Creative Streak

Understanding the Audience

Once the objective or purpose of the idea has been articulated (Seven Creative Steps and Smart Objectives), the second step of the creative process is to learn and discover something about ...

• the topic or subject itself
• the environment in which the idea will come alive, and most important,
• the audiences who will connect with the potential ideas

The goal of this step is to thoroughly understand these elements – the topic, the environment and the audience – so that a key insight might be isolated and transformed into a compelling idea. (Definition of an insight: “The ability to understand the true or core nature of something.”) While it’s possible the key insight might be about the topic or its environment, more often than not, the insight is about the audience – even more specifically, about their psychographics, or "how they behave."

Why Do Ideas Die?

When I began to facilitate creative sessions roughly fifteen years ago, I started keeping a list of phrases or reasons why ideas would die in brainstorms or immediately afterwards. For years, the list wasn't well-organised and some notes were patchy, but it didn't stop me from adding and adapting and editing. After sitting in a particularly heinous brainstorm a few days ago, I decided it was time to clean up and publish the list - if, for no other reason, than it was a bit of therapy for me.

An idea dies because:

1. It's killed by budget. Isn't it funny how someone in a brainstorm instantly becomes an accountant? Without any warning, they kill a particular idea because they know every cost, from every vendor, and in any way that it might be implemented. Another variation is the person who begins a brainstorm saying "I need a big idea - but I only have $1.289!"

Seven Creative Steps

When we first started teaching creativity workshop in 1999 throughout Asia to people in the communications industry, some of "Western" concepts didn’t have a parallel word in some of the languages of our learners. Imagine running a meeting without being able to use the words “idea” or “brainstorm.”

At the same time, some of the creative problem solving methodologies we’d studied were too detailed to use in half-day workshops, while others didn't fit the field of communications. For example, we wanted a phase which would help us define the core messages that the idea needed to convey.

Given the dearth of resources where we often had to create, design, facilitate and improve the curricula on airplanes flying between workshops in different countries, we cobbled together bits and pieces from a variety of well-known systems (such as the Creative Problem Solving Model, TRIZ and Synectics), from leading experts (Edward de Bono, Ng Aik Kwang, Anand Chhatpar and Dilip Mukerjea), and from a diverse group of organisations (such as the University of Cincinnati, Beijing University, University of Sydney Technology and the National University of Singapore).

SMART Objectives

If we could put every (good) creative problem-solving methodology side-by-side, we'd see each begins with the same basic concept: articulate what the idea needs to accomplish.  What must the idea do?

A proper objective – or not – is also a good place to analyse why brainstorms often go wrong.  Lots of people believe brainstorms begin and end with idea generation, but in reality, articulating an accurate and appropriate goal is the most important step because it ensures all subsequent steps move forward in a coordinated and efficient direction.

Imagine we were trying to sell 1 million widgets during the next 12 months. We’d hold a brainstorm and no doubt come up with plenty of potential ideas. But, if the objective changed – we had to sell 10 million widgets in 3 months – we'd create a different set of ideas to achieve our goal faster. At the very least, we're prioritise the ideas differently.

How To Stop Great Ideas

A cold winter's day in Sydney is the perfect time to catch-up on reading - both the old kind (on paper), and the new kind (on screen).

I have about 20 topics to cover, but before I sit down to compose some thoughts, I thought I'd share this list of negativity quotes gathered by Donald Clark, entitled "How To Stop Great Ideas."

"Deadline"

Just in case you haven't seen "Deadline," this magnificent stop-motion film with Post-its, you must click here immediately. Enjoy, and have a great weekend everyone!

A Brief on Creative Briefs

Successful communications programs of any type have one consistent element: at the beginning of the program's development, someone sat down and wrote a creative brief.

This person might not have called it a "creative brief," but the purpose was the same: to articulate the program's objectives, to outline the problems and opportunities the program will face in the hearts and mind of the intended target audience, and to consider the program's strategic direction.

The name changes depending upon where it's developed. Agencies often call them a strategy brief or client brief. Internal communications departments use slightly more generic names, like strategic plan or planning guide. At MasterCard, we used to call them "OST Plans" (objective + strategy +tactic). A colleague in Sydney doesn't have a name for his department's document per se, but his explanation certainly suggests one: "Our team sits down together and decides what the hell we're going to do before we waste time and money."

Creativity, the Tao and Winnie-the-Pooh

One of my guilty pleasures is reading in bed before turning out the lights. Tonight, while re-reading a favourite book of mine – The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff – I came across a section I had entirely forgotten, on creativity and ideas. I was going to write something insightful about how we might use it to create ideas everyday, but frankly, I couldn't improve upon Hoff's eloquence.

I do not have permission to re-print this, but in the spirit of sharing – if not to strongly entice you to run out and buy the book – I'm including a short excerpt below. Perhaps you too might find it a marvellous book to read at the end of your day. Enjoy.

To Find An Answer ...

Here's a good complementary post to "Are Brainstorms Dead?  Read "To Find The Answer, Stop Looking At The Problem" here. 

Are Brainstorms Dead?

In the past two months, I've received five articles and two blog posts heralding the death of brainstorms. Is it the economy which has caused this? Perhaps. I've had three brainstorms in the same time period cancelled. (One client told me her boss said: "We don't have money to implement new ideas at the moment." Well, good luck with those old ideas.)

Or, perhaps it's because four of the authors had a new book to spruik. (What a surprise.) Each of them had a new "buzzword" and methodology which rendered the philosophy of brainstorms obsolete. One of them even confessed - and I'm not kidding - that he'd invented his new buzzword during a brainstorm.

Personally, I think the reason is even more simple. We're all tired of attending badly managed, poorly organised and strategically inept meetings where nothing gets accomplished - meaning, no good ideas are generated.

Does this describe your brainstorms?