Creating the culture of the absurd: Building and encouraging creative thinking.

How to kill a great idea.

Outside the square thinker Albert Einstein famously said, “If at first an idea does not appear absurd, there is no hope for it.” Talk about absurd: The idea that a so-called dyslexic and conventional school failure would unlock the heartbeat of the universe is truly that. And yet, he did.

Now, consider this same sentiment in the context of your office. How many absurd ideas have you heard lately? How many have you had? How would an absurd idea be received? Consider it in relation to this example: “Say boss, (of course no one actually says boss) I have an idea. Why don’t we sell to our competitors?” The boss glances up from doing his e-mails, and without any change to his perfectly blank expression replies, “Have you finished that report?” He then returns to e-mailing.

Absurdity is often the breeding ground for ideas and innovation. However, building a culture that fosters great ideas and lets them live is a challenge. These days, we’re more attuned to the many different ways to kill an idea. Here are four effective techniques that kill innovation:

o Ignore the idea entirely and carry on e-mailing.

o Compliment the offender on his/her sense of humor.

o Make a remark about relative expertise (as in the idea generator has none).

o Say, “Interesting idea,” and hurry on.

They all work. Ideas are fragile and the more outrageous, the more readily they can be crushed. It is part of the way we learn to work. “This is how we do things around here” captures this ethos of non-linear or outside the square thinking.

Of course there are definite business benefits to knowing how we do things around here. Otherwise unnecessary mistakes will be made and genuine efficiency will be reduced – but not invariably. There is no system, no technique, and no process that cannot be improved in some way.

Taichi Ohno of automotive innovator Toyota puts it like this: “Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or boring, and then rewrite the procedures. Even last month’s manual should be out of date.”

It is a peculiar dilemma that on the one hand we exhort others and ourselves to “think outside the box,” while at the same time referring to the book of procedures or brand guidelines as a kind of dogma or Bible. We need ideas desperately and yet through our adherence to systems and our analytical- some might say obsessive – approach to problems, we develop cultures that actively militate against the creative thinking we say we want.

How not to brainstorm
Of course there are times when we do determinedly set out to be creative. We call people together to brainstorm. Generally, we do this because a problem has been identified. We analyze the root causes of the problem and then brainstorm possible solutions. Sometimes we even record all the ideas. But as often as not, we manage to judge some unworthy of making it even to the whiteboard. “Good idea, Jeff, but I think a little off the track.” Or even more categorically, “That won’t work!” And so we break the first rule of brainstorming, which is to accept all ideas equally.

There should be no judgment during the brainstorm and all ideas should be treated equally. Too often rank is pulled and instead of originality and truly fresh thinking, conformity sets in.

There are two issues at work here. First, brainstorming is just one technique for helping to generate ideas, and secondly, the “problem solving” approach causes us to ignore the possibilities that exist where there are no apparent problems.

We are all familiar with the proposition: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” According to “lateral thinking” guru, Edward de Bono (he invented the term), this time-honored adage has hampered the competitiveness of businesses and even whole industries. The search for new ideas and fresh perspectives should know no bounds. Ideas for improving successful products, services, systems, and processes should be as welcome as those that solve known problems. Unfortunately, this is not the rule.

As a creative director, I hold creativity and creative thinking to be my most important capability. For me, achieving a very high degree of creativity is a critical objective – in many ways, it is my reason for being. Ironically, it is perhaps the most important attribute available to any business and it is also one of the least understood. In our experience no one is ever “against” creativity, but often times it is relegated to the status of a luxury. Or, it is viewed as the domain of only a select and chosen few who propagate the proposition and are deemed exceptional talents. So, if that’s the case, what does creativity really mean to clients, our brand managers, and us?

Idea + design = success
What is design exactly? It is commonly perceived to be the commercializing of ideas. The New Zealand Taskforce defines it as “an integrated process, a methodology (or a way of thinking), which guides the synthesis of creative, technological, scientific, and commercial disciplines to produce unique (and superior) products, services, and communications.” Indeed, when we refer to innovation, we often mean design, as design takes an idea and brings it to life commercially.

Design, then, is truly a valuable enabler. Numerous international studies reveal that design is thought to be a crucial component of commercial success. For example, the report cites research by PricewaterhouseCoopers that showed that the top five percent of companies, based on return on capital employed, gave design a high level of strategic importance, as did nearly 75 percent of the 25 percent of top performers. On the other hand, 90 percent of the bottom 25 percent said design had a low strategic value.

However, often times we miss the fact that innovation and design relies on the creation of an idea. A common refrain in many organizations is that “we have plenty of ideas around here, ideas are not the problem.” The thought behind this is that if we employ design, the ideas will take care of themselves. However, this is a hazardous mistake as it causes us to leap directly to the process of innovation without being sufficiently rigorous about the ideas and concepts we have on hand.

Some disciplined and structured questioning should rectify this impasse. How many ideas do we really have? How good are they and by what measures? How deeply or broadly have we explored? What alternatives have we considered?

In fact, in a report surveying innovation, The Economist (June 21, 2003) said, “Experts reckon an enterprise has to start with around 3,000 bright ideas if it is to come up with 100 worthwhile projects, which in turn will be winnowed down to four development programs for new products.”

In support of this observation, try this simple exercise: Make a list of the new ideas you have had this past week. Or, make a list of the new ideas your staff has produced this past month. Better still, reach for the two lists.

For most, this is an embarrassingly brief check on creativity. In our experience, when asked exactly those questions, managers struggle and most often admit that there is not too much to say. So, while we undoubtedly need to be better at innovating, all of us also need to be better at generating ideas. We need to be more creative and inventive.

Indeed, marketing and business are rarely formulaic. Take, for example, a study of 29 groups in hi-tech Silicon Valley firms (C.A. O’Reilly and Tushman, M.L., 2000). The study confirmed that the highest rates of innovation were achieved where norms (such as proactive searching for new ideas, recognition for ideas, effective teamwork, speed and urgency) exist to promote both creativity and implementation.

Here lies a critical lesson for design agencies as well as our client businesses: Creating a culture that fosters inventive and creative new ideas has to be as important as any other particular business discipline. Our contention and advice to clients is that there should be no room for complacency here – we need more and better ideas, better understanding and expertise at commercializing those ideas, and design should be a fundamental and integral strategy for every business.

Intelligent, imaginative, inspiring!
Interbrand regards creativity as the central pillar of its service offering. Our task is to convert creative thinking into concepts and ideas that measurably strengthen our client’s brands and businesses.

Though it may seem self-congratulatory, we are good at it because we practice, and because we put a premium on having people on our team who are naturally creative. We refer our discipline as our “Directed Creativity Cycle.”

Some may disagree, but our version of creativity is not the same as “craziness.” We place equal emphasis on all parts and have created a systematic approach to creating new and better ideas. That said, without extraordinary creativity there can be no extraordinary solution.

The concept must come first. And being creative is not limited to the initial brainstorm or to the visual output that is generally the main evidence of our work. Continuous creative thinking leads to better expression and more effective action at every level. Indeed, we strive to push thinking into the outer realms at every stage. We are determined to inject creative thinking into all the different aspects of our client relationship, and our client’s relationship with their customers in pursuit of the very best solutions. The embodiment of all this thinking is Interbrand’s global call to action “Intelligent, imaginative, and inspiring!”

So, while we look for people for our teams who are naturally creative, this stand against the mundane or pedestrian is at the vanguard of our creative process. The following quote elaborates this perspective even more: “Individual creative abilities are a lot like physical capabilities. The more you use them the better you can perform. If you don’t exercise those capabilities they diminish very fast. And just as you have a physical exercise program to shape up muscles not used in your normal activities, you need a creativity exercise program that stimulates the brain tissues that are used too seldom today.” (Harrington, James H., Geln D. Hoffher, Robert R. Reid Jr., 1998) There are no exceptions – naturally creative or not, practice makes perfect! The quote continues: “And what is the difference between creative thoughts and normal thoughts? Typically you will know you are creative by the way you feel about the results of the activity. Typically you will have the ‘Wow’ experience.”

We love that concept – the “Wow” experience! It drives our efforts and forces us to think in different ways. But it can be a dangerous time! Charlie Brower once said (quoting ancient Roman poet Ovid): “A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.” Helping to nurture this “Wow” perspective is a further philosophy we have which is to treat every idea as an uncut diamond.

Of course creative thinking exists in many different ways and at different levels. It can be modest or grand; it can be big “C” or little “c.” It can be concerned with the smallest component, or it might revolutionize the entire business. We don’t think the context or scale is what matters. What is important is to take nothing for granted – that we leap boundaries – and that we focus anywhere and everywhere for no other reason than to see if there is another way. Finally, it is important that we challenge any and every proposition to see if it might not be costeffectively improved. We strive to live by the axiom, “If it’s not broken, ask why not?” It is a powerful perspective that helps us, as well as our clients to identify and create new opportunities in brand building and marketing.

How creativity works

Having defined our view on creativity and how we encourage it, the next question is how does it work? Why is it that experts maintain that it requires work and practice? Creative thinking, as the doyen of the discipline Edward de Bono says, is a not a natural process for the brain. He describes how the brain evolved to recognize patterns in order to make sense of the deluge of information with which we are all confronted. Without that pattern recognition capability, we would need to untangle every set of stimuli we encountered. That would be highly inefficient. He uses this analogy:

Every time we have a thought, the biochemical/electromagnetic resistance along the pathway carrying that thought is reduced. It is like trying to clear a path through a forest. The first time is a struggle because we have to fight our way through the undergrowth. The second time we travel that way will be easier because of the clearing done on the first journey. The more times we travel that path, the less resistance there will be, until, after many repetitions, a wide, smooth track will exist that requires little or no clearing. (De Bono, E., 1996)

In other words, he says the more times a “mental event” happens, the more likely it is to happen again. Rather more poetically Sir Charles Skerrington, who is regarded as the grandfather of neurophysiology, said, “The human brain is an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one – a shifting harmony of sub-patterns. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. This extraordinary loom has one profound disadvantage. We become our ways…narrow minded.” (Buzan, 1996) It becomes progressively harder to do what we exhort ourselves, and others to do: to think outside the square (or box).

This is because the square is a good place to be and may have taken equal innovation and effort to reach there. We have, in fact, established boundaries for good reason. Unfortunately, when we attempt to “shift gears,” or to think in different ways, we struggle against our natural tendencies. We are comfortable to think in the way we do, because it is easier. The more we go down a habitual line of thinking the simpler it becomes. Ultimately though, it is a fatal impediment to lateral thinking. It keeps us in the zone of all our current knowledge, conceptions, and prejudices. It cuts off truly new ideas.

De Bono described it thus: “Vertical thinking is digging the same hole deeper. Lateral thinking is trying again elsewhere.” (De Bono, E., 1996) Analysis is not enough because we continue to see the information in the same ways. We have to learn to dig somewhere else and with different tools.

In the late 1960s, Nobel Prize winner scientist Roger Sperry determined that the two sides of the brain’s most highly evolved area, the cerebral cortex (“cortex” meaning “outer shell”) tend to divide the major intellectual functions between them. The right hemisphere appeared to be dominant in the areas of rhythm, spatial awareness, imagination, daydreaming, color, and dimension. The left appeared dominant in words, logic, numbers, sequence, linearity, analysis, and lists.

Although each hemisphere of the brain is dominant in certain activities, they are both basically skilled in all areas, and the mental skills identified and assigned to each hemisphere are actually distributed throughout the cortex. Consequently, the fashion for labeling people either left-or right-sided is counter-productive. If we call ourselves “left brain” people for example, we may limit our ability to develop new strategies.

We may even think, as we work nights and cram more and more information into a fatigued mind, that we’re full up! Perhaps we might even stop learning or thinking for fear of overloading the brain. We can be reassured that such an outcome is simply not possible. It has been calculated that if the brain was fed 10 items of data (each item being a simple word or image) every second for 100 years, it would have used less than one tenth its storage capacity! Most managers and businesses will recognize at least traces of the following analysis from experience:

Ritualization is an absolutely lethal problem. The founders breakthrough into a fresh, ecstatic realization and pour forth a white-hot torrent of transformative energy, describing their realizations and the practices by which others can also attain them…but if others fail to take up the practices the result is a process of ‘decay,’ whereby effective practices fade into ineffectual rituals. Descriptions of direct experience solidify into theoretical doctrines that in turn ossify into rigid dogma…the result is an archaic collection of mindless, deadening rules that neither enliven or enlighten. (Walsh, 2000)

Not Jack Welch or Peter Drucker, but Roger Walsh on the great religions. Perhaps, simpler to repeat the common saying, “If you aren’t the lead dog, your view never changes.” At Interbrand we say: “Gather them all (the ideas) lest we lose one uncut diamond.”

Creative thinking tools

There are a variety of ways to encourage creative thinking but brainstorming is a tool for generating ideas that was largely developed in the advertising and communications world. It is now widely used by businesses in any field and at many levels. It is very useful but it is only one tool and it is not always the most effective – and strangely enough, it isn’t always used correctly.

As outlined before, brainstorming can be productive or it can simply perpetuate the norm. To be effective here are the “rules” for brainstorming:

o Defer judgment

o No criticism or feedback during the session

o Freewheel

o The wilder the better – even the most absurd ideas may trigger another, usable one

o Seek quantity – more is always better!

o Combine and build – join and move ideas forward into new areas of thinking

o Record every idea and number each one

o Compete between groups

De Bono invented the thinking tool that he called “The Six Thinking Hats.” One of those hats is black. He characterized black hat thinking as being judgmental, cautious, and conservative. It is black hat thinking that prevents us making fools of ourselves more often than absolutely necessary.

But it is also black hat thinking that causes more ideas to be killed than any other factor. And in our western, scientific, and analytical tradition, we are all well endowed with black hats! De Bono argued that black hat thinking was good, provided it was balanced by other types of thinking. For instance, his “yellow hat,” that obliged thinking to focus on the opportunities and benefits springing from an idea. It was also balanced by the “green hat” that called for the generation of more ideas around a concept.

Consequently, in brainstorming there is no room for black hatting. Indeed, the use of the black hat should be limited in any forum and at any time. Equal emphasis should be given to the green and yellow hats — or to the gut feeling red hat.

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