How To Have Ideas

This is copyright material extracted from Paid Attention, published by Kogan Page Ltd, 2015. www.koganpage.com/PaidAttention

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The Genius Steals creative process is broken down into six steps, as set out below.

1. Defi ne the problem

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will

allow a solution.

(ATTRIBUTED TO GEORGE BERNARD SHAW BUT PROBABLY A FAUXTATION )

Creative ideas in advertising exist to solve problems, usually specifi c business problems. The ideas must address the drivers and/or barriers to business growth in some fashion. The foundation of any solution is how the problem is defi ned. The application of creative thinking begins here, with the formulation, because how you defi ne a problem determines if and how you can solve it.

A good problem statement needs to encapsulate the issue and objective, and inspire the appropriate solution. It should avoid jargon and be phrased to be as generative as possible. There is a famous and probably apocryphal story of a Toyota executive who asked his teams to brainstorm ‘ways to increase their productivity’. This proved unfruitful, until he rephrased it as ‘ways to make your job easier’, which led to many, many suggestions.

Creating behavioural objectives can help to focus ideas. Will Collin, one of the founders of Naked, explains it well. He pointed out that the business objective might be to sell 15 per cent more mayonnaise but that phrasing it as ‘getting people to try mayo on their fries’ 2 will be far more inspirational for creating solutions.

2. Frame the metaphor, extract the abstraction, look for patterns

Our brains think in metaphors, in connections, and often the best ideas are patterns that have been established elsewhere that are matched onto the problem at hand. In order to do this, we have to abstract things out of the specifi c into the general, and where else these patterns may have been implemented. This framing then allows for the next stage, fi nding the right inspiration and outspiration , from different times, places, categories and so on.

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3. Iteration, inspiration and outspiration

The components of new ideas are always other ideas. I think of them as pieces of Lego. You can make anything out of Lego, but in order to make specifi c things, you need specifi c pieces. Looking at the most successful attempts to solve similar pattern problems in the past is the fi rst place to look for ideas that can be evolved or iterated.

Finding the right inspiration, the right Lego, is a crucial and ongoing part of any creative process. It is an adage in advertising that you must look outside advertising for inspiration. This is both true and not true.

As professionals it behoves us to be aware of the best work that is happening in our fi eld, and the award shows make this easy for us. (This is part of their value, as we shall explore in Chapter 9 .) This is inspiration. That said, we obviously want a much larger gene, or Lego, pool than this so we need stimulus from further fi elds: art, technology, design – all of culture is open and available online.

In genetic engineering, the process of introducing unrelated genetic material into an organism or breeding line is called outcrossing. It increases genetic diversity, therefore reducing the probability of being subject to disease or genetic abnormalities. This is why I call inspiration from outside outspiration . Every weird thing you are interested in, every niche of culture you geek about, is part of your stock house. Based on the abstraction, the pattern discerned in stage 2, you can begin to select and compile appropriate outspiration.

The point, again, is to fi nd elements diverse in fi eld and interest to apply to the problem. Outspiration can also come from inside the world of advertising, by looking at similar problems from very different categories or cultures.

The ‘apple’ game is a good way to get the iterative creative juices fl owing (and to avoid hackneyed phrases like ‘creative juices fl owing’, except possibly in relation to fruit-based creativity games). Divide a piece of paper into boxes, one for each member of the team or group. Everyone must draw something in each box to the brief ‘apple’, with the only other condition being that you cannot repeat anything already drawn. By pushing things endlessly, soon the obvious apples give way to more metaphorical interpretations of the brief, more creative iterations.

4. Recombination: blend and blend again

This is the forge, where ideas are smelted from disparate pieces. Every creation begins as a connection. Almost all brainstorm and creativity tools



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focus on stimulating non-obvious connections to see if they crystallize into ideas.

Naturally creatively minded people make these more obscure connections more naturally, but it is a process that everyone can be guided through, and a faculty that gets better the more you use it. Using the elements gathered above, every idea and piece of inspiration or outspiration, you can create a very simple combination engine by writing them all on separate cards and shuffl ing them, or laying them out on a table and seeing if you can connect two cards together into a new idea:

● Random input : this can be added into the mix, by simply selecting them from a dictionary and force-fi tting them to the elements at hand.

● A–Z ideas : volume can be mustered with the A–Z game, where you create an idea for each letter of the alphabet in a short time.

● Write in silence : another volume driver, get everyone to write down their ideas privately for fi ve minutes before any discussion or team brainstorming.

● Reverse brainstorming : looks for patterns in the negatives, looking through the antonym lens. Take the problem defi nition and reverse it. Instead of ‘How can we solve this?’, ask ‘How could we cause it or make it worse?’ Rather than ‘What’s the best idea?’, ask ‘What’s the worst possible thing we could do?’; ‘How could we create the opposite to what we want?’ Use this to stimulate ideas, which can then be reversed to look for actual solutions.

5. Incubation: stop thinking, distract yourself, get out of your groove

Every creative process has this element. Once you or a team have forced your collective minds at a problem for some time, you begin to create ruts for your thinking as you move towards articulating a solution. This is when you should take a break and, importantly, think of other things. The classic bathtub eureka moment, the long brisk walk, the moment in the shower, the advice to sleep on it – these are all specifi cs for this general step.

When your brain stops actively working for a while, other more random connections start to get made by the combination engine of your imagination. Distracting your conscious mind, having a few drinks perhaps, suppresses the internal censor that stops some ideas coming to mind.



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6. Articulation and judgement: is it good? Will it blend further? How is it to be articulated?

Ideas are fragile, the best must be protected beyond gestation or they wither and die. Once the most fruitful ideas are selected, based on how well they seem to solve the problem and how non-obvious they are, the ideas can be nurtured into existence. As Shakespeare observed, ideas need names and a ‘local habitation’. A look and feel, an elevator description, a key visual in context, all help ideas come to life. Usually it is the ideas with names and contexts that stand out to the creative director, to the client and to the world at large.


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How To Have Ideas