The Learning Industries (New Article for Mediacat)

The Learning Industries

According to physicist Linus Pauling (one of the few scientists ever to win more than one Nobel Prize) “the best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas”.

It’s advice that our forerunners on Madison Avenue took to heart in the 1950s. It started when an account executive named Alex Osborn invented the brainstorming session in 1941, based on the following rules:
No criticism of ideas
Go for large quantities of ideas
Build on each others ideas
Encourage wild and exaggerated ideas

Certainly all of us have sat down at some points with a notepad to come up with brand names, ideas for new products and services etc., and have noted hundreds of ideas - then shortlisted some more promising ones.

When I work on strategy and innovation projects I generally aim to open the process by tabling 7-10 ideas, as much as anything to overcome anyone (including me) getting too attached to their first idea.

But when it comes to the real work of most creative industries, this isn’t how we work is it? What we do is more in line with artist Pablo Picasso's saying that "I do not seek, I find". It's not about endless possibilities, it's about THE idea.

As an aside, brainstormings are completely hopeless for real creative challenges of any sort. They come up with stupid, superficial, random stuff. Even worse they come up with ideas that are in the right direction, but expressed so flimsily they get overlooked. It just isn’t that easy – if it was it wouldn’t be such fun. Brainstormings are client relationship meetings, a bit like having a sauna and massage together, or a nice dinner, but lets not kid ourselves that they are real work.

If you feel like jumping to the defence of the brainstorming (because it’s a comfortable habit, like the focus group) then do bear in mind that in academic psychology there is pretty conclusive proof going back decades that brainstormings are useless. One study found that a matched sample of individuals given the same task as brainstorming groups came up with more ideas, better ideas, more original ideas. Another study found that brainstormings reliably produce high states of arousal – a pattern of brain activity similar to stress. This results in stereotyped thinking (whilst feeling like exciting thinking is being done). It's simply baffling to psychologists of creativity that business folk perversely persist in doing something which is so counterproductive. (Although it's hardly the only example of corporate insanity?)

Anyway, you already know this, right? Brainstorming is a sort of fast food creativity, low grade, a sugar rush - but lacking in any consideration or craft.

There are some features to what we really do that I would argue are more akin to learning than the pop culture image of creativity (deeper forms of learning being defined in cognitive psychology as arriving at a new mental model of the world).

Reframing

When you introduce a new idea, if it’s powerful the whole picture changes. After Apple people started to look at computing in a different light – as desirable. Not only the answers change but the questions.

Incubating

Great ideas emerge quite slowly. Often at first they are inarticulate, awkward and a bit daft sounding. But over time they grow on you. Again this is something to do with altering your world view - so that the new idea can become the new normal.

Simplicity

In retrospect big ideas are quite obvious. But you can tie yourself in knots of complexity getting to this point. In psychological terms what we are talking about here is a new synthesis.

Problem solving

There’s no such thing as a good idea, if it doesn’t answer a problem, need or necessity. Sometimes this problem only truly becomes apparent when you have the actual idea. Ideas can create the strategy. This makes a nonsense of the old fashioned approach of spending ages on a creative brief before you get onto creative work.

Values based

Stuff has to fit. In business school strategy there are “3-5 options” in most case studies. But real living companies have a kind of fate - they cant turn from a tortoise into a hare, they must just be the best tortoise they can be. Clients should choose a strategy or idea like they would choose a spouse: they should fall in love with them, feel completed by them (as obviously they may have to live with them for a long time!)

Psychologist Carl Jung was fascinated by the process of getting to a new worldview. He once said that people don’t solve their problems, they just arrive at a higher point in the valley (Jung was Swiss), where the problems look smaller and are put into perspective. Jung would call that individuation. But a simpler word for it would be learning.

In my view 90% of our kind of creativity is literally learning - research. Immerse yourself in information, viewpoints, new media developments, case histories… As they say in screenwriting, "if you get writers block, go to the library". But you also have to internalise all this, live it, hone your feeling for what works, by feeling how it works on yourself.

Of course there is still a mystery to creativity – the feeling of having an idea, even just the answer to a crossword clue, is quasi mystical. And we need to respect that, just give it space. It's what English artist William Blake described as the essential contribution of the poetic and prophetic character - without which the world would never change. But how you feed that mysterious process is learning – ideas are made out of surprising new combinations of other ideas.

In the light of all of which I think we should rename ourselves the learning industries. And help clients see that we are in the business of reimagining their markets (rather than simply decorating them)? I know it isn't as sexy sounding. But it is a good deal truer to the experience and value, than the image our industry has?

Big Picture TV

Congratulations to Tyler & Jeremy at Big Picture TV on their stunning new site. Content is amazing too :J

UK's first viral funding platform

sponsume.com looks like a really great new crowdfunding site for entrepreneurs, charities, artists and inventors. It's along similar lines to Kickstarter (a similarly great and hugely successful site in the UK), I really like the detailed service design on sponsume though, from coaching on pitching your idea through to the project vouchers idea.

Do check it out, upload some pet projects and fund some of mine ;J

Rent the Car Next Door with Whipcar

The People's Supermarket

Lovely day for a walk and on my way up from Mediacom to the Guardian bumped into the People's Supermarket. I'd heard about this but amazing to see it in the flesh. The basic concept is you join and do several hours a week in the shop to keep prices for all members low. This is how the co-operative movement started 150 years ago, interesting to see a new spin on what the Rochdale Pioneers called Self Help for the People. And you never know, there's lots of cheap/vacant store spaces for social businesses...

Conversation with Jonathan Porritt

Here is the complete 30 minute video (filmed by Wiley) from the book launch party for Co-opportunity of myself and Jonathan Porritt and members of the audience debating and devloping some of the key themes in the book and beyond:



If it doesn't load in your browser you can also view it at eu.wiley.com

What Comes After Cool? (Article for Mediacat)

What Comes After Cool?

Last night at dinner my son - in the middle of a "why? why? why…?” line of enquiry a TV detective could have been proud of for its persistence – asked: “Why do I ask so many questions?” The answer may simply be that he is seven years old. And that curiosity at 7 years of age is a drive experienced as a kind of physical hunger. To quote a scene from the US comedy film “Uncle Buck” (where Macauley Culkin reveals to his uncle John Candy that his record for consecutive questions is 39) - “I’m a kid that’s my job”.

Fast forward ten years and the main psychological work of a young adult is to establish an identity - their place in the social world. Hence the drive, also experienced as an almost physical craving, to be cool. We use phrases like “achingly cool” to connote this longing. It’s not just an outward cultural thing of appearances. It is desire. A genie from the inner world that plays havoc with other plans and better intentions. Psychologist Erik Eriksson coined the phrase Identity Crisis to capture some of the turmoil of these teenage years. It is a human equivalent of the insect chrysalis phase – a withdrawal, emotionally turbulent inward reconfiguration and re-emergence as a butterfly; tragic, beautiful, wonderful to behold. In traditional societies teenagers went through initiation ceremonies to hasten and consolidate this transition from child to adult – even using terrifying rituals such as being buried alive. One unique feature that’s particular to this phase is individualism. In some societies young adults (for instance, girls at puberty) are sent away to live in the wilds outside the tribe. It’s a phase of social and sometimes mystical retreat – a quest to find yourself. But the point is that you are supposed to do so - not get lost in some lifelong quest - in order to consolidate a new social role as an adult. The sensible thing for society as a whole being to get this over with. Whether accelerated through initiation, this stage is supposed to be fleeting. Many significant events could happen in that transition and establishment phase, such as finding a wife or husband, taking up a trade, setting up home. But it’s supposed to be a transition, not a destination.

What seems to have happened with modern societies is we got stuck at this phase. In the 1990s American poet and men’s movement founder Robert Bly wrote a seminal book called “The Sibling Society” lamenting the failure of most American men to achieve the maturity that society needs from fathers, managers, citizens – something he described as characterised by resilience; a steadiness of gaze and underlying resolve (a quality of “true grit” so familiar only a generation earlier from cowboy movies). In a society where parents act like children, who is going to take responsibility for the many issues we face?

The drive to be cool – to establish, fashion, remake your identity – is the epitome of modern consumer marketing. "Buy this and be this" is the promise of most brands. Most obviously in the case of image products such as cars, perfumes, mobile phones, trainers and drinks. But also pervasively in the desire to be up to the minute, to be in the in-crowd. The aim of the "cool" phase transition in social terms is a fitting in. What today’s rapid cultural obsolescence has done is akin to the trick teenagers play on each other when a car door is opened, but just as you are about to get in, the car moves away, you catch up and then it moves again. This always just out of reachness – and the resulting frustration and fascination – could be said reach into the very fabric of consumer culture, for instance in the fast cut commercial which keeps us disorientated and yearning for closure? It’s this rapid cycling - from "in" to out in only a few years - that has driven one social media trend after the next. Much to the chagrin of those like the owners of Bebo who discovered the downside of cool marketing is the inevitable rapid redundancy of what is always already becoming “so last year”.

All of this is natural for 17 years olds. But it is troubling when the entire edifice of Western society – from 11 to 71 – is caught in the relentless pursuit of the cool. It’s at best a distraction (we really had more important things to focus on this year than the iPad). And at worst it's a block on any real progress. Of course not everyone is caught up with this. We have children, companies, crises in life that can pull us past all of this into a more mature and balanced perspective. What comes naturally after cool – according to psychologist Erik Eriksson – is something called generativity. Again an almost physical drive or urge, this one concerns the longing to leave something of lasting value, to add something to the stock of human culture. It could be writing a book, making a short film about your community, passing life lessons on to grandchildren, volunteering, starting a business, building a house or school. Literally it means to act for future generations - or as Eriksson put it “for the good of the species”. But Eriksson saw this as a vital stage to reach not just for others but for your own mental health. The alternative to generativity is stagnation - getting stuck telling the old stories and every year becoming a slightly smaller, shriller, more stereotyped version of our former cool selves. Getting smaller as a person every year, like a Russian Doll. Conversely studies show that there is a strong positive correlation between wellbeing and involvement in generative activities (such as volunteering in the community).

I’ve couched all this in individual psychological terms because it’s something we can all relate to. But for our work – if we want to be generative and yet stay working in creative marketing – the challenge is to find ways that our companies, campaigns and clients can become generative. The built in obsolescence of cool and the addiction to buying stuff on some always futile quest for a new identity (futile because there is no destination) is the essence of what’s wrong with consumerism from a sustainability point of view. And the generative alternative holds the keys to more enduring, models of financial and cultural stability; building our brands around lifetime loyalty, shared values, a higher sense of purpose. Around the ideas for instance expressed by Linux (that a community were engaged in building something monumental) rather than Apple (the iCool brand). Smart companies, ever attuned to the way the world is going, have already found their way to this realisation. For instance Unilever whose new vision statement is all about generativity: “We work to create a better future every day. We help people feel good, look good and get more out of life with brands and services that are good for them and good for others.” (Even if you would rather just make “cool ads” there is still the inconvenient fact that leading clients like this have moved on - and you need to keep up!)

How do you put generativity into action, in marketing? Regular readers will know that I believe one of the keys is co-operation; defined in games theory as behaviour where individuals act for a group goal (rather than individual interests firsts). Co-operation and generativity runs through many of the latest marketing campaigns I have been covering recently; for brands like Nike, Pepsi, Nokia or Obama’s election campaign…. This is the “how”. But the bigger challenge for the marketing sector is probably the “why?” - embracing. Beyond the branding and marketing of identity (cool brand images) to building a better world together. And it’s also a challenge to the prevailing culture of creative agencies; ultra cool, competitive-individualist and so very far from “grown up”?