The book Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (previously titled: Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People) contains an exploration of the common personality traits of creative people. The traits are articulated as a series of ten paradoxes. Before listing them, he writes:

Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity.
What makes us different from apes–our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology–is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognised, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.

You’ve got to love the man, I’m sure he’d be against speculative work and 6-way creative pitches.

The list itself is delightful on its own, and will feel intuitively familiar to anyone who has an appreciation for creativity and creative people. An interesting thing, is that while going through the list you discover that the principles apply not just to creative individuals, but also to innovation and to creative companies and organisations.

So here are Csikszentmihalyi’s Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality, translated to the the traits of creative companies.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.

Creative companies balance a great capacity for doing and action with time for focus, reflection and a healthy work-life balance.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.

Creative companies retain a sense of wonder and innocence. This allows them to attempt the impossible even when “they should know better”. It sometimes results in great breakthroughs.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

Creative companies realise fun and experimentation are just as important to the bottom line as budgets, KPI’s and deadlines. However, when most companies think of creativity, they only think of the fun part, the truly creative appreciate all the work involved in making the idea a reality.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

Creative companies continually imagine, reinvent and plan their future, but they also acknowledge that “A goal is a dream with a deadline” and that “Vision without action is an hallucination”.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.

Creative companies look outside as well as inside. They tell stories and look for the limelight, but are also great listeners and willing to learn from anyone (and anything).

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.

Creative companies know their self-worth and don’t shy away from tooting their own horns, but they also keep their eye on the next challenge and know that their status should be continually justified. They acknowledge their debt to those who came before them, while not afraid to carry out their own vision.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

Creative companies actively seek a healthy gender balance – both in term of staff mix and cultural style.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.

Most organisations will be either rebellious or conservative, but truly creative companies stay loyal to their values while challenging and often revolutionising their markets. A deep understanding of your business, requires you to be immersed in its history, principles and mechanics. And then you have to challenge them – a rare quality.

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

In a creative company, people passionately defend their work and are expected to do that, but they are not ashamed to step down or make changes when someone has a better idea, because creative companies are “all about the work”, so when the work can be improved, there’s no reason for conflict.

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

Creative companies can be a bit of an emotional roller-coaster, but have the biggest potential to provide fulfilling work experiences (and, in turn, great customer experiences). In creative companies people are not afraid to be themselves, allowing themselves to show vulnerability (for more about the importance of vulnerability to creativity and happiness, see Brené Brown’s smash hit TED talk.)

Being at forefront of your business will expose you to a lot of criticism, unless you can handle it, your creativity will be squashed very early. In a truly creative company, the thought that things can be better and you’re not aspiring to make them so is unbearable. This requires a certain sensitivity. Companies with a culture of compromise, rarely exhibit creative breakthroughs.

These are but initial analogies? What do you think?

Cross-posted on The Crossed-Cow (The Partners’ Blog)

I wonder if the structure of the singularity argument could be extended to other areas. For example, I think it’s safe to say we’ve pretty much hit the content singularity. Social media percolation is increasingly so efficient, that stories that once took days and weeks to move from the margins into mainstream media can now take minutes to do so. Once something is deemed interesting or important it gets liked/re-tweeted/etc and at a certain point bound to be broadcasted by one of the big connectors, mavens or salesmen and just take off. It’s on the next news bulletin and in tomorrow’s newspaper.

Unlike with technology, a state of absolute efficiency is not very far from where we are right now.

One area of business and marketing that is noticeably affected is cultural trend analysis. Trend spotting used to be a highly specialised area reserved to a small group of experts and gurus who made a nice living postulating the next big thing. Nowadays, the next big thing simply is or isn’t. Everybody has access to pretty much the same information, social media makes emerging patterns explicit on an unprecedented level. The trend forecasters still around differentiate at best by having access to unique data or analysis tools ; at worst by trying to come up with cleverer titles and quirkier examples for the same trends reported everywhere else.
If this isn’t enough, trends develop so quickly that you’re always bound to have trend and counter-trend occurring simultaneously: Eating in and eating out, well-being and indulgence, thrift and luxury, and so on.

One interesting side effect is that with many industries, it’s very clear that innovation has become almost regimented. Everybody is spotting the same trends and are therefore identifying the same opportunities and addressing them in increasingly similar manners.

Traditional business paradigms require sound arguments behind any decision. A business plan behind every development, backed by compelling market data. But what happens when a lot of the data we all have access to points to the same content? Naturally, it will push to the front similar reactions to similar opportunities.

But what if a business chooses to do the opposite. What if instead of heading to the obvious opportunity in the market you headed in the opposite direction?
In our creative development processes, we often talk about “tackling the elephant in the room.”, heading intentionally for the least comfortable area. We try and bring in ideas from completely different categories or suggest new and strange analogies.
What is the thing people are least likely to think of while wearing (or paying for) cashmere? Goats! People not visiting the National Gallery? Let’s hang priceless masterworks in the streets! The client asks for a screensaver? Let’s turn off their screens!

We seek out the contradictions, the paradoxes, the conflicts and we often find that getting out of the comfort zone yields the most interesting results.

The silver lining of “Trend Singularity” is that, increasingly, businesses will be pushed to take more risks if they want to maintain their competitive edge. Try different things, be more experimental, and dare we say – creative?

It’s no longer enough to identify opportunities, you must now create them.

Cross-posted on The Crossed Cow

Twisted Worlds by Jeff Kubina

February is here, and we can hear the gentle pop of New Year’s resolutions expiring all around us. Like soap bubbles that once were full of hope, reflecting a better future, many of our resolutions are now reduced to a moist residue on the harsh pavement of reality.

It’s no surprise that coming up with resolutions is much easier than keeping them. A 2007 study by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol showed that 88% of those who set New Year resolutions fail, even though over 50% felt confident they will succeed at the point of making their resolution.

New Year’s resolutions are commonly articulated as objectives, and just like business objectives, common reasons for failure can include lack of strategy, inconsistent implementation, lack of stakeholder engagement and cultural fixations. But there’s one pattern of failure I’d like to point out: the search for meaning trap.

When we set ambitious change-orientated goals, we are engaging with our definition of purpose. We are articulating various “happy ending” objectives and laying out early chapters for new, life-changing, narratives. In essence, defining resolutions is one of the ways we explore the meaning of our lives.

Similarly, defining business objectives is an activity intertwined with the organisational search for meaning. When we define business objectives we are exploring the purpose of our organisation and redefining a vision of our company’s future. The more critical the objectives are, the deeper we will have to engage with the fundamental questions about our brand. We will discover that in order to make significant changes to the composite and priorities of objectives, we have to engage with the question of who we really are as a company. That’s why in strategic processes you will find that terms like mission, vision, purpose, values, brand story, personality and other terms suggesting deep meaning tend to connect, raising further complexities and challenges.

This is the point where the search for meaning trap kicks in.

Because the search for meaning is a never-ending quest. The meaning you were happy with yesterday, will start to degrade in your mind the moment you leave it be, and even faster if you continue to examine it. Suddenly, the sense of clarity of intent and enthusiasm you’ve felt begins to wane, and you wonder if this was the right idea in the first place… Maybe that brand idea isn’t right, maybe you need to re-examine your vision. Maybe what you lack is a positioning statement. Maybe it’s really the time to revisit your purpose, or corporate mission statement. And what about getting a good idea of how the market has changed since the last time we went through the process of defining those elements? And who’s our target audience again? And what about the different ways different departments or subsidiaries have been going about the same process?

Before you know it, you are running a new company-wide brand programme and engaging everyone from the receptionist to the chairman of the board.

Hang on a minute! Didn’t we go through this just 18 months ago?

Oh but how the world has changed since… So much that by the time you finish this exercise you will have to start it again, just like you did last time you decided to “shake things up a bit”…

Now, you can never accuse a strategist of a lack of love for planning, but I believe that being stuck in an endless corporate search for meaning is the equivalent of moving from one resolution to another, one fad diet or self-help book to the next, without ever achieving any of the intended transformation.

The solution? In one word – Act!

Let go of the notion that you will ever reach a perfect definition of your brand or purpose. You are on a quest, so stay focused on the road ahead and deal with the obstacles head on. You need something good enough which suggests a clear course of action. Little changes make a big difference over time and once your plan is even half decent, the rest of your energy should be focused on coming up with actions that make things happen and get things done.

If I could suggest one new habit for brands in the new year, it would be to stay focused on action. So shift the resources you were planning to spend on your Nth strategic planning programme of the last few years into actual things you can do for your world.

Throw away that self-help book, and start doing.

Cross-Posted on The Crossed Cow

My pet monster

So here goes:

About 18 months ago, I decided to indulge myself and get back into gaming. I started the process by making the terrible (and apparently common among adult gamers getting back into the habit) mistake of buying a gaming laptop (and nothing less than a souped up Alienware 11mx !). About a year later, I still had the best laptop I’ve ever had, but being unable to upgrade the graphics card (or pretty much anything) meant performance with new titles began to suffer.

A prospecting shaft. Mch. 26. Claim 44 below Discovery, Hunker Creek (1901) by Joseph Burr Tyrrell, 1858-1957, CC: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

Strategic brand ideas are rarely linear textbook answers; they often call for an original reframing of the problem or reinvention of the rules. Strategy is sometimes called “The creative before the creative”, but fundamentally both share a similar ambition – the quest for breakthrough ideas.
Breakthrough thinking is just as mysterious as breakthrough creativity – the two are intertwined. And while there have been attempts at exploring it, you won’t be surprised to know that there are no recipes. However, occasionally there are some useful tools and models.

One of my favourite descriptions of the quest for breakthrough ideas, highly applicable to design thinking, is found in David Perkins’ book “The Eureka Effect: The Art And Logic Of Breakthrough Thinking”.
Perkins constructs a model of breakthrough thinking based on the analogy of digging for gold in the Klondike. During the gold rush, everybody is looking for gold, and there are various methods of digging for it. When you find gold, if you have even little experience, you’ll know you’ve hit gold. But the big question is “how do you know where to dig?”

In that tricky terrain, the breakthrough answers and brilliant ideas are out there somewhere, but to get to them, the creative thinker must confront four types of thinking traps:

1. The wilderness of possibility – The terrain is hectic and full of details. Nearly every spot looks either suspicious or promising. Every nook and cranny may be hiding the answer, but where to dig? Which opportunity to choose?
2. The clueless plateau – The terrain is so bereft of any information or detail, it’s impossible to identify the potential areas where solutions may be buried.
3. Narrow canyons – You may not realise it, but the path is taking you further away from the solution and limiting your exploration to barren areas. You may struggle, but there are so many limitations that the range of actions possible seems extremely narrow, almost as if there’s no way out. A worse incarnation of the canyon trap is when you may think you are choosing the right path, but actually you have a distorted view of the territory. You’re walking trapped in the canyon and you don’t even realise it.
4. The oasis of false promise – This is it, you’ve found a spot that looks promising, this must be it. But actually, there’s nothing there, and you may dig and dig and sweat and nothing will come out of it.

There are techniques to mitigate and attempt to get over those traps, and sometimes half the job is realising which trap you’re dealing with. Here are some tactics to deal with the aforementioned traps:

1. Spoilt for choice? Develop qualifiers/filters to make you choosier. Find a system for your roving. (And if that doesn’t work, rove randomly enough to hit something).
2. No idea where to start? Try and generate more opportunities, roam more freely, and stay alert for any clue, however small.
3. Stuck in one direction? Try removing any constraints or reframe the problem and see what new directions open up.
4. Going for a promising direction but not yielding results? To begin with, don’t limit yourself too soon, don’t fall in love too quickly with solutions, keep roaming for a while. Have been focusing on an area of promise with little result? Try moving away, explore a new area and see what new possibilities open up.

Thinking back on brand challenges encountered through the years, I’m surprised to discover that most projects tend to fall into one of the first two types – Either you’re drowning in information and possibilities, with dozens of seemingly exciting alternatives and little evidence to what is worthy of staking a claim, further development or exploration. Alternatively, you find yourself in a bleak “insight desert” grasping for shards of useful information or any clue to point you in the right direction.

Why are the other two types more rare?
Simply because if a client falsely thinks they have the solution already or believe they are on the right path and nothing exists outside the box – they are unlikely to turn to strategic or creative advice in the first place. Instead, those “non-project” situations will sit there, waiting for someone to sound the wake up call of reality (to get out of the oasis trap) or for someone to breakthrough a new direction (to get out of the canyon trap) – either from the inside, or the outside.

Cross-posted on The Crossed Cow

Here is a quote from a recent blog post that I think applies to concept development in general and creative/strategy collaboration in particular:

“Coming up with a Meet the Team short [* animation shorts promoting one of their games. UB] is a lot like a game of Jenga. 99% of it involves making room for an idea and seeing what happens.

Most of the time what happens is the whole structure collapses. Then you have to figure out why it collapsed and rebuild it, this time making sure to add in some structural support for your idea so it doesn’t bring the whole short down.”

(the rest of their post relates more to the specific animated short they’ve been developing)

While working on an article about brand ecosystems, I came across an interview Diageo CMO Andy Fennell recently gave to Marketing magazine.

Here are some choice quotes:

- Given your marketing challenges, what type of agency do you need today?

There’s one thing that we will always need from our agencies – brilliant creative ideas. That’s what we are buying – big ideas, full of flair to surprise our consumers. At Diageo, when we work with an agency it is the number one priority. Sure, account servicing and all that stuff is relevant. But the reason we buy an agency’s service is because of its creative flair.

That said, we can no longer segment the different aspects of an idea in the way that we used to. We need agencies that can see the totality of our engagement with the consumer, whether that is blogger outreach, social networking conversations, long-form content or more traditional advertising. Almost always, we need agencies collaborating with each other around what we end up showing to the consumer.

There are very few, if any, agencies that are able to do everything. So, we need our lead agencies to be able to see the whole idea and collaborate with partners in order to deliver to the consumer something that joins together and makes sense. We talked about integrated marketing for years. It’s been a buzzword in agency land. Now it is absolutely required. If it’s not integrated, the consumer rejects it.

- If it’s all about getting consumers to participate, do you still need big campaigns?

Not big advertising campaigns, but we need big brand ideas. When you have more and more people collaborating, you need a big idea to hold it together. The difference now is that you don’t start with an ad campaign. You start with an idea that allows people to participate – so we talk about ‘participating platforms’.

***

You can read the rest here.

No big surprises for brand agencies there, you might say, but here is a thought…

When the entire marketing world becomes hyper-integrated and idea-driven, two of the core elements that used to set apart Brand(/ing) Agencies in the past become hygienic to the entire creative industry.

The concept of having a “Brand agency” in such a world, makes as much sense as having a “Positioning Agency” or a “Differentiation Agency”. Branding is just too important as a mode of thinking in marketing to be fenced off and left only for one type of agency.

That’s why if you look across recent innovations and best-practices in brand management, you will find a wide variety of agencies involved.

That’s why the more clued-up about branding clients are becoming, the more they are likely to give branding work to other agencies or even do it themselves.

And, guess what? We don’t get a prize for being the first to realise the importance of those ideas or for being the pioneers of practicing them.

So unless we prove on a daily basis we are the best at creatively combining clarity of definition with the power of execution…

The best at connecting creed, consequence and community.

The best at coming up with “long” integrative ideas for participation and engagement platforms.

Then brand agencies will go down in history as passing phase.

A mere symptom for a moment in the evolution of marketing.

Ah, well… At least our mission should  clearer.

p.s.
1. Slight revision and a similar situation is rippling through the Digital Agency sphere.
2. I think integrated and idea driven may be the two key attributes of contemporary marketing. I would love to hear if you think there are other attributes that are as big. (Action? Community?)

Do not buy this book if you’re expecting to find out anything at all about 1984, as this writer seems to have been living on a different planet…Orwell completely fails to capture the uplifting vibe that was the pop explosion of the summer of ’84… maybe he lived in Norwood.

So I immediately thought “I wonder what else is out there?” So went through some random favourite classics, and look what I found…(highlights added)

On Slaughterhouse 5:

This book is a complete waste of time. It is so difficult to read as it jumps back and forth in time. There is no great climax and the stories within just seem to be included by the author to bulk it up.
Childrens crusade? HA! Childrens book more like!

Old Man and the Sea:

This "novel" was the worst "piece of literature" I have ever read. If you can spare yourself from the agony of reading a hundred or so pages about an old man and a fish, than do so. This book brought the worst period of my life to a dramatic climax. I was more miserable reading this book than when my wife divorced me and my parents disowned me. I now have no one but at least I don’t have to read this book anymore. Thank you god.

The Sun also Rises:

I read this as my first Hemingway,and I have to say that it was thoroughly underwhelming. The characters just hang around drinking, and saying things like ‘What rot!’. The dialogue is comical and unrealistic, and you have to ask yourself what exactly happened when you get to the end. The answer? Nothing. Lack of plot is usually mace up for by interesting character development and interplay, but all we have here is a group of rich conceited fops, gracing Europe with their presence. A waste of time.

Beloved:

It feels as if you suddenly stumbled upon the hallucinogenic dreams of someone who just watched "Roots" and then dropped acid.

Light in August:

This book tells a story that can be likened to a horrible traffic accident caused by mean, wicked, and spiteful people. In the traffic accident, everything is on fire,
but the cars passing by cannot refrain from slowing down to stare
at the decapitated head by the side of the road.

Peter Pan:

Peter is just an awful child, his arrogance and self importance outweighing any good that might be seen in him and Wendy is just such a girl that I found myself wanting it to end rather near the beginning. I just really disliked this book, it was, now that I really think about it, quite sinister. I just couldn’t see the joy that so many others have seen in it. I was more on the side of the mother who had her children leave and forget her.

Animal Farm:

Animals Can’t Talk!!
This book is terrible, I mean, I know it was written like ages ago like in the 50′s when movies were all about giants ants and stuff, but none of the animals on this farm were even radioactive or giant or anything, so who cares? They just kind of fight amongst themselves and that’s it! The whole book

God bless the interwebs.

What will you find?

Some examples:

“In most cases, being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.”

I agree. This way has proved itself for me when working with design teams as well as, a long time ago, when I was hiring my team at IOL (Many have done exceptionally well in their careers, such joy…)

“Almost everyone [women] first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them.”

Sadly accurate. So far the book is full of feminist observations that while not ground-breaking, are well articulated, heartfelt, opinionated and a joy to read from someone so bang in the heart of mainstream.

Last one, on the cult-like experience of studying and practicing improv comedy:

“Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path towards Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I look at the world, and it’s where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?“

(Previously published on the

“Is our brand more ‘about us’ or ‘about you?’”

Agencies and clients alike, we all love a good positioning matrix.

To begin with, they are dangerous creatures, as their seductive powers come from the brain’s cognitive preference for clear cut dichotomies, and life isn’t always black and white. Taking two dichotomies and using them together is that power squared, but so is the danger.

Love, respect, and fear them—they’re not going anywhere any time soon. However, it will be useful to start rejecting some common false dichotomies that tend to make reoccurring appearances.

The one I want to mention this time is when one axis (usually the X) talks about the difference between "talking about us" (the company/brand) and "talking about you" (the audience/customer).

Usually the assertion will be that the brand is too inwardly orientated, talking about the detail of the products and the history of the company instead of the needs and solutions of the customers, audiences, or stakeholders.

Time and time again?I’ve seen it used as a central dimension to the analysis of positioning, often favoured by research agencies.

The bias is in the question itself, compounded by a guilty residue from an era before customer-centricity. A concept that is now hygienic to every industry (at least as an ambition).

Beginning with the question: the world we live in is just not like that. Most of the best brands you could think of will be neither. Apple talks about its products and culture, but is a brand that cares deeply about meeting needs and ease of use. The same can be said about Google. Coke is very much about the product and the myths that come with it, it’ll be tempting to position them opposite to Pepsi and say that Pepsi is more about its drinkers and Coke more about its own brand. But in truth: 1) Coke has adapted its myths to centre on changing lifestyles time and time again. And, 2) Is it really that helpful to put them on this axis to begin with?

The best brands are both about themselves and about their customers. Apple, on different analysis pieces I’ve seen, is placed on either end of the spectrum—being "about Apple" to differentiate from and "about the customer" as a pointer at the important-but-generic-for-the-last-30-years (at the very least) practice of customer centricity.

Going back to the bias in the question: If you ask customers in focus groups or individual interviews what they prefer, what do you think they’ll answer? Of course they will say: "Me! Me! Talk about me!" But we know that in the mysterious mix required to make them pay attention they also want to know who "you" are and why is it worth paying attention to what you have to say.

So can we just stop using it and pretending that it adds any meaningful insights?
Thank you.