The motto on Tracy Wong’s blog is, and I quote, the belief that:
“…anyone can have a good [advertising] idea. Not just a creative. And that everyone needs to be invested in the creative process, including account folks and clients. It’s just one of the paths to better creative.”
I love the way Tracy Wong thinks and love the idea of exploring paths to better creative.
In fact, I would add that everyone has the innate capacity for creative thinking, not just the “creatives” in a typical marketing/advertising agency. Nor is “creativity” the exclusive domain of CDs, ACDs, ADs, or anyone else donning a black turtleneck, thick pair of black-framed eyeglasses, and the latest MacBook Pro.
While everyone has the natural ability to leverage creative thinking, the creative process still carries with it a mysterious aura that left-brain oriented people may be quick to scrutinize or feel compelled to compartmentalize. Though, the creative process can’t be reduced to a simple set of black and white elements—however convenient—contrary to popular belief.
Creativity lends potentially greater power if we loosen rigid procedures in favor of a more flexible shades-of-grey approach to solving problems. A good example might be the single creative brainstorm meeting intended get ideas rolling or, as my PMs used to say, “get the creative juices flowing”.
While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, ideas can’t always be “scheduled-in” for predefined blocks of time. The dreaded “you’ve got 30 minutes to come up with 10 solid ideas we can use” rarely yields interesting results. This technique may only produce default run-of-the-mill solutions.
A more fluid way to invite not only more, but a higher caliber of ideas, might be smaller less formal ideation sessions dispersed throughout the day and combined with other seemingly unrelated tasks.
Really promising ideas can surface at the most unexpected moments: in the shower, driving home, grabbing a coffee, while preparing dinner. Creativity doesn’t check-out at 5pm then check back-in at 9am the following morning.
But where does creativity come from? How do we control, quantify, and measure it? How does our creative factor in to ROI in a business communications context? Some people might say creativity is all smoke and mirrors, devoid of any discernible logic or defined process. But rigid processes and formal definitions don’t necessarily work in helping us better understand what makes the creative process tick.
All you really need to make creativity work is an open mind, imagination and curiosity. That’s about it. Toss out the manual. We all possess the ability to fuse seemingly lateral connections and divergent insights into what could only be characterized as a creative solution.
Jason Theodor invests a lot of time exploring creative thinking techniques and various methods for getting more out of the creative process, and also our tendency to want a neatly defined and categorized explanation of creativity, but:
Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity.”The Scientific Method is expressed from the outside in, trying to understand existing things, and put them in a tidy box. Creativity is not like that.
Brilliant! Makes me think perhaps it’s better that way.