Creative Streak

Framing the Problem

The process of creating ideas begins with a specific objective: what do you want the idea to accomplish?

I was reminded (again) of its importance after conducting and/or participating in a number of brainstorms during the past week. At one meeting in particular, the person (facilitating their own brainstorm – eek!) announced with a sigh at the beginning of the brainstorm, “Well, here we go again. I’m sure we’ll get the same ideas as last time.”

Indeed. Despite the inappropriateness of launching a brainstorm with a broad slap of a negativity brush, 'Mr. Optimism' was right, going so far as to admit afterward that the reality was much his own doing. Why?

The majority of most brainstorms in public relations and communications begin with the same two hoary* objectives:

• Generate (traditional/social) media
• Generate awareness

There lies the problem. Why would you generate any new idea if you always start at the same place and take the same route? Worse, the client in this specific case fell into their weekly routine:

• The same meeting tactics (always at 10 am, the same horrifying conference room, no food, the same people)
• The same agenda (no ice-breaker, no creative warm-ups, no brief, Mr. Optimism virtually started with "Achtung!  Who has any ideas?)
• The same product background (men, aged 1 to 99 who live in Australia and breathe at least once a daily basis).

Bits & Bytes, March 15

Here's some of my week-end catch-up on posts related to creativity, innovation and communications.

Framing Is Everything - One of my favourites, Luciano Passuello writes Litemind, always a thought-provoking blog on creativity and innovation. His post Framing Is Everything speaks to the process of "framing" and its importance to problem solving and decision making. He suggests that how you articulate the problem will profoundly influence how you solve it with creative thinking.

How Good Is Your Website? -  My colleague Neil Drewitt sent this website to me - Bowen & Cragg - a company which consultants on website effectiveness. It has a terrific database of best practices, plus 1,000 articles free on its website. You can also sign up for its newsletter. Handy, practical and a beautiful website to boot (no surprise there).

Two Articles on Innovation

Winning Business

The process of new business development – specifically, winning a new assignment from a client – is often elaborate, time-consuming, lengthy and political.

To make the process easier, more productive, and focused on generating the right outcome, the client should outline and broadcast the specific criteria they’ll use to select the best agency. (More about “and broadcast the specific criteria” in a moment.)

The criteria tends to fall into six different categories.

Content. Will the agency’s proposal – specifically, its strategies, its tactics – help the client meet both its business and communications objective? How measurable are the objectives?

Creativity. Will the ideas which bring the strategic and tactics to life be cut-through, differentiating, unique and tailorable to the client’s messages? Can the agency talk about its creative process?

Best Books on Creativity

There's nothing like a thriving conversation on LinkedIn to inspire you to research a topic further. Well, it also helps to break two toes over the holidays so your activities are curtailed to sitting much of your day in your home office.

Anyway, I'm a member of the Outside the Box Thinkers group on LinkedIn, and Francois Lavallee of Aliter Concept in Montreal, Canada, asked for suggestions to start a collection of books on creativity. With a couple of days, he had some excellent suggestions. It prompted to me to think about what books on creativity I like.

Of course, any list of "Best of ..." is contentious by its very nature. There are a lot of great books on creativity and innovation, both from an artistic/personal and a business perspective. However, of the 200+ books I've amassed in my career, I ultimately chose just a few books, based on just one criteria. Did I use the book again as a reference after the first reading?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on other books that you've considered, or even take a suggestion to re-read another book that you've particularly found helpful or insightful.

• 101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving, by Arthur (Andy) B,. VanGundy © 2005 – Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (ISBN 0-7879-7402-1)

• 101 Creative Problem Solving Techniques: The Handbook of New Ideas for Business, by James M. Higgins © 2005 – Published by New Management Publishing Company (ISBN 1-883629-00-4)

• The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self, by Julia Cameron © 1994 by Souvenir Press (ISBN 0-330-34358-0)

Levels of Problem Knowledge

In his book The Concept of a Problem, Gene Agre defines a problem as “The gap between the current state of affairs and the desired state of affairs.” In other words, the “current state of affairs” is “the present”, or Point A. And, the “desired state of affairs” is “the future”, or Point B.

As it relates to communications, Point A is what the target audience thinks and behaves today, which is a result of their history, experience, expectations and background in relation to our company, reputation or product. Point B is what we want the target audience to think, believe or act. What prevents or dissuades the target audience from moving from Point A to Point B is the “problem.” The bridge between Point A and Point B are messages carried by the creative idea. (See the first, top.)

To solve a problem with creative thinking, it’s often helpful to understand what stage you are at in the problem-solving cycle. In one of the best books on creative thinking – Creative Thinking in the Decision and Management Sciences – author James Evans uses a simple chart to explain how problem solving occurs. (See the second chart, below.)

Defining the Audience, Part 2 (Values)

I just sat through a brainstorm where the sponsors unloaded volume after volume of tree-killing reports – each bursting at the seams with statistical data about their audiences. But among all this PowerPoint plethora, there was not a shred of information about the audience's values.

Understanding the primary audience's values are extremely helpful in idea generation: they are the ultimate tools to connect your product or service to your key audiences. While advertising has always used values as an integral part of its campaigns, most people in communications rarely consider them – that is, if they have any notion of what they are.

By definition: Values are deeply rooted principles or standards which are universally accepted among the target audience, and which explicitly guide what they believe, their attitude toward a specific topic, and ultimately, how they behave. They are created in all of us by a wide-ranging number of influences during our lifetime, such as (and certainly not limited to) family, culture, society, race, gender, education and socio-economic background. Because they are so ingrained in our psyche, they are – not surprisingly – the most powerful of motivators.

While values are unique to the individual, there are also 'universal values,' which Sir Isaiah Berlin defined as “values that a great many human beings in the vast majority of places and situations, at almost all times, do in fact hold in common, whether consciously and explicitly or as expressed in their behaviour.”

With a trace of irony, there is no agreement on a universal values list. Shalom Schwartz developed the first list of universal values at the University of Michigan in the 1980s. Since then, others have expanded the list to more than 100 values, others to as few as 15. I generally consult a list of 22 values – originally developed by Wirthlin International – which I’ve included in a separate posting.

So why are values – more so, universal values – important to creativity?

Universal values are helpful when trying to define an audience by its attitudes or behaviour, specifically to identify what values they may use or tap into when making a decision about a subject, issue, product or service. If you can somehow translate the persuasive value into the idea, it makes the idea that much more compelling and engaging for the audiences.

For example, if you look back to the post on 15 July 2009, you’ll see our original team identified – through focus groups – that our primary audience (Australian wine drinkers) connected to premium wines through two primary values. The dominant value was “accomplishment” – that is, “the wine I serve says everything about me.” The sub-dominant value was “belonging and acceptance,” – that is, “I want to be seen as knowledgeable, so I can impress my friends.”

These values helped us create ideas, they helped to set the tone and style for the campaign, and we used wording in the campaign messages which leveraged these themes to reinforce them to our audiences.

The only way to determine another’s person value is to ask them directly or, less so, indirectly. A focus group is probably the most common method in business, although there are many other effective methods such as questionnaires, surveys, voting and polling.

What you should never do is assume.

Defining the Audience, Part 1 (Demographics, et al)

There's a variety of ways - statistical data - to define a target audience. The two most common are demographics (social science data) and psychographics (lifestyle and attitudinal data). Both can be conducive to brainstorming ideas because both suggest how a specific audience might behave, what they might participate or engage with, what they are attracted to, how they choose to spend their time, either personally or professionally.  More importantly, without this audience information, brainstorms are rarely effective because it's impossible to connect the ideas to the audience, and vice versa.

Demographics - Social or vial statistics about a specific audience such as age, gender, university education, family status, financial worth, income, geography (like their postal or zip code). While demographics are helpful to initially define the group, don't rely upon them solely. You also need to define the audience by how they act, which is the point of ...

Psychographics - Statistical data which defines an audience’s general attitudes, behaviors, decisions and opinions. In other words, Psychographics define ‘lifestyle choices,’ or describe how people feel or act.

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.