Inner Mind Creativity (Part 5)

By Jeffrey Baumgartner

 

Building a Creative Vision

It has often been said that ideas are a dime a dozen. As a creative person, you know that is not true. Ideas are worth far less than that! Indeed, if I could exchange a dozen ideas for a dime, I would be filthy rich now. At the time of writing this, I am definitely not filthy rich.

In fact, an individual idea is almost worthless.

The Cult of Ideas

Unfortunately, in the world of creativity, especially business creativity, The Cult of the Idea has become a powerful force. The Cult of the Ideas believes that the idea is everything; the end product of creativity and measurable innovation. It is a seductive cult because it only demands ideas, which are easy, and not implementation, which is more challenging.

As far as the cult of ideas is concerned, if your brainstorm results in 100 ideas, you can pat yourself on the back and say you've done a jolly good job innovating. If your corporate suggestion scheme software has 50,000 ideas in the database, you can dance of joy and claim that your company must be the most innovative in the world!

However, there are two problems here. Firstly, ideas do less than nothing for the bottom line. Indeed, in the corporate environment, ideas cost money. It takes time to hold brainstorms. It takes time to collect ideas. It takes time to evaluate ideas. If those ideas are not generating income, they are a waste of resources. This is an unfortunate situation that The Cult of Ideas prefers to ignore.

Cults can be that way!

Creative Vision

Ideas are rather like bricks. Each one is largely useless. But cement them together in the right way, and they can collectively become a wall, a house, a castle. Likewise, individual ideas on their own are largely useless. But you can use them to build a creative vision that starts to have value.

Think about it. Guernica is one of Pablo Picasso's most creative, powerful and moving paintings. It depicts the tragedies of war and, in particular, the suffering of individual civilians caught in the middle of the war. This masterpiece did not come from a single idea. Rather it came from a complex creative vision.

Steve Jobs did not merely have an idea for the iPod. He had a vision of a sleek and sophisticated digital music player. And his vision did not stop there. He continued building upon it, later developing the iPhone and the iPad.

Leo Tolstoy did not merely have an idea in order to write a book about war. He built up in his mind a massive and complex creative vision for an epic and massive novel: War and Peace.

Building a Vision

Most creative tools and methods involve generating a large number of ideas in hopes that one is somehow viable. This is why such tools are not very good at enhancing your creativity. Generating dozen of little, unrelated ideas will not get you anywhere creative. This is why artists, musicians and authors do not do traditional brainstorms. Instead, they try out ideas in their heads – or share them in a group. If an idea is too boring or not viable, it is rejected and a new idea is tested. If it seems creative and viable, they build upon it by adding additional little ideas.

This is what you need to do when you have a transcendental situation (a situation in which you want to take creative action). Once you have come to understand the situation deeply through meditation, consideration and questioning, you probably already have some ideas about the potential action you might take.

Good.

Now, let's play with those ideas. Can they be combined together to build a bigger idea or initial concept? If so, work with that. If not, which are the most conventional ideas? Dispose of them immediately and focus on the less conventional and more creative ideas. In particular aim for outrageous, unconventional and zany ideas. After all, the purpose of cosmic creativity is not to be boring and conventional, but to be creative! Boring ideas are not creative and you should not waste your time with them.

Once you have a creative idea that works, build upon it. Add more ideas. Make it bigger, more creative, more insane!

As you do this, invite your inner provocateur to push your thinking even further. Your provocateur can tell you that your ideas are not crazy enough, that your solution is too obvious, that you can do better. She can question your assumptions and suggest you bring unrelated notions into your vision-building.

Very possibly, as you build your vision, you will occasionally see flaws in the vision. If so, address those flaws now. Backtrack if need be and remove ideas that do not work. If the vision starts to seem hopeless, don't worry. Discard the vision and start again. Creative people do this all the time. Discarding a boring or non-viable vision in order to build a better, more creative one is not failure. It is being creative!

Keep at it. If possible, allow yourself a couple of days to think about and further develop your vision.

It may be that your vision will never seem complete to you. But, once it is a comprehensive, creative vision you can stop building and move towards taking action. We will see how to do that in the next section of this book/series of articles.

Example

For instance, let us imagine that you are the director of product development for a company that makes high quality sausages with organic, free-range meat. You are trying to come up with a new product.

You start to think about pork sausages, but that is rather boring. Most sausages are made of pork and you company already has over 20 different kinds of pork sausage.

You think about spicing and ethnic flavours. That is a little more interesting than pork, but not much. Most of your competitors are coming up with various spiced and ethnic-food flavoured sausages. Your company also has some such products on the market and they do not sell particularly well.

Then your provocateur reminds you of the fundamental assumption behind all of your company's products: the use of meat.

So, you play with the idea of vegetarian sausages. At first, the idea seems stupid. After all, your customers buy your products because of the quality meat from which they are made. But, often very creative ideas first seem stupid, so play with the idea more.

In time, you realise there are two positive points to your initial concept. Firstly, many of the families who buy and trust your products have vegetarian members – such as your own teenage daughter. Meat eating buyers of your product may appreciate vegetarian options for family members who do not eat meat.

Secondly, you have learned from your daughter that most vegetarian sausages do not taste very good. You suspect this is because they are made by vegetarian food experts rather than sausage experts. If you could apply your company's expertise in sausage making to a quality vegetarian product, you might have a real hit.

With this in mind, you start thinking about ingredients and flavourings. You initially consider a tofu and egg based product, but as you develop the vision, you realise the texture will never be suitable, so you discard the vision and start with a new vision using nuts and beans. Eventually, you have a comprehensive vision that cannot be developed further in your head. You share your vision with colleagues in the product development division. Initially, they are sceptical – this is often the case with very creative ideas: people do not initially like them. Fortunately, you persevere and convince them. They start to experiment with ingredients and soon you develop a really great vegetarian sausage.

As you can see, by reconsidering one of your company's core assumptions; by rejecting boring ideas and non-viable ideas; by pushing your mind further and listening to your inner provocateur you were able to come up with a creative vision for a radical new product – at least in terms of your company's usual product line.

Compare this to a traditional brainstorm in which you might have generated 100 vague ideas about sausages.

A Word About Assumptions 2

In addition to building creative visions for specific transcendental situations, it is also useful to pose generic creative challenges to yourself and perhaps your team, this is particularly true in business. Let's look at a few generic creative challenges for businesses

What If Assumption X Is Not True

As I wrote earlier, we live in a reality of assumptions and this is particularly true of business. If you have not done so already; make a list of the assumptions you and your colleagues make about your business, your sector and your market. Then choose one of the fundamental assumptions and ask yourself what you would do if that assumption were to become invalid.

This can happen more easily than you realise, usually for one of these reasons:

What Would You Do If...?

Look at the underlying assumptions of your business, choose one and ask yourself, what you would do if that assumption became invalid. In the example of the logistics business mentioned earlier, they could ask “What would we do if diesel fuel and petrol became unavailable?” or “What kind of business could we provide our clients if 3D printing became ubiquitous?”

If you were the management team of a mobile telecoms company, you might ask yourself, “What would we do if Google, Facebook or another tech company launched a free, global mobile telephone service?”

Why Bother?

Exercises such as these are useful not simply to have a contingency plan in case someone else does something to disrupt your industry, but also as a means of coming up with a creative vision that might enable you to disrupt your industry! After all, it is better to be the disruptor than the victim of disruption, is it not?

In addition, developing a vision that enables you to respond to a drastic, disruptive change in your business might help you identify new opportunities that exist within your business sector – but which you and your competitors have failed to see because your view has been blocked by assumptions.

Lastly, this kind of creative exercise is simply a good way to exercise your creative mind. And that's a good thing in its own right.

Entrepreneur

If you are an entrepreneur with a deep knowledge of a particular sector, questioning assumptions in that sector may enable you to invent a new product or service that becomes a disruptive innovation that changes your market. The potential in such a situation is great.

As described above, make a list of all the assumptions prevalent in your sector. Do this yourself and talk to others. Then go through those assumptions one at a time and for each ask what might cause the assumption to become obsolete; what the consequences to existing businesses in the sector might be; and what opportunities might arise.

Questioning Assumptions on a Personal Level

You should also question assumptions on a personal level from time to time. As you grow and take on responsibilities in life, such as to: work, a life-partner, children, ageing parents and mortgages to name but a few, it is easy to live a life that is controlled by assumptions rather than your true goals. As a consequence, you may not perform as well in these roles as you might.

As I wrote earlier, one of the most common assumptions people tend to make is that they need to earn as much income as possible for their families. As a result, the person works long hours, brings work home, answers email at the dinner table and neglects the family in hopes of getting promotions and salary increases. Worse, if the economy is bad, some people devote themselves entirely to work just in hopes of keeping a job!

If that describes you, try this. Imagine you work only half as much as you do now, but only get half as much income. How would you have to change your life to make that work? How much more could you do for your family in such a situation?

Very likely, your creative vision will be a lot more desirable than the creative vision that involves having a lot more money, bigger house and a nicer car; none of which you can enjoy since you are working long hours to pay for all of them!

If you have been in a long and comfortable relationship, you probably assume that your partner will stay with you forever. So, imagine the scenario in which your partner leaves you. Why might she (or he, of course) do that? What could you have done to make her want to stay with you? How could you have made the relationship better for her?

Needless-to-say, taking action on these ideas will only delight your partner, even if she has no intention of leaving you!