HOW TO BE CREATIVE?

If you say to me, how can I improve my hotel, make it more charming, I will give you a list. If you own a business and want ideas for it to be more customer friendly, again, a list shall follow your request. Banks, airlines, utility companies, retail chains, telecoms Companies, media organizations, industrial giants, financial services powerhouses - all of these and more, across the course of twenty odd years, have asked me for this kind of help. And the truth is, if you ask me for ideas, the only real question is, how many? I will keep generating them until you tell me to stop. I cannot stop myself. I do not run out. I just keep on finding more and more.

Why?

People say it is a rare talent. I don't believe that. I believe anyone can do it. Likewise, being a poet. Or an artist. Anyone can do it. Just be thick, be stupid, be outrageous, say whatever is on your mind, say whatever is in your heart, be it rude, be it idiotic, be it irrelevant, be it incorrect. I doesn't need to be "good". It just needs to be.

What is, perhaps, rare is the banishing of the censoring self which prevents it. For this reason, rebelliousness in kids is to be treasured. It is growing up, becoming adult, fitting in, worst of all being professional, which inhibit this ability. The ability is there, I think in all of us. But by believing we have to be things like smart, right, sensible, professional, moral, decent, honest and true, we censor away a world of ideas and possibility. These self definitions and their validation kill creativity. Ken Robinson alludes to how education erodes these abilities in his famous TED talk, viewed by something like 30 million people, many of whom, I can assure you, mourn the loss of their own creativity through the predominance of convergent, rather than divergent thought in our education and society.

In business, if you want divergent ideas - new ideas, get people on the job who know nothing about it. Get rid of the experts. They will be good at telling you what won't work. They'll be poor at coming up with new ideas. The whole history of invention proves this. Most breakthroughs are either accidents, or authored by amateurs.

Better still, disguise the real brief. Get people to find ideas about something different but analogous. That way, their prejudices about what does and does not fit won't apply. Just retro fit the ideas you get back to the original brief. It will amaze you how relevant they are.

I heard Lem Sissay, the poet, on the radio this morning, and his use of language was so startling to me, it acted as a personal alarm. The alarm was that, in listening, I realised that his language was so much more uncensored than mine, and that I, too, despite years of earning a living through my ideas and words, turn away in my daily thoughts, many of the simplest, the most innocent, the dumbest, the sweetest, the loveliest, the most useless / useful of connections. Like orphaning a child, my child. Abandoned. Hurt. Leaving that innocence bruised, grazed, ever so gradually broken. In the ignorant act, promoting the old lies - that to grow up is to lose the wonder of ideas and the magic of wide eyed, uncensored connection with the world around you.

The very essence of creativity.