THINK INSIDE THE BOX

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Here’s some of what I’ve been thinking about lately. If you enjoy these recent posts, be sure to browse the category listing at the lower right to find more you might like.   NEW! While you’re here, check out the new Download Center to grab copies of useful tips, information and ideas.

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Latest post
WHAT’S THE SMALL IDEA?
Not once in my 20 years in communications has a client ever asked me to come up with a small idea. I can count on every briefing or brainstorm to exhort me to deliver a “big idea.” It can be exasperating, partly because it’s such a cliché, and partly because it often forces the agency to play to the client’s desire for flash and spectacle when nuance and subtlety might be more effective in achieving the objective. I was thinking of the power of the small idea recently when I interrupted a healthy walk home from work with an unhealthy stop at a Johnny Rockets burger joint. The experience was the same as a thousand fast-food visits before it while I ordered. (Burger, fries, diet coke). The waitress delivered my food, but then to my amazement, put a shallow cardboard bowl on the table, grabbed the ketchup bottle and poured a smiley face for me. I couldn’t help smiling back at her and the bowl. They both seemed so pleased.
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WHAT’S THE MEANING OF THIS?
Consider what’s really going on when people say “some people are born creative and others just aren’t.” It seems to me what we’re really talking about is less about an inherent skill than it is about an inherent disposition. No doubt just about anyone can be taught basic techniques that will increase their ability to be creative, but ultimately acting creative and being creative are different states. The first is concious, periodic and primarily externally motivated. The second is unconcious, ongoing and primarily internally motivated. Truly creative people create not because they want to, but because they have to. They are in a constant state of wondering why, asking what if, and looking for meaning. When meaning isn’t apparent, they have to find a way to create it. Creators are meaning makers. It’s an admittedly neurotic pursuit of existential stasis. That’s why the downside of creativity is that the search for meaning is emotionally and psychologically volatile. In fact, as Eric Maisel points out in his intriguing book “The Van Gogh Blues,” it’s a cliché that creativity and depression go hand-in-hand. But clichés are the children of truth.
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First in a new series of guest essays
ABSURDITY: STEVE LEVEEN’S DOORWAY TO INNOVATION
When thinking about how products might be different, I like to imagine absurdities. I like to imagine the worst way to solve a problem. Imagine something you know couldn’t possibly work. But then, just for fun, pretend it does work and a few years from now you’re explaining it to someone who is standing beside you agog. Let’s say you’ve been given the task of designing a completely different way for people to enter and exit a new public library for the city of Phoenix … Okay, let’s be absurd!
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FELIX AND MACGYVER WOULDN’T ASSUME; NEITHER SHOULD WE
I learned about assumptions from Felix Unger. Felix is, of course, one half of Neil Simon’s Odd Couple, portrayed by Tony Randall when the popular play-then-movie was translated to television. I recall watching an episode when I was about nine where Felix is defending Oscar (Jack Klugman), in court … and chastises a woman on the witness stand because of an assumption she made. “Ah… you ‘assumed’!” Felix proclaims. He leaps to a nearby blackboard and scrawls the word in thick, self-righteous chalk capitals. “My dear, you should never ‘assume,” he says, then underlines three parts of the word. “You see, when you ‘assume’ you make an ASS of U and ME!” I thought it was funny. The point lingered longer than the laugh, though. Assumptions serve a useful purpose, but they can be misleading. Because assumptions result from the conditioning effect of pattern recognition, to be most effective in the creative process we need tools to consciously identify existing patterns, break old patterns and create new patterns. The most powerful tool I know of is questions.
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