That Might Work!

There must be a thousand reasons why I remember the first time I traveled internationally. I was only twenty-one and just became the in-house Creative Director for MNET under the marketing genius of Chris Raats. Dear Dotti Lai Lam arranged the trip and as a special treat, she also included Amsterdam, London and Florida as “stop overs” for the meetings I really had in New York and Seattle! It really all blew my mind completely and I’d say it was one of the most important shifts of perspective in my life. I am so grateful for that!

WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

Near the end of the trip I sat with a room full of creatives in Seattle, at what was then called the BPME (before it became Promax.) There was a talk by a guy from Creative Services in Los Angeles. He had a fantastic session and it started out with him expressing the excitement of being in a room full of creative minds and wanting to put it to the test. He suggested we improve on the design of a chair, which he put on the table on stage for all to see.

Pretty soon, everyone was shouting out suggestions. People thought one could add a headrest with speakers, a laptop stand with light, massaging buttons, color changing buttons – you name it. All fantastic ideas to improve on the chair. And we all got really excited, encouraged up by this speaker.

Then he suddenly stopped us and said that he was so impressed with our thinking that he wanted to do another round. He wanted us to shout out as loudly as possible, the first great though we had when he flashed the next word onto the screen. We were all ready. The screen lit up and the word was “TABLE”. As once voice, more than a thousand people shouted out: “CHAIR!”

Oh dear! What just happened? He hammed disappointment so well that just about every one of us wanted the earth to swallow us in on the spot. But what did happen?

THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP

In hindsight, a lot of stuff went down in that split-second for me! Of course, the demonstration was to open discussion about how our minds easily fall into the trap of solving problems “in the same way”. Without thinking too hard about it, we default to what has always worked and that’s why we will come up with predictable creativity every single time if we fall prey to our ego. You simply cannot rely on your mind’s capacity alone. The brain is designed to look for short-cuts because it is lazy. If it weren’t for that logic of the brain to recognize/memorize certain patterns, even simple things in life we take for granted may take hours to figure out every time.

But when it comes to new ideas and innovation, we need to go about things differently. Albert Einstein once said that you need to adjust the approach to the mindset of a particular problem, because you’ll only come up with the same solutions if you use the mindset with which the problem was created.

THAT MIGHT WORK…

The final take-out of the session was a brainstorm technique called Detour Thinking, which I discussed HERE. But it also went with a noddy badge that said: “That Might Work…” And to me, this describes the attitude one should have at the outset of looking for something new. Remember to embrace absolutely every idea with an attitude of positivity and exploration. Because if you don’t, you will have violated the second rule of brainstorming – you may want to re-look those rules, HERE!

Thank you, Dotti! And thank you for reading; Have a great Weekend!