’ve just been on a training workshop designed to stimulate more innovative ideas for your clients, try thinking about innovative ideas for your agency. Chances are you’ll have been thinking about Owned and Earned communication as much as (if not more than) paid, so there’s not financial reason why you couldn’t test your new way of thinking out on your own business/department/team first.
In fact, I think it’s better that you do – there’s no substitute for direct experience and making room for practising what you preach. That’s why I started doing this blog, and it’s made me start thinking about what a deeper online presence for the agency might look like.
4. Act fast to maintain the connections you made during the moment
Training sessions, because they’re different and disruptive to the usual routine, also tend to be memorable – but can become fixed in time by memory if you don’t act quickly.
As well as the new techniques and exercises you’ll have picked up, you may well also have worked for the first time with new people. Comments from people if different disciplines can stand out at training sessions – you’ll probably have made a mental note to chat to fellow delegates about some common ground you have. Make a diary commitment to have a coffee with them. Ask about that project you could have in common. You could set whole new workstreams in motion
You might even have uncovered, as I did, that your agency accommodates cool new skillsets you hadn’t been aware of. I for one will be dropping by the desk of the UX specialist who’s been quietly sitting on the same floor as me while I’ve been carrying on in blissful ignorance.
5. Make time for discussion
It’s one of the most rewarding facets of time away – finding common ground, the discovery of similar mindsets among different disciplines, the discussion that occupies the spaces in between departments and silos. For once you have the time, you have nowhere else you have to be and no distractions stopping you from forcing think/explain.
At DA2 we spent a lot of time dissecting and decoding existing work and digital experiences. I’m sure we all share stuff around – the latest YouTube thing, a great tool, a cool site with amazing production values – but how often does a bunch of people sit around and ask themselves why something’s good.
Whether it’s analysing the ASOS site experience, or looking at how a campaign trajectory played out, trying to articulate the anatomy of an idea gets people learning in a different way to how they normally do in the office, where they’ll simply read. It’s a way of crowd-sourcing and accelerating literacy – like the way book club’s provide different perspectives and enable deeper understanding.
Try ring-fencing time for pure discussion, for wallowing in great work and trying to decode what makes it great. You’ll understand more effectively what levers you have available to pull.
6 Make a public pledge.
Behaviour change is more likely when people make a public commitment to something.
Populating cards with pledges helps people capture what they intend to do differently. The neat trick is to have them sent to delegates after a couple of months – it’s a disruptive reminder of everything they promised themselves they’d do.
We were asked for four. I actually wrote 5 (the first five building blocks above) – I couldn’t narrow it down.
And this post is my own public pledge – making it six building blocks in total.
Do these work? What else would people recommend? I’d love to hear how anyone else has managed to embed everyday innovation. Challenges too, of course, but I’ve tried to focus on the positive here – what we can do as opposed to why we can’t.
But then I’m only a couple of days back into the routine, of course…
A huge thanks must go out to Neil Perkin for his involvement in the workshop that inspired all this.
