An utterly brilliant project - this the 3rd film in the series reminds us that creativity starts with copying, moves onto transformation and then and only then goes to combination using (funnily enough) existing elements in new ways. The film shows brilliantly how derivative so much creativity is. A great and reassuring argument for worrying less about being brilliant and original and to recognise that everything we do derives from the work of others. Thought it does make me wonder where that leaves companies whose reasong for existing is the 'ownership' and monetisation of original creative work like the record companies and the film companies.. which I strongly suspect is the point that Kirby Ferguson is making. I love the way he lists his tools. How would it be if you had to pay a royalty to Apple everytime you did something creative on one of their products? Huh?
true to form all of the bits and pieces of this film are available - you can even buy the music! The first 2 films are also excellent. And the fourth is due out in the autumn of 2011. You can make donations on the site.
I've been reading Jonathan Aitken's biography of Rev John Newton. The former slaveship captain who became such an asset to the anti-slavery movement because of his graphic accounts of what really happened on slave ships. I also knew of Newton as the writer of the hymn Amazing Grace - probably the best known hymn in the English language. What I didn't know was of his partnership with the 18th century poet William Cowper - they wrote a book of hymns together the Olney Hymns. Newton decided that the best way of instructing the people and in particular children was when he prepared a sermon to write a hymn which would teach the topic. Cowper as a poet and lyricist was much more talented but the two spurred each other on. The results of their efforts have made a lasting impact on hymns in this country.
The same afternoon after Newton had preached and Amazing Grace had been sung for the first time, Cowper walking in the fields had a panic attack - he suffered from severe depression. He ran home (the two men lived 100 yards apart) and wrote the hymn God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. The following day he tried unsuccessfully to kill himself. And never wrote a hymn again. I've been very moved by this story of a creative partnership enabling both to achieve more than they would otherwise have done. But also how fragile such creative partnerships can be.
In Greenwich having a cup of tea with Catalina Cernica - we discovered that the Biscuit Teashop doubled as a place where personal creativity was the point of difference. The cakes had photos of the local cook who had made them. The cups and plates were plain so you could paint them yourself. And you could collect the glazed pot a week later or they would post it to you. The owner enthused about hen parties, speech therapy groups, familes creating ceramic heirlooms by writing favourite recipes then glazing them into dishes. It was a riot. I was trying to work out if I could run a research project in the store and glaze the projective materials in time for the debrief!
This idea of personal creativity and personisation is a powerful one but I can't help feeling you need some crazy advocates to persuade the average person that they're not crazy and they can make something rather good.
Hanne Kristiansen of Flexiblebrains invited me to be an observer at a Discovery Day workshop she was running using her Creative Creatures concept. I had met Hanne at the Innovation Fest the previous week and you can find a summary of what her creative creatures represent on their site. Behaviours are distinct from processes and particular skills - they represent creative aptitudes which all of us have in different measure.
The morning was a series of exercises which enabled around 30 people to determine their creative identity as individuals and as a marketing team. The assessments aggregated what they intuitively felt to be their strengths with the judgement of fellow group members based on an innovation exercise, supplemented by the assessment of a work colleague and the results of a multiple choice personality test. Even more interesting the company had been profiled so it was possible to look at the contrasts between those who had been in the company less than a year and those who had been there more than 8 years. The conclusion - those who are new to a company are strong at new ideas and are more than helpful in helping to take ideas in and through the company. This profile is markedly different for those who have been in the same company for a long time. Their political skills are sharpened but their skill consists in spotting new ideas that are more likely to be acceptable to the corporate culture. Collaboration skills decline over time. Why support an idea you know is going to lose?
I have a particular interest in the creative creative called a Supporter - the ability to enable groups of people to work better together to come up with and shape new ideas. Hanne asked me to look out for examples of Supporter behavoiur in the workshop. The ambient noise was so loud that I couldn't hear what individuals were saying. So had to rely on identifying supporters purely by their behaviour. Which wasn't as difficult as it sounds. At this stage the participants were brainstorming in triplets. One of the 3 was the scribe or sketcher. So was concentrating on listening to the others and giving visual expression what was being discussed. Which meant that of the remaining two the dominant person was a stimulator or a selector. The supporter was quieter. Better at listening. But the body language giveaways were nodding - clapping even and mirroring of the posture of the stimulator/selector. Creative roles like this are not locked to particular people. A lot will depend on group dynamics. But I believe it is possible to classify the different creative behavious by more than body language: through the role plays in the group, through key phrases and metaphors which they use. More for me to think about as I start to map supporter behaviour.
I wasn't able to stay for the afternoon but Hanne briefed me on the content which was going to be about teaching the participants how to ask creative questions. Following the 5 typologies there are 5 different kinds of question. Explorative questions designed to challenge norms and elicit new ideas. Reflective questions helping to sift the data so as to spot emerging promising concepts. Evolutionary questions designed to share and mould emerging concepts. Reassuring questions designed to build group identity and to give confidence that the group were indeed making progress at the task. And probing questions designed to illuminate which are the most promising ideas to take forward. There was even a grab bag of pre-prepared questions to be sorted out so that people could learn to identify the different sorts of questions. There were exercises so people could learn when to ask which questions and who needed to be involved because they were naturally more cabable in that creative area.
It was one of the most stimulating mornings I have had for a long long time. Way more to think about that I can easily summarise. And I am writing this a week later - I haven't had the chance to write up my notes until now. I hope to work more with Hanne soon. Perhaps she'll agree to do a podcast and we can talk about creative questions in more depth. In the mean time I recommend the Creative Creatures website and blog.
Innovation Fest was a particular treat because I met Nicole Yershon - who I had wanted to meet ever since Dave Trott wrote a glowing tribute to her earlier this year called memorably We don't need more thinkers we need doers. Stop right now and read that last link.
Dave makes his point so eloquently I am not going to even start to explain what it is that Nicole does except that she runs the London Digital Lab for Ogilvys as a profit centre. If you read this blog regularly you will know that I have a longstanding slowburn project called Waggledancers. Nicole is a waggledancer extraordinaire she creates by assembling teams and drawing the best out of them. I don't think there is a higher calling for a creative person myself. Classic Supporter behaviour using Hanne's Creative Creatures - which you can read about in the Innovation Fest below. She was telling me about how she found the technologist who could create audio so high that only teenagers could hear it so they could signal to each other without adults knowing. It was great to meet Nicole who was our host at Ogilvys for the day - a real highlight. Creativity is not just about ideas -it is about being able to motivate people and to keep creative control by securing the funding as well. There's an interview with Nicole here too.
Download Nicole Yershon interview
We started at 8 with a half hour of what I was informed was the Morning Waltz - which seemed to me like Pilates to Strauss waltzes. Interesting to be sitting on a chair doing flow exercises in a building where Johan Strauss taught Vienna to waltz.. The first session of the morning was about food. The bit which really got my attention was a section on the accoustics of fresh food by the CEO of Honey and Bunny - a husband and wife team of food designers. In conversation I discovered that Vienna has its own vegetable orchestra! My own interest was that if the sound of food being prepared or eaten has such strong resonances then why isn't it being used more as part of soundscapes and music. Watch this space - time to experiment I think!
The main morning session featured a range of design entrepreneurs. I very much enjoyed Julai Cassim of the Royal College of Art who has developed a whole method of co-creating products with the disabled not merely because it is a better way to design products FOR the disabled but because the disabled have a unique sensibility about how products should be used which makes them a great asset to a design process. I was also intrigued by Friedrich Wille who started life as a chartered accountant and then reinvented himself as the CEO and creative director of a chain of jewellery stores. Frey Wille. I got a chance to take a look at these stores in Vienna airport on the way home.
The next session on industry and creativity seemed to get bogged down in familiar themes of businesses not being creative enough and creatives not being commercial enough. This much we knew - the challenge was to find ways to get somewhere new.
After lunch two facilitators from Bindslev in Denmark ran a facilitation session to see what people had got out of the IncrediblEurope event - new business, inspiration, reputation or links. The Links group proved hard to dislodge because they were so busy networking.. what followed was an exercise for the whole event to select goals for IncrediblEurope to follow in the coming years. Getting feedback from 100 or more people in 15 minutes is a tall order but somehow we managed it. And with that the event concluded.
I spent the rest of the day with Selma Prodanovic the founder of IncrediblEurope, Jillian de Beer, and Mirko Ilic. In the early evening we visited the Start event as the young entrepreneurs gathered their teams and started a weekend of preparing pitch presentations. Its hard to summarise quite what its like to attend an event like this which moves at a whirlwind pace. At one level it is thoroughly local and I appreciated getting a central European perspective on marketing and innovation from the ground up. At another level it was remarkable to meet so many creative people from all around the world, the small scale of IncrediblEurope makes all the speakers and delegates very accessible. The really interesting thing for me was to get a chance to network with creatives away from my own home territory of communications and market research. It really stretched me. The event is testament to the imagination of Selma Prodanovic, Ab Kuijer and Miriam David.
I'll be following with other posts related to some of the people I met.
Hard to give a flavour to an event that was quite so eclectic. Imagine a concert hall in one of Vienna's central parks. Filled with an intriguing mix of entrepreneurs, designers, architects and a few politicians. Add some keynote speakers and some panels. And see what happens next. That seemed to be the formula as far as I could tell. This is the second year that IncrediblEurope has run. Its founder describes it as less an event than a movement. But if it is a movement it isn't clear what its moving towards. Which might be frustrating for those who want a clear destination. But fascinating because of the ebbs and flows of the exchanges.
The theme for this year was Imagining what Europe might look like in 2049. That was kicked into the long grass rather quickly by Manfred Reichl, a persistent contrarian from the World Economic Forum who argued that there had been a revolutionary change in social structures every 150 years. The last one had been in 1915. So there wasn't a lot of point in planning for 2049 since a revolution in values would transform the current intellectual landscape out of all recognition anyway.
There was a lot of angst around the lack of innovation in Europe. And the feeling that the USA had a built in advantage in tolerating failure and encouraging and funding entrepreneurs whatever age they were. This didn't happen in Europe. Which translated into a sense that Europe wasn't keeping up and the European 'project' was failing. And outrage that the USA rather than Europe might be the global thought leader. All of which made quizzical viewing from my perspective. The sheer range of opinions was dizzying at times. There was a lot more talking out from the stage than conversation between panelists much less a chance for the audience to challenge or ask questions of their own.
Highlights of the first morning were de Bono's introductory keynote - de Bono style creativity is a known quantity these days but he's an expert and original presenter. Mirko Ilic - troublemaker from the start did a barnstormer of a deconstruction of the redesign of the Pepsi logo - an orgy of self indulgence and postrationalisation leading to a bland concept - and it cost them more than a billion dollars to do.
Cameron Sinclair stole the show at the end of the morning with his keynote. Complete with ipad - the first time I had ever seen anyone present with one he explained how he built a global aid organisation staffed by architects who co-design buildings with local communties and then build them together. Its an inspiring story which demonstrates how co-creation is more tangible than organising on the internet. I include a film of my asking Cameron a couple of questions - the interview coming to an abrupt end when someoene interreupted.
In the afternoon Jillian de Beer chaired a panel session about the connection between creativity and innovation. Any temptation that panelists might have had to theorise about creativity was punctured when Jillian brought the audience in relatively early ensuring there was a wide range of questions. This panel was a vivid demonstration of how broad the contributor base was: a professor of Economics, the head of 3M in Austria, a serial entrepreneur, a 23 year old PHD student taking a double PHD in mathematics and finance and the Ideo's global head of knowledge - Gentry Underwood. Putting people this diverse together is bound to create sparks. What is less easy to see is what kind of fire the sparks will light.
We had a session with angels and VCs about how to finance creativity. They weren't putting money on the table at this session but this was followed by a pitch from a selection of young entrepreneurs who were pitching business ideas to recruit teams to prepare business plans until Sunday at which point they would pitch to VCs and angels and try to raise some capital.
Michael Conrad was one of the panellists - an adman who re-engineered Burnetts global offering it was interesting to meet him because now he heads up the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. An MBA you take in a single year while staying in your job. The difference about this one is that every couple of weeks you are expected to get on a plane and go to live and work in a different part of the world to spend time with some of the most experienced creative people they can find. Moscow, Tokyo, New York, London. I know a couple of the students on the course who run agencies of their own. I have been told by one that all in the MBA is likely to cost you at least a hundred thousand US dollars but is worth every penny for the amount of access you get to practitioners and of course the networking opportunities. The students are drawn from leaders of creative businesses from all around the world. Interesting therefore to meet the man who had a major part in putting it together. I have always fancied doing an MBA but was always put off on the grounds that those who graduated seemed to have little option but go and work for banks and corporates to pay their debts. Even though this is considerably more expensive than your average MBA it is at least focussed on teh creative industries and represents a genuine altenrative. John Hegarty is joining the programme this year as one of the professors.
Lots to post about but no time to post it I'm afraid. I'm writing from Vienna because I've come to IncrediblEurope Mark 2 I think - Selma Prodanovic (whose baby it is) asked me to drop by last year but I couldn't make it. Billed as a gathering of creative changemakers to decide what we want Europe to be like in 2049. At the weekend seques into 2 days of networking and pitching for business startups and investors. Workshops on various topics happened yesterday. This year Edward de Bono is giving the keynote. What interests me is the diversity of the backgrounds of the creative people presenting and discussing here. And the quite deliberate policy of getting Europe wide representation. A breadth I don't think we even start to come close to in the UK as the island monkeys. So I'm really looking forward to it. Watch this space. The backfill will have to come later
I'm indebted to Maggi Dawn for this link: Elizabeth Gilbert talking about creativity at TED. It seemed appropriate to post it on Pentecost the festival when the Christian faith institutionalised the celebration of the arrival of the spirit of God. For those who would restrict this to religious inspiration and activity I would quote the words of the 104th psalm: When God takes away his spirit all things die and return to the dust, when he sends out the spirit all things are created - he renews the face of the earth. There is a fundamental connection between life and creativity that sings out of what Elizabeth Gilbert says. Its not about you - its about whether you make yourself open to be a channel. Happy Pentecost.
