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.

BEST IDEA LOSES

I was once asked to produce ideas for Eurostar. They wanted to attract business customers. Especially they wanted to get business people to try their route from central London to central Paris. My colleagues and I came up with a lot of ideas - that was our job. But the one that stood out for me, they didn't use.

I proposed that they buy all the available London to Paris business class airline tickets for a day or two. This would mean that there was no business class airline capacity on those days and so business people would have to try Eurostar, or fly economy. Since business class airline fares are fully refundable, the idea also had zero cost.

But they didn't run with it.

It was legal. It would have worked. It involved nothing immoral. It would have created more trial in the target market than all the other ideas. None were as strong. But the managers had their way. It was just too sharp. It went into the dustbin of history.

Shame. I thought it was one of my better ones.

Spreading butter is ludicrous.
Put on enough to cover the ground in the first place.

ONE OF MY ALL TIME HEROES

THE SUNNE RISING

Morning has shown up

Wearing a dark coat
And when that’s removed
Little else;
The little being sheer
And trimmed with gold.
And it is more alluring than nothing.
Complicity,
A willingness toward surrender,
Against the fairytale norms,
A statement
That says I will enjoy this
And so will you.
And the hidden and the half concealed
(horizons in mist, nipples behind silk)
Are the more attractive for it,
Reminding me of a time
When my hands made a discovery:
You aren’t wearing underwear, I said,
Between kisses.
I didn’t think I’d need to, she replied.

 

VIEWS

My wide eyed infancy
Was written under Norfolk skies.
It's said it's flat there.
It's hillier than you'd think.


I was curious, left and climbed
Hills, mountains, crags -
Anywhere made thrilling by the chance of falls,
And views I thought lofty, heights worth defence.


Older but no wiser
I occupied a lower ground again,
Flat land, big sky.
A different kind of openness?


By comparison, a lack of views.
A return to boyhood skies
And possibilities?
A return, perhaps, to perhaps.

CASUALTIES AND CAUSALITIES

Causality is often unexpected.

As with Brian Eno's diagram - unintended consequences - desertification, which shows the unexpected and unintended result of digging village wells in the Sahel, as increased desertification and extended human suffering. A sobering view for aid workers.

I can't (yet) find the causality of what must have been a housing boom in the first twenty or thirty years of the 19th Century in rural East Yorkshire, resulting in so many farmhouses (including mine) being built about that time. Work in progress.

Meanwhile, prompted by a similar interest in vernacular architecture, my reading takes me to some new understandings.

Wool churches, across the East of England, were late medieval legacies of the wealth made from wool exports.

The wool exports were a result of increased emphasis on sheep farming rather than other forms of agriculture.

The increase in sheep farming was less labour intensive.

The change in emphasis was the result of decreased agricultural labour.

The decrease in labour was a result of the Black Death.

There's a Swedish detective series, BECK, which currently airs and captures my attention for similar reasons. The motives are unexpected. And often, people doing wrong things for right motives.

There's something humanising about this. If you walked in my shoes you would walk as I do.

Not a bad thought to take forward into daily encounters.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

We used to call them Firms.
They were firm.
Then we called them Companies.
Were they better company?
Now, organizations.
More refined. Classical etymology.
But more distant from the emotional connections of the previous two.
More scientific, perhaps? More in control of the lab rats?

THE SUNNE RISING

The earth is laughing at the light -

The day crowing its fading longevity
Night gathers its winnings, and leaves,
Knowing the odds are shortening.
The sun that rose over John’s barn
(064 magnetic)
Now, like a sniper
Peering through masonry,
Aims its first shot south of east.
Dark knows it is darkening
Longer and colder,
Longer and colder.
The boilerman is coming
To cure the screeching valve.
Every night is longer at the table.

 

GO ON, MY SON

I don't shout at my kids. Not at sporting events, anyhow.

Once, at one of George's bouts, I caught myself shouting some idiocy. Then I realised, there's so many people yelling, he can't hear me anyway.

I confirmed this with him.

"I'm not going to shout any more", I told him, "but I am going to watch harder so that, if you want, we can go through it all together afterwards in a more thoughtful way".

Like me, he saw the usefulness of this.

I try not to want my kids to win. I try to be detached. I don't mind if they win. I don't mind if they don't.

But what if they haven't tried?

There, I find myself at odds with the throng of consoling, excuse making parents.

I am sure people read my silence as a Neo-Victorian censure.

Perhaps. To me, it's a matter of truth. A reluctance to say or endorse what is not true.

"Didn't your...... (insert name)..... do well?" says well meaning playground parent.

"No, they slacked in a shameful way," is what I want to say.

What I do say is, "well, .......(insert name)........ what did you make of it all?"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I met someone the other day. He is an airline pilot. Wow, you may say. A dream job. Once it was only a dream, a distant dream for him. As a boy, he ran down streets, his arms outstretched. Flying. He was flying. All his life he wanted to be an airline pilot.

For some years he was a happy airline pilot. But just recently, his airline has been run by money men, keen on staying competitive in times when people don't think flying is special any more, in times when they think it is the same as getting on a bus.

This change in status is hard for all who have to bear it. And when the airline is very hard nosed in the way it deals with its people, my pilot feels understandably angry and disappointed.

Hard to know what to say.

So mainly I listen.

Finally, as gently as I can, I remind him of that boy running down the streets, flying.

"Don't let them kill your dream," I say.

A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS

A couple of my favourite things are within this: