Increase The Odds Of Creativity
By Will Burns, Contributor – Forbes
I used to believe that creativity, like the hair color on your head, was something you either had or you didn’t. The only “odds”of creativity happening was a function of the minds you tapped.
After years of podcast interviews with creative experts, reading countless books on the subject, and being in the idea business, I now believe that creativity is a changing variable. And that there are at least three different “kinds” of creativity (that I’ve seen, anyway), each of which require slightly different creative skills, and each of which can be enhanced with different methods.
Understanding these three “kinds” of creativity, particularly within the context of marketing, and understanding how we can enhance our creative skills within each, I believe will increase the odds of creativity for everyone.
Three Kinds of Creativity.
Steven Johnson, in his brilliant book, “Where Good Ideas Come From,” suggests that ideas are the result of collisions between existing ideas. I agree. And, interestingly, the three different kinds of creativity I am proposing below differ only in the nature of those collisions.
1. Conventional Collisions.
What is it: This is the most basic form of creativity in marketing, the “fender bender” of collisions, but needs to be at least acknowledged. Think of it as a “match maker” for two existing ideas. A local mechanic sponsors an auto show, for example. Sponsoring auto shows is nothing new (and neither are mechanics), but a mechanic sponsoring an auto show might be new to that particular local mechanic. Or a barber shop doing a live remote with a local radio station. Not a new concept, but might be new to that barber shop.
How can we improve the odds of this kind of collision: When a brand needs to get attention for itself, one time-tested way to do that is to sponsor an event that people attend. Not terribly creative, but it just might work. And the only way to know about such conventions is to be aware of them through years of experience. Media companies are particularly adept at this kind of creativity and have “automated” the creativity involved by building sophisticated tools to help identify the right (existing) channels for new marketing challenges. But enough years in the ad business and you develop a “gut” for such things and smart Conventional Collisions come quickly.
2. Internal Collisions.
What is it: Now we’re talking some serious creativity because here the collision happens inside one’s own head using the “materials” already installed. Everything you have ever learned in your life is stored somewhere up there between your ears. And everything up there is entirely willing to collide with something else in there to create the endorphin rush of a new idea. Internal Collisions come to us while thinking, brooding and actually contemplating. Or they come to us after some time for incubation, when the subconscious has time to slam concepts together from the millions to choose from in your brain. The ideas that result from Internal Collisions lead to those “Aha!” moments that we all experience from time to time. They seem to come out of the blue, but nothing could be further from the truth. They come from recombinations of concepts within the confines of your own mind – facts, experiences, preferences, emotions, and everything else. Some believe the crazy randomness of dreaming at night is nature’s way of forcing seemingly disparate thoughts together in our minds.
One of the most famous and entertaining examples of Internal Collisions revolves around a Beatles song. Did you know that Paul McCartney woke up one day in the ’60s with the song, “Yesterday,” in his head? That’s right, he woke up, fell out of bed, and before he could drag a comb across his head, he had the melody in totality. Here’s Paul recalling that day.
Keith Richards, according to his book, “Life,” did the same thing with the famous “Satisfaction” guitar riff. Wrote it while sleeping one night, had the good sense to keep a recorder next to his bed, and the odd-sense of sleeping with his guitar. When he awoke in the morning, there it was on the recorder.
No external stimuli led to those musical epiphanies. Just a lot of raw material jossling around in a couple idea guys’ heads, all of which was given the right environment to properly collide.
How can we improve the odds of this kind of collision: There are many methods you can try, and most of them involve getting us out of our own way by changing our context or environment. Here are three of the more interesting methods:
- Drink alcohol. Keith Richards practically invented this one, but I a recent articlein Men’s Health reported that moderate amounts of alcohol actually increases our creativity. The people behind the study, as reported in Consciousness And Cognition, believe it’s due to alcohol’s effect on our ability to focus. With a couple drinks our minds are a little more free to roam, less confined to reality. But I personally believe it’s equally about alcohol’s ability to reduce our fear, the enemy of creativity.
- Go to coffee shops. Another finding, this time by the Journal of Consumer Research, and presented in this article on Gigaom.com, is that the distractions available with the steady hum of a coffee shop can enhance creativity. It has to do with a perfect level of distraction that keeps your mind from getting too focused, and allows your mind to maintain a level of abstraction where ideas in your head are more likely to collide. I find it wildly interesting that being slightly distracted is good for creativity.
- Create psychological distance. This one is weird, but very cool. Scientific American, in its article entitled, “An Easy Way To Increase Creativity,” talks about the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, which essentially says that when a problem is presented in a way that is “distant” from ourselves at that particular moment – distant in time or space – then the way our brain attacks the problem involves more abstract thinking, a higher-performing creative level of thought. So, for example, if I tell you that the problem you’re about to solve was derived from a team in a far away land, your likelihood of solving goes up (told you this one was weird). Whereas, if I tell you that the problem was derived from a team down the hall, your creative powers diminish. And that bizarre effect works with time as well. If I tell you to imagine yourself five years in the future before presenting you with a problem (any problem), you’re more likely to solve it creatively than if I tell you to imagine yourself one day in the future. I don’t care if it’s weird. If it’ll help us with our Internal Collisions, bring it on.
3. Outside-in Collisions.
What is it: These are the collisions where one concept is already in your head and it collides with a fresh, new concept “out there” somewhere. High form of creativity, this. Because it involves real-time, on-the-spot creativity. No incubation here. The outside concept either collides with something right then and there, or it’s relegated to the ranks of the Internal Collision, hoping one day it’ll connect with something else inside your head. Think of an Outside-in Collision as the “in-prov” of creativity and it doesn’t just require talent, it requires a certain mindset, or way of living, in order to happen frequently.
So let’s say your brain is just teaming with inspirations, facts, experiences, nuggets, and other odds and ends. It’s all useless to an Outside-in Collision if you are not constantly open to seemingly irrelevant information out there. There are no preconceived notions when it comes to this type of idea intrusion. People with ADD are especially good at being open to irrelevant information, which gets in the way of their focusing on studies as children, but aids big time with creativity (and explains the high propensity for ADD folks in the advertising business). Outside-in Collisions require an optimistic view and a feeling that anything out there could be an inspiration in here.
How can we improve the odds of this kind of collision? First and foremost, leverage your inherent curiosity to arm yourself. Fill your heads with any and all you can. Because the more stuff inside your head already, the more likely a genius collision will happen with something on the outside. So read, go to the movies, watch TV, talk to people, read the industry rags, and live your life in a way that continually scours and gleans anything that interests you. Since you’ve read this far, my bet is you already do all that.
Now find ways to force coincidences with the outside. As cultural “anthropologist,” Dr. Bob Deutsch, once put it in my podcast interview with him, “Creative people live in directed serendipity.” Creative people are “directed,” in that they have a problem they need to solve and are good at holding that problem somewhere accessible in their minds. But then they let the world happen to them, they notice things, they pay attention to their gut, they seek out experiences, all of which mathematically increase the odds that a collision of inside and outside concepts will happen.
We force coincidences at Ideasicle by design. We assign four creative people to each ideation project, not the traditional two. And the four come to the project with four very different perspectives (e.g. a retail expert, digital expert, moms expert, luxury expert, etc.). That way, the chances for unexpected “outside-in” thoughts, notions, and ideas, colliding between the four is exponential.
But a great trick to increase the odds of Outside-in Collisions on a personal level is the iPhone and iPad application, StumbleUpon. It’s my favorite app because it scours the internet for stories in the categories you’ve pre-chosen (advertising, science, UFOs, etc.) and then learns what you like so it can serve up more of that. But I especially like it as a way to force coincidences. You may have ten categories you can stumble within, but you can also “Stumble All Interests” at once so you have no idea what’s going to come next. I find this kind of “vetted randomness” an excellent, easy, and cheap way to introduce outside concepts to your internal thinking.
Be Ready For Anything.
Increasing the odds of a brilliant idea, regardless of which of the three kinds of idea collisions, is a waste of time if you do not have a way to capture those ideas as they happen. I’m not suggesting sleeping with your guitar like Keith Richards, but I am suggesting you have some sort of recording “device” with you at all times. Chances are you have a smartphone. Smartphones have zillions of “idea apps” that can record pictures, your voice memos, and your typed notes. Find one you like (I personally use the “Idea Organizer“) and put the app on page one of your phone for easy access.
Now, I’ve only scratched the surface with the ways you can be more creative. So, tell us, what do you do to increase your creativity? Please feel free to share your methods and stories below.
You know, create a few Outside-in Collisions for other readers to increase their odds of creativity.
