“If you want to under­stand phe­nom­ena, you should under­stand it in its most devel­oped, fullest form,”

via Where the research takes you | Har­vard Gazette.

Reminds me of the long-term memory’s role in cre­ativ­ity. In fact, cre­atives tend to obsess over an idea for seem­ingly no rea­son, while other peo­ple don’t see the point. There’s a rea­son for this: if you have a dia­logue around a topic, either an inter­nal or exter­nal, you’ll under­stand it bet­ter in prin­ci­ple. And under­stand­ing prin­ci­ples teaches you how to be resource­ful with that idea.

The Boy and His Pencil

I use the pen­cil exam­ple to teach this prin­ci­ple. A child goes to school and learns about a pen­cil. While many kids sim­ply use a pen­cil, this kid obsesses over it. He wants to know what it’s made out of.

Over the years, he dis­cov­ers that pen­cil lead is actu­ally graphite, which is mostly use­less trivia. But to him, it’s inter­est­ing. He also dis­cov­ers that liq­uid graphite is used to lubri­cate locks.

When he’s 26 years old, he’s locked out of his house when his sticky, neglected front door lock finally decides to quit mov­ing. As he con­tem­plates his options, he wishes for some liq­uid graphite. He then real­izes he has a mechan­i­cal pen­cil with some graphite “lead” in it. He clicks it a few times to extend the lead, puts it in the lock and breaks it off. He works the key around a lit­tle bit and lock starts oper­at­ing freely.

Why it Matters

We call this resource­ful­ness, inge­nu­ity, inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­ity. But it hap­pens in the long-term mem­ory, when the nodes are formed in the brain that orga­nize our infor­ma­tion on what a pen­cil is. If those nodes are set up to con­tain basic knowl­edge about a thing, it’s more likely to seem to con­nect to another thing.

For instance, some of us might think of a pen­cil as good for writ­ing only, where oth­ers think of it in its more basic form: a piece of graphite, wrapped with wood, topped with a rub­ber eraser, held on by metal. If it’s a writ­ing uten­sil, it’s only good for writ­ing. But if it’s all those things, it’s good for kin­dling (wood), hold­ing the back of an ear­ring on in a pinch (eraser) or lubri­cat­ing metal.

For cre­atives, this means you’re not wast­ing time by obsess­ing over things related to your task. For strate­gists, this sug­gests that obsess­ing over a prob­lem a bit before try­ing to solve it yields a real com­pet­i­tive advantage.

So if you’re build­ing your under­stand­ing by obsess­ing over the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of a thing, let’s just say there are worse ways you could use your time.

For more on this: Necka, E. (1999). Ency­clo­pe­dia of Cre­ativ­ity. (M. A. Runco & S. R. Pritzker, Eds.). Aca­d­e­mic Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=cpc7CJH1-s8C

.

It’s true. Logic is the begin­ning of cre­ative. It starts with a work­ing hypoth­e­sis of a busi­ness prob­lem. Research informs the liv­ing hypoth­e­sis, lead­ing to a sit­u­a­tion analy­sis and descrip­tion of the oppor­tu­nity. It’s not just data, mind you: it’s gut feel­ing and point of view, ver­i­fied by evidence.

That point of view becomes the brief. The brief cre­ates a solu­tion space for the cre­atives, focus­ing their awe­some energy.

Logic leads cre­ativ­ity in value creation.

A cre­ative brief answers the ques­tions, What is it (the prod­uct), Who’s it for, and why does it mat­ter (to the audience)?

A cre­ative brief starts with a goal: what do we want them to think, feel or do? And cul­mi­nates in a “Sin­gle Most Impor­tant Thought” or SMIT, which con­tains the one-sentence state­ment of what the audi­ence needs to hear in order to think, feel or do what we’ve decided.

Here’s a point of view on the cre­ative brief.

As an instruc­tor, much of what I do is lead­er­ship. In fact, I’ve never had a man­age­ment job, but I’ve had plenty of lead­er­ship jobs. The dif­fer­ence? Lead­er­ship (like adver­tis­ing: my pri­mary field of train­ing) requires that you look at things from the customer’s point of view. It’s all about intrin­sic motivation.

So when you’re try­ing to get a project going, and you notice peo­ple are burn­ing out, ask them the fol­low­ing ques­tion: What’s mak­ing this seem like “work” right now?

You see, peo­ple feel like they’re work­ing when they’re doing unpleas­ant tasks that they don’t under­stand. This could be because you’re not shar­ing the vision or because you’re ask­ing them to do too much. Or, and this is big in inno­va­tion, you’re ask­ing them to both be cre­ative and mul­ti­task (please, if you don’t already know, ask me why this is ill-advised).

I, like most of you, am not per­fect. So when I give direc­tions, it’s a good idea for me to remain hum­ble and keep a lis­ten­ing ear. That way, peo­ple feel okay about telling me when they’re doing some­thing they don’t want to do. And when that hap­pens, I can find out exactly why things aren’t get­ting done.

Now I can either get them some help, help them real­ize why they’re being asked to do that task, or real­ize that my direc­tions were a lit­tle vague or impos­si­ble to follow.

In sum­mary, try­ing to force peo­ple to do things they don’t want to do, in a cre­ative envi­ron­ment,  is a bit like try­ing to change the direc­tion of the wind. It’s much bet­ter when peo­ple real­ize they want to do something.

Then you can fol­low the advice of Gen­eral Pat­ton: Don’t tell peo­ple how to do it; tell them what to do and watch them amaze you with their results.

I was in a talk by Scott Bed­bury yes­ter­day, and he told us some­thing that every­one in the ad pro­gram pretty much agrees with: make the ad about the cus­tomer, not about the brand. Then he gave an exam­ple that really helped me to see how far this con­cept goes.

He told us about an early Nike ad about Hay­ward Field. You can read about it in his book, A New Brand World, but Nike was about to run an ad talk­ing about them­selves. It would have been an art­ful ad about the his­tory of Nike, jog­ging and Hay­ward Field, tying the three together. In Scott’s words, Nike was about to take the credit for an entire move­ment. The ad never ran, and Phil Knight made sure it never saw the light of day.

This made me real­ize that sniff­ing out those ads about the brand–that leave the audi­ence out–isn’t as sim­ple as just find­ing the clumsy ads on TV about ser­vice, qual­ity and price. Rather, it’s deeper than that. After all, an ad could be art­fully done with plenty of story and still be telling an irrel­e­vant story.

This also gave me hope. After all, if you can fail so big with a huge bud­get and the best cre­atives in the world work­ing on it, then maybe you can suc­ceed with a small bud­get, but with the right story. Maybe, even in a local mar­ket, you could tell a story that involves the audi­ence in an inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant way, show­ing them the value instead of talk­ing about attrib­utes of your product.

In this way, you’ll be telling stories–whether through dig­i­tal or tra­di­tional media–that involve your audi­ence in your brand, because it’s not a story about you. It’s a story about them.

The stu­dents of J458 were priv­i­leged to have Jason Gal­lic speak about poetry. By the time class was over, the stu­dents were writ­ing and shar­ing beau­ti­ful poetry they’d writ­ten, along with a piece of them­selves, with the rest of the class.

Here are a few notes from the presentation.

Notes from Jason’s visit, by McKen­zie Wilcox

My notes from Jason’s presentation.