Creative Instigation Week - The Right Answer

This conversation took place on a plane in the row ahead of me as a child showed a picture he’d drawn to his father.

The little boy asked, “Daddy…is this a masterpiece?”

His dad said without question, “Yes.”

The little boy squealed repeatedly over the next few minutes, “What a masterpiece!!!”

Next time somebody asks you how good something is, and it’s really good, let them know, “It’s a masterpiece!!!”

That was our week recapping Creative Instigation. Thanks to Jan Harness for being my partner, and we'll keep you updated on the progress of our "Creative Instigation" book!

Creative Instigation Week - Shakespeare Didn’t Get It

Sorry to break the news here, but William Shakespeare was wrong. In Hamlet, he wrote, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” That's not good advice for creative instigation.

When it comes to generating new ideas, it’s valuable to both borrow inspiration from others (making sure that you modify and better it) and to make sure that you’re sharing your ideas with others to see if they can improve upon them in ways that you couldn’t.

So get out there and start borrowing and lending your way to more great ideas!

Wednesday Bonus Post - Travel with Jay!

Be sure to check out Jay Liebenguth's website for daily updates on his trek through the central United States discovering interesting business stories for his Thursday radio programs on KCTE 1510. Jay has been a great supporter of this blog and this end of Summer trip through 10 states and at least 25 cities to capture 50 interviews is the epitome of creative instigation! Here's the remaining schedule:

Wednesday August 27th to Idaho Falls, Pocatello ID
Thursday August 28th to Jackson Hole, WY
Friday August 29th Flex Day
Saturday August 30th to Casper, Cheyenne, WY
Sunday August 31st to Ft Collins, CO
Monday September 1st to Estes Park, CO
Tuesday September 2nd to Boulder/ Denver/ Colorado Springs, CO
Wednesday September 3rd to Hays/ Manhattan, KS
Thursday September 4th to Topeka/ Overland Park, KS
Friday September 5th to Maryville, MO

If you have interview ideas for him in upcoming cities, visit Jay's Q&A area on LinkedIn to offer your suggestions. Best wishes Jay!

Creative Instigation Week - Structured Creativity

A primary theme in the Creative Instigation presentation was how you can use structure to help people expand creativity.

We showed how everyone could draw a “gator” by using letters and a couple of characters of punctuation (the gator at the right is drawn with a different color for each letter if you'd like to give it a try). Providing a music structure helped several groups write and perform blues songs, while others drew comic strips or wrote Haikus all within only 10 minutes.

Structure can be powerful in helping anyone get a faster start on thinking and performing creatively.

Here’s a challenge: think about your best talents, stepping back to see how you successfully apply rules, heuristics, formats, and other structural elements to perform well. Then identify how you can teach and share that structure with others so that they can experience new talents that they didn’t know they possessed.

They’ll appreciate it and maybe even show you how to use structure to start experiencing their talents!

A side note: The objective of the exercise above was to have people exorcise past negative people or interactions that said "You can't do that" or "You can't be creative." They ranged from someone being told she couldn't be in a university music program without completing a piano recital (even though she was making money performing music already) to a young woman who was denied playing soccer with boys.

Interestingly, just a few days later, reading the current issue of "Men's Health," it turns out that even David Beckham had a similar experience, being told that he was too small to play English football. Just goes to show that any of us have to be on the watch for "creative disintegraters."

Creative Instigation Week - Be a Creative Pack Rat!

Start a new file with a prominent place in your filing system and call it “Creative Instigators.”

Use the file to save pictures, articles, thoughts, ideas, quotes, thank you notes, cartoons, ads, Brainzooming posts (I couldn’t resist), and anything else that stimulates your creative juices.

When you’re stuck creatively, pull out this file and take a stroll through its contents to kick start your thinking!

Creative Instigation Week - A Bold Creative Quickie

This week we'll cover ideas emerging from the Creative Instigation session on August 12.

Today’s Creative Quickie is to be bold when you're thinking creatively.

One way is to use a Sharpie marker when writing, doodling, or sketching ideas. With a Sharpie, it's impossible to make a bashful line. Everything you create will simply look more bold & forceful!

Just watch out and don't get marks on your clothes - advice from someone who does it all the time.

Indie B(r)and Strategy

A recent post on my musical tastes elicited an interesting reply from “Anonymous” about the predominance of indie acts that struggled with maintaining early critical and/or commercial success. The question was what these bands could have applied from business strategy to improve their longevity. Here are a few thoughts:

• In applying business strategy, most of these bands are “product brands” (Liz Phair, Cracker, The Lemonheads, Crowded House, etc.). Records labels are the businesses. They Might Be Giants is probably closest to a true business with its diversification into other mediums.


• Based on the first point, most indie bands don’t subscribe to typical business objectives initially (i.e. Liz Phair disavowing interest in selling records early on, only to realize later that it’s okay). As such, the indie strategy is typically “build it and they will come” – far from a successful long-term marketing strategy.


• How achievable long-term success is for indie bands seems tied to how their brands are defined:
  - “How” oriented bands – a brand built around style whether musical (M. Ward, Fatboy Slim) or visual (while not on my list, Flock of Seagulls is the ultimate footnote in this category).
  - “Who” oriented bands - built around individuals or groups of individuals (Lemonheads, R.E.M.).
  - “What” oriented bands – the brand is tied to the group’s structure and form. The Clash was about its members and a point of view; U2 is another example. “What” oriented bands seem to have the most viable options for growth and staying power. “How” and “Who” acts seem more hemmed in by fans unwilling to allow change.


• Speaking of fans, another factor limiting broad commercial success for indie bands is music’s highly emotional nature. This phenomenon limits maneuver for brands seeking out new stylistic territory. If your bathroom cleaner changes formulation, big deal – there’s no emotional connection. If your favorite indie band tries to change, however, there’s a lot greater likelihood you’ll feel betrayed and look for a new one with which to connect.


• Finally, from a strategy perspective, a business can only afford for its products to be as niche as distribution systems allow for efficiency and profit. When most of these acts became popular, distribution was through physical stores, with higher inherent costs. As a result, bands had to meet tougher sales hurdles to continue recording. With today’s electronic distribution, minimum commercial sales targets have likely declined. The greater distribution efficiency is the only reason most of these acts still even have music available for purchase.

The net of all this suggests a variety of factors that make it tough, albeit perhaps easier today, for an indie band to breakthrough to broad commercial success. But doing so still often pulls a band away from its critical base. The key to doing all this successfully ties to staking out a broad enough structure and form for the band’s brand early on, providing enough room for the expansion necessary to go after commercial success.

As usual, check out Seth Godin’s blog for a couple of intriguing posts that address related aspects of the questions of popularity and targeting your strategy.

Thanks for prompting this response Chris, I mean, “Anonymous.”

BrainzoomingTM - First Questions

Start any possibilities-oriented conversation with the question: “What are we trying to achieve?”

Explore it fully and settle on an answer before generating possibilities.

There's No Accounting for Taste

Don’t ask, “What would you like?” or “Do you like this?” of people not prepared or appropriate to answer the question.

If you do, you potentially lock yourself into either having to work with something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t the best choice based on objective standards. Instead, use questions such as:

• “Does this meet the objective?”


• “Is this on target (or on message or on strategy)?”


• “Does this reflect what you were trying to accomplish?”

Each one implies a perspective relative to some objective measure. In that way, if someone responds based on personal taste, you can bring the conversation back to an external standard.

The result should lead to a more fact-based conversation and decision when there’s no accounting for taste.

Lifetime Value in Action

We had a great afternoon this past weekend celebrating a friend’s birthday on the Plaza in Kansas City. We’ve done this previously, returning to the Plaza for his birthday for the first time in two years. Following a late lunch, we returned for drinks to the same “upscale” restaurant we visited last time. Notice that our “return” suggests it’s becoming a tradition, spending time on their patio on a beautiful August day.

Mid-afternoon, having already been seated, the waiter informed us that if we didn’t order food, we’d have to move. The reason? Because we’d been seated in an area reserved only for people ordering food. This after the greeter hadn’t inquired about our planned order. (We’ve run into similar situations there before though, with the restaurant refusing to serve its Happy Hour menu on the patio, forcing you inside if you weren’t ordering off the main menu.) When asked, the greeter informed us that if we ordered appetizers, we could stay where we were seated. We elected to order some food, although we’d just eaten, and there’s essentially nothing on the menu (other than dessert) that my wife can eat.

Later, the person that seated us (and had told us to seek him out if we needed anything) came around to ask how things were. I told him matter of factly that everything was fine once we were coerced into ordering food. He expressed surprise that the waiter would have hassled us over this issue mid-afternoon, clearly outside of peak time, when the patio was half full. He ultimately made the waiter come over and apologize, saying he’d been misdirected by the restaurant manager to say something to us originally. Yet at the same time, someone near us was being told the same policy. For our trouble, they comped us a couple of desserts.

The end result was that the restaurant was successful in driving a lot more revenue from our table – that day. Long term, I doubt it will be part of any traditions for us, because the pain of dealing with their elitist crap seating policy tarnishes the view from its patio location.

Creative Quickie – Break Tradition

What’s your most well-worn creative trick or talent – the one that you always go to in a pinch? Got it?

Now break tradition. That might mean doing something different, doing less of it, turning it around, changing it, or substituting another trick or talent for it – you pick.

Just make sure that you try something new that could become a future creative tradition!

Ancient Quotes, Contemporary Strategic Truths

“Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.” - Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645, legendary Japanese swordsman

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” - Aristotle (384-322 BC, Greek philosopher)

“Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances.” - Sun Tzu (c. 490 BC, Chinese military strategist)

“Unless a variety of opinions are laid before us, we have no opportunity of selection, but are bound of necessity to adopt the particular view which may have been brought forward.” – Herodotus (5th century BC Greek historian)

Looking for a Good Time? Get a Hotel Room!

A frequently asked question when preparing a planning or innovation session is, "Should we go offsite?" The quick answer is, "Get a room.” There are a number of advantages:

• It looks different – The surroundings will be different than the typical work setting, and a key to great idea generation is to see things from a different perspective.
  
• It's flexible – You can spec out a size (much more space per person than a typical conference room) and configuration (not a u-shape) typically unavailable in a fixed office conference room. The extra square footage and alternative setup allow you to have even the room contribute to successful ideation.


• It removes some logistics pressure – Knowing there’s facility staff available to address room, materials, food, and beverage issues so you can focus on the session participants provides HUGE peace of mind.

So go ahead, make the investment, and get a room…even if you do have to rent it by the hour!

The Week That Is

Creative Instigation

As someone described it to me last night, the much hyped “Creative Instigation” session for the Kansas City PRSA took place Tuesday afternoon.

Thanks to Tracy Richardson from Barkley and PRSA for hosting “Creative Instigation” yesterday. Several people were instrumental in helping the presentation and workbook come together, including regular readers Leslie Adams and Cory Christensen. Thanks to both of them as well!

We haven’t had a chance to go back through the comments forms to identify questions and points to clarify, but as we do, they’ll get covered here and on Jan’s “Creative Instigation” blog.

"Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye"

I talked previously about the feedback approach we tend to use in meetings where the junior most person starts with the first comment, and we sequence through by seniority and title. In that way each person conveys their point of view free of undue influence from a boss or senior team members.

It’s been a great benefit for most of the past 8 ½ years that I’ve been able to respond after Angie Davids. Doing so has always prompted new insights that I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own without her perspective and expertise. Angie is one of the smartest strategic thinkers I’ve worked with in my career.

She’s moving to a new position at the end of this week and will be missed tremendously. And beyond being a great strategic thinker, she also has a wonderful sense of humor. So if I start sounding dumber or not as funny, you’ll know what has happened! Best wishes Angie!

Creative Instigation - Shooting for the Moon

I’m not a big “shoot for HUGE and settle for what you get” person. I’d rather “shoot for reasonable” and reach it through strong planning. With the “Creative Instigation” presentation Jan Harness and I are doing today, however, I’ve tried to consciously force myself to stretch, in keeping with our message.

Early on, we imagined a “live” blog - with whatever possibilities that suggested. We translated that into writing and introducing a book on “Creative Instigation” based on common themes in our blogs. After selecting articles in April, we began editing and augmenting them with new material and illustrations.

By July, the book was in solid draft form, yet we realized that we needed to start creating the live presentation. We reluctantly put full time work on the book on hold and turned attention to building the content for today. Interestingly, because of all the effort on the book, identifying a shorter set of exercises for the presentation became relatively straight forward.

I shifted attention in late July to the session workbook. Inspired by a creative activity book from Veer.com, the design resulted in a colorful, picture-filled, 38-page workbook that looked different than anything we’d ever done. I printed a completed copy last week and took it to an EVIL copy center for a quote on producing 60 copies. The bid: $1500. Needless to say that wasn’t happening! (It’s funny though that when looking at a copy of it, Jay Liebenguth said it alone was worth the price of admission to the session. He didn’t know how right he was!)

After a few frustrated phone calls with Jan and some heavy duty anxiety, the task was clear – for now, reduce the pages by at least 50% and make it work in primarily black and white. And do it all that Sunday evening.

I didn’t think such a transformation would be possible that quickly, but because of the more ambitious work that had been done, it came together very easily. The prospect of spending $1500 made editorial decisions much clearer.

The lesson? In both cases, shooting big and landing short moved “Creative Instigation” ahead much more dramatically and effectively than if we’d started to simply do a presentation and a handout. I guess applying the lesson to the book now suggests that as we revisit completing it, we should be shooting for “Creative Instigation” as a major motion picture!

Creative Quickie – Jumbo Size Your Creativity

The jumbo size formula in fast food usually involves a combination of three or four menu items all in larger than average proportions. Transfer the formula to your creative efforts. The next time you have a large creative appetite, pick several of your best creative talents, combine them, and use them in a bigger way than you have before.

Want an example? If you can draw, write, and are funny, getting the message across in your upcoming presentation could involve creating a cartoon to make your point in a bolder way!

That will be $4.79 at the next window. Please pull forward.

Phair Weather Week - Repeat Songs

I was a DJ for several years in college at a bar where there wasn’t dancing. Music simply provided a lively, entertaining environment. That was tremendously freeing because I didn’t have to play familiar music intended to get people dancing. The music choices could be lively, even if they were unusual; they just had to fit that night’s crowd. This became an early impetus for me seeking out great music far off the beaten path of popularity.

In recent years, I haven’t kept up on current music nearly as much. I tend to mine online sources for older, eclectic music that I may have missed With the internet and online music stores (particularly iTunes) this is much faster and cost-efficient than scouring cut-out bins used to be. In fact, I’ve characterized iTunes as bringing together two of my strongest passions – music and research – in a very seductive way.

Between iTunes, eMusic, Pandora, and Google (for searching lyrics snippets to find song titles), my iPod is filled with a wide variety of songs, many of them little-followed. I usually play these songs over and over for weeks listening for interesting lyrics, melodies, and chord progressions with a tolerance for repetition that drives my wife crazy.

Liz Phair certainly fits this category for me. When “Exile in Guyville” came out, I was already well into a career focus and didn’t get into her music much although I was aware of her. Rediscovering her now has put her early work into my heavy rotation.

In wrapping up Phair Weather Week, here’s a top 25 of these heavy rotation songs from the past year. Some artists and songs will be more familiar than others, but for me, they all have the musical elements I would have included in the mix back at the Brass Rail. Enjoy the discovery process!

• “Never Said” – Liz Phair (from Exile in Guyville)
• “All in a Day” - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros (from Streetcore)
• “Vincent O'Brien” – M. Ward (from Transfiguration of Vincent)
• “Failure” – Ian Ball (from Who Goes There)
• “Glory Box” – Portishead (from Dummy)
• “Brand New Day” – Chris Duarte (from Love Is Greater Than Me)
• “Renegade Master” – Fatboy Slim (from The Fatboy Slim/Norman Cook Collection)
• “Alright” – Supergrass (from I Should Coco)
• “Euro-Trash Girl” – Cracker (from Greatest Hits Redux)
• “Ain’t That Good News” – Sam Cooke (from 30 Greatest Hits - Sam Cooke Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964 Remastered)
• “Don't Make Me Come over There and Love You” – George Strait (from George Strait)
• “Happy Woman Blues” – Lucinda Williams (from Happy Woman Blues)
• “Honky Tonk Part 2” – Bill Doggett (from The 50's - A Decade to Remember: Do You Wanna Dance)
• “Ice Cream / Basin Street Blues” – George Lewis (from At Club Hangover 1953, Vol. 2)
• “Not an Addict” - K's Choice (from 10: 1993 - 2003 Ten Years Of)
• “Wrong ‘Em Boyo” – The Clash (from London Calling)
• “Rehab” – Amy Winehouse (from Back to Black)
• “A Little Less Conversation - XL-Vis Remix” – King Junior (from A Little Less Conversation Remixes)
• “Casino Royale” – Herb Alpert (from Sounds Like)
• “Rule of Three” – The Lemonheads (from The Lemonheads)
• “The Cap’m” – They Might Be Giants (from The Else)
• “Georgia Buck” – The Carolina Chocolate Drops (from Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind)
• “Brimful of Asha - Norman Cook Original Radio Edit Remix” – Cornershop – (from Digging In the Crates: 1998, Vol. 1 – EP)
• “How Great Thou Art” – David Jeremiah (from Live at Crossroads)
• “Locked Out” – Crowded House (from Recurring Dream - The Very Best of Crowded House)

Phair Weather Week - Back to an Unconscious State

In the interviews discussed Tuesday, Liz Phair talked about losing the creative freedom of writing songs that she didn’t think would be heard after she gained fame. She characterized her career since then as an effort to get back to writing in that more pure, unconscious state.

That’s an interesting expression of the challenge of having too much knowledge. That’s why brainstorming techniques are so valuable. They serve to twist your expertise in ways that put you back into unfamiliar territory where your knowledge has to be applied in a new way once again.

This is also why bare walls and different tools of expression are so valuable; they can readily place you into unfamiliar creative territory. So don’t hesitate in using approaches that push you into new areas of “unconsciousness.” You’ll find you are re-stimulated in cool new ways.

SPECIAL NOTE: Jan Harness and I will be on Jay Liebenguth's radio show, "Live with Jay" on Thursday, August 7 at 3:00 p.m. on KCTE 1510 AM in Kansas City. You can listen on the internet at http://www.1510.com/ or check out the interview later on Jay's website. We'll be talking about the upcoming "Creative Instigation" session we're doing.

Phair Weather Week - Explicit Ideas

Look through Liz Phair’s song catalog and you’ll find many songs labeled “Explicit Lyrics.” You don’t have to listen very long to know it’s an appropriate label in more ways than one. She sings about many explicit sexual topics. But her material is also explicit in another sense of the word’s definition.

Within her lyrics, Phair uses a variety of very rich similes and metaphors that create explicit images and unusual connections. And as we've discussed here, connecting things that aren’t typically connected is a key to trigger new ideas and possibilities in your thinking. Among the connections Phair makes in her lyrics are:

• Your eyelashes sparkle like gilded grass
• Baby you're the best magazine advice
• Your kisses are as wicked as an F-16
• You f**k like a volcano
• They play me like a pit bull in the basement
• You're an angel with wings afire

There are certainly others that I couldn’t asterisk out and still have them make any sense!

But without being explicit in the first sense, you can certainly look for opportunities to be explicit more frequently in the latter sense to envision new possibilities and communicate your ideas in ways that will get you labeled a “creative instigator.”

Phair Weather Week - Playful Expression

Liz Phair did an “iTunes Original” session in 2005 that features an interview. An art history major at Oberlin College, she talks about the expectations that were in place for her art; it had to be of a certain form, subject matter, and caliber to be considered valid by those that would view and judge it.

When creating music early on, however, she felt no such expectations, thinking no one would hear it. To her, music was a “playful expression” with tremendous freedom and opportunity to express herself. She does cite the irony in that music, and not art, became her career.

Do you harbor the same challenge AND the same opportunity? Do you have a creative outlet that is tremendously freeing and fulfilling because you’re the only audience for it?

If this is your situation, think about how you can transfer that sense of freedom into the more visible areas of your work, family life, and other outlets. This can’t help but make your efforts more creative and alive. And you can still decide whether you want to express your playful creativity more broadly or keep it to yourself.

Phair Weather Week: Creative Quickie - Answer This

This week’s articles tie to my current interest in all things Liz Phair. If you’re unfamiliar with her, she’s one of the early alt-indie-tough-sexy-filthy-rocker chicks, hitting the music scene in 1993 with “Exile in Guyville,” an album ranked as one of the best that year and on many long lists of all-time bests. With a 15th anniversary digital re-issue of "Guyville," I’ve been going back through her catalog and story – as varied as both have been.

“Guyville” was envisioned as a song-by-song answer to “Exile on Main Street” by the Rolling Stones. Answer songs aren’t new though. “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynard Skynard was an answer to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” triggered an answer in Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

Beyond simple inspiration, in each case a new creative work was formed as a reply to another. The approach is certainly used in commercials, books, and other creative efforts.

Try applying this intriguing creative technique yourself in a twist on changing your perspective. Choose a particular work’s subject matter or statement, figuratively walk around to its opposite side, and create a response from 180 degrees away.

Throughout the rest of the week, we’ll mine Liz Phair’s lyrics and music for other interesting creative insights, so please use the comments section to provide your own “answer posts”!

More Relationships They Don't You in MBA School