Generating, Evaluating and Nurturing Ideas

In times of high turbulence and uncertainty, such as the current pandemic crisis gripping the world, we need creative thinking and creative ideas to solve problems. The unknown creates fear and anxiety for many, opportunity and excitement for some. The old rules of the game no longer apply, but the new rules haven't been established yet either. Urgency and necessity for solutions creates a pressure cooker atmosphere. This is an environment where creative thinking is essential and creative solutions are required to drive positive change.

Dim Sum Strategy, published late last year, presents a carefully created selection of proven creative thinking tools from three decades working with some of the world's leading brands at the world's top agencies.

In this excerpt from the book I share with you insights about ideas; how to generate them, evaluate them and nurture them.

WHAT THIS TOOL DOES

Ideas are the catalysts for change. This tool suggests methods for generating, evaluating, and nurturing ideas, taking from my own experience in advertising and from creativity experts like my friend Wayne Lotherington and cult figures like Edward de Bono.

Why is it that some people always seem to have good ideas while others are bereft?

Some can be explained by thinking preference types, but we can all be more creative thinkers and idea-generators if we learn to develop more creative habits. As Edward de Bono observes, most people would like to be more creative. Creativity is the key requirement for achievement and certainly for new ideas. Without it there is no innovation, only repetition and routine.

Many people don’t see themselves as creative people or capable of being creative, but it is a skill that can be acquired.

What can we learn from what creative types and entrepreneurs do? Creative people tend to have the following habits, they:

• Challenge conventional wisdom

• Break patterns of expectation

• Produce multiple solutions

• Ask better questions

• Aren’t constrained by established rules

• Move around obstacles

• Link unrelated thoughts

• Think in different, multi-sensory mediums

• Suspend disbelief

• Brainstorm effectively with others

Entrepreneurs:

• Are persistent

• Believe fiercely in their ideas

• Are adventurous

• Experiment

• Treat failures as necessary steps to success

• Develop creative environments, creative cultures

• Marry frontal right brain conceptual thinking with frontal left brain business and financial acumen

• Treat success as reward, not money

An easy exercise many of us will have tried before is this (if not, try it yourself without looking): List as many uses for a brick as you can in one minute.

The typical response, without having been primed by the thoughts above, will list things like:

Build a house / build a wall / support a car / throw it through a window…

The creative responses will not be constrained by the conventional uses of bricks, although they will likely include these as well, they will go beyond these to include things like:

Strike a match on / kill ants / sharpen an axe / create a brick tortoise / cook a chicken / grind into dust and use as sand / make a mouse bed / put in your underpants / square football / art display … and so on.

The point of the exercise is not how sensible the ideas are, but simply how many uses you can think of. Those constrained by conventions will struggle to find 10 or more different uses. Those thinking outside the box can often list 40 or more — even if most of them are nonsense.

‘That’s not fair!’ I hear all the time after I’ve done this exercise. What’s not fair about it? I didn’t say they had to be sensible, or even good, or even in English. All I was looking for was how many ideas you could come up with in a minute.

The rational thinkers object to this concept, but the more creative types accept and even embrace it. Our world tends to criticise bad ideas more easily than it rewards good ideas.

What does creativity or being creative mean?

It’s no coincidence that creative people are often prolific. They have lots of ideas, even if they don’t like them all. de Bono describes creativity as “bringing something into being that was not there before”. The great Australian creative agency Campaign Palace says:

“Truly creative people and companies have the imagination to see beyond the present reality and invent new, different and better ways of doing things”.

Wayne Lotherington, a good friend and ex-colleague of mine at Leo Burnett, describes creative thinking as: “The behaviour we use when we generate new ideas… creativity itself is the act of connecting or merging ideas which have not been connected before. New ideas are formed by connecting current ones within our minds.”

The first idea is something we already know, the issue at hand, the problem, current situation or brief. The second idea is also something we know but completely unrelated to the first idea. The third idea is what emerges as a result of colliding the first and the second.

Examples might be a ballpoint pen and deodorant, resulting in roll-on deodorant. Or a surfboard and sailing dinghy, resulting in a windsurfing board. Horse drawn carriage and an engine…you get the idea.

Separate Idea Generation from Idea Evaluation

Fertility is an asset when it comes to idea generation. A neat trick to increase idea fertility is to separate the generation of ideas from the evaluation of ideas.

Suspending disbelief and encouraging the free-flow of idea exchange keeps the creative pipeline open and flowing. It’s OK to allow clarification or build off someone else’s idea, but it is not OK to shoot down ideas at this stage. It’s incredible how many ideas that would have been killed at birth as ‘stupid’ or ‘unrealistic’ go on to inspire real solutions.

Once the flow of ideas is exhausted (and there are many ways  of squeezing more thoughts out of the collective grey matter than most groups imagine they’re capable of) only then do you begin the process of evaluation.

Overcoming Obstacles to Creativity

Getting started is often a problem. Writers are encouraged to just write, anything at first, just to get the creative juices flowing. Athletes warm up before the game, and your brain needs to warm up too.

If you hit a block, take a rest and return refreshed. Or try any one of a myriad of idea generation and lateral thinking tools, including the following creative thought-starters:

• Word association: What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say…?

• Type association: If you were a fish, what kind would you be?…a car? …a bird? …a food item??

• Object association: how would a spoon relate to the issue? …a guitar? …a hairbrush?

• Take three adjectives from a group-generated list, and have your neighbour write a short story using these adjectives

 • Write an epitaph for your product or service

• What would get you fired?

• What do you stand against?

• Write a newspaper headline featuring your brand in five years’ time

• Write a movie logline

• Go outside, bring back an object, then describe how it relates to solving the problem

(If you want more ideas, Edward de Bono’s How to Have Creative Ideas lists 62 different exercises to develop your creative habits. Wayne Lotherington has a wealth of creative methods too in How Creative People Connect. Check out methods such as Eyes of Experts, Relevant Combinations, Random Words, the 3 Is, Extremes, and more.)

Once you’ve started, it’s common to encounter obstacles that prevent progress. Too many give up on their own inherent creativity too early and too easily. Have faith in yourself and your ability to open up your creative mind. It’s liberating and fun!

We developed quite a reputation for rocking the boat at Ogilvy & Mather Philippines under the creative leadership of David Guerrero with support and guidance from worldwide Creative Director Neil French. David and I inherited a small agency of 50  or so people, with one client accounting for 75% of the revenue. We agreed that the market was naturally creative, but the entire advertising industry had never received an international award, ever. And people were more into copying than originality. It all said to us that we needed to have confidence in our own ability. Raise your sights and ‘come to the edge’, as Saatchi’s famous saying goes.

We agreed that building our creative reputation was paramount to our success. Creative, award-winning advertising is directly correlated with greater awareness, engagement, and sales, so we would single-mindedly focus on becoming the most creative agency in the country. We would do this by judging ourselves against international creative standards, not just the local awards.

One of our first ads was a simple print ad for Pepsi-Cola. It had just three lines running from top to bottom:

Say no to dope… Say no shabu… Say no to Coke*

…and in small print in brackets at the bottom (*a public service message from the Pepsi-Cola Company).

Well, this tiny little ad caused an enormous commotion at Coca- Cola. Coke had a dominant share of the Asian market at that time. How dare Pepsi take an underhand swipe at them? But the public saw the joke and Pepsi began to gain share.

Recognising and Nurturing Creative Ideas

It’s difficult to recognise big ideas when they’re created because big ideas often start off as small ideas.

Think of them as seedlings. They start as small green shoots. It’s hard to tell if they’ll grow to be a weed or a mighty oak. They are still small, delicate, easily crushed underfoot. They need nurturing and protecting. They need the right environment; fertile soil, nutrients, sunshine, water and temperature all have to be right for them to grow. Later they’ll need fertiliser and perhaps pesticides to ward off disease. It will need to be pruned and cared for to grow strong and healthy.

How many seeds land on barren ground, or don’t get watered, or get eaten by the birds? When a seedling gets crushed, few people mourn it. It wasn’t developed enough to be recognised for what it was, so nobody misses it. We don’t know what we never had the chance to know. It’s a lost opportunity.

It’s the same with ideas. They need the right environment to survive, develop, and flourish.

Creative companies have receptive environments to protect and incubate ideas. But even then they can’t keep them all, and only the rarest few turn out to be mighty oaks. So how do they identify those ideas with promise early on?

At Ogilvy, Leo Burnett and BBDO, we were often generating work under the intense pressure of disappearing deadlines, alcohol, and fear of failure. We had a good rule: No decision made at three o’clock in the morning is a good decision. Sleep on it and review it then. For creative ideas that seemed wonderful (as many do when you’re dog- tired and wanting to see the answer) we called it the ‘stinky fish test’. It looks great and smells sweet now, but let’s put it aside and see what it looks and smells like the next day. If it looked and smelled like rotten fish then, it probably was rotten! And if not, it may be a keeper!

That sounds like a flippant test, but I can’t tell you how much time and effort is wasted ‘polishing turds’, as Neil French so eloquently describes it. The more effort the polisher puts into polishing it, the more reluctant they are to discard, what in the end, is still a turd.

Great ideas tend to generate energy and excitement around them. They have a buzz. They have a knack of surviving attempts to crush or kill them. They keep reappearing, popping up at strange times and in odd places. They begin to polarise people into positive and negative camps. This polarisation increases over time as does the antipathy between the opposing camps. Polarisation is the first sign of something truly different that could be revolutionary. Truly different ideas tend to break the established order or rules and are thus strongly resisted by those with a vested interest in protecting the way things are.

A few tips for those running agencies, design houses or other creative businesses. I had a terrific relationship with my partner in Manila, David Guerrero. He ran the creative side, I ran the client and business side. We were committed to raising creative standards despite the skepticism of some clients in the value of doing so.

How did we do this?

Well, we had an ongoing educational programme that made the case for creative solutions as the key to profitability, and we invited junior client members to join our agency classes. The senior client members naturally wanted to know what their staff was learning, and information would filter upwards that way. We’d covertly educate when we sold ads too. We’d celebrate victories with our clients and give them the ownership of the idea they deserved. Slowly, we built up a shared belief in the value of creativity. It didn’t work everywhere or with every client, but the message began to seep through and our reputation grew. David and I had a client classification triangle, with three sections.

At the top of the triangle were clients that championed, even demanded, award-winning work. Agency people clamoured to work on these businesses because they were professionally rewarding. This ‘top triangle’ segment of clients were perhaps no more than 15% of our portfolio of clients. We aimed to double the size of this segment.

The largest section occupied the middle ground of the triangle. These were clients that didn’t necessarily champion creativity, but neither did they resist it. They were open to suggestion. We committed to do everything we could to move these customers up the creativity triangle, but we wouldn’t die in a ditch for battles that couldn’t be won. We would reward work that ‘pushed the creative peanut’ for the middle-ground clients. There was nothing more uplifting than having one of these clients taste what creativity and creative recognition felt like — and more importantly see the results in their sales. These were perhaps 60% of our client portfolio.

Then there was the remainder; the 25% of clients at the base of the triangle. These were creative ‘no hopers’, either non-believers, resistant.

to new ideas, or wedded to rigid executional formulas or ‘pattern’ copy from elsewhere. Unless they were profitable (and therefore effectively subsidising the creative work produced for other clients) or had the potential to change, we would move these clients out of the agency and replace them with others that were better matched.

Naturally, every creative team wanted to work on the clients that gave them opportunities to show their creativity and be recognised for it. This system allowed us to distribute clients fairly between teams and reward them with the better prospects based on their success. An ad agency is not a democracy, it’s a meritocracy. My philosophy on generating great creative work and managing top creative talent was this; if you have thoroughbred racehorses in your stable you’ve got to let them run. The best jockeys earned the right to ride the best horses every day. That’s how we won the big races.

Playing the Joker

Creative people were often frustrated by our internal creative review processes that filtered out concepts they felt were capable of doing well before they were even presented to the client. There are great ideas out there that are never seeing the light of day, they’d claim.

So David and I conceived the “Playing the Joker’ rule. Once every quarter we’d allow the Creative Director to select an ad of their choice, that may have been rejected internally or externally, and ‘Play the Joker’. That meant the Account Management team weren’t allowed to question it. As long as it was legal, decent and truthful, we would do our utmost to sell it, no questions asked.

This made the creative team think really hard about what ads they felt deserved a second chance. It had the double benefit of self- prioritisation, reducing the pressure on the selling team to push every ad. And it focused everyone on one ad or campaign that merited it. We didn’t always succeed, but the team recognition and effort strengthened the bond between creators and sellers.

Dim Sum Strategy is available through select retailers, Amazon or through the website below.