1. Prepare. New ideas are the result of recombining our existing knowledge in novel ways. You can’t do this unless your mind is stocked with the components you need. You need to be steeped in your subject and the vocabulary of your trade; you need to do background research. Your team aren’t wasting the time they spend absorbing the work of others even if there’s no immediate tangible result. Bill Gates took ‘reading vacations’, where he read books on a variety of topics in quick succession, to nudge his unconscious mind into seeing new links between disparate ideas. Einstein: ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.
2. Observe. Ideas are often triggered by noticing something you hadn’t seen before, and thinking about its implications. Highly creative people are intrigued by things the rest of us write off as irrelevant (one of the reasons they are bad at tuning out distractions in busy offices). They also see links between things which seem quite different to the rest of us. Richard Osman talks about observing things – ‘something you’ve just heard, someone you’ve met, an unexpected view from a window – that form little bubbles of thought in my head. And then suddenly two of those little bubbles burst into each other and that’s a creative idea’.
3. Spend time on your passions. As far as you can, pursue the things that interest you, and allow your team to do the same. If something matters to you, you will keep returning to it, and each time you do, you will launch your unconscious mind on a new quest to find a solution. Google requires its staff to spend 20% of their time on a pet project guided entirely by their own interests and preferences. Over 50% of Google’s new products arise from ideas under this scheme.
4. Protect your space and time for creative incubation. The real work of creativity takes place at unconscious level. Only your unconscious mind can step outside the tramlines of your normal ways of thinking. But it can’t happen if you’re focusing on something else, like answering your emails; that switches on the wrong brain network. JK Rowling says, ‘Be ruthless about protecting writing days. Do not cave in to have ‘essential’ meetings’
5. Free your mind for incubation by disengaging from the project and doing something totally different that relaxes you: go for a walk, have a bath, doze. When Mark Gatiss is stuck on a project he goes for a run or has a bath – he calls them ‘think baths’. Douglas Adams sometimes had 6 baths a day, when he was really stuck. The gold standard for incubation is of course sleep, as we know from many accounts. Paul McCartney said that the melody for ‘Yesterday’ was fully formed in his mind when he woke up one morning – he just walked over to the piano and played it. (See Article 6, and Broadcast Comment Piece 2 for a fuller account of the creative process.)
6. Find the time when you work best to capture your ideas – maybe early in the morning or late at night when there are no interruptions. Allow your team this space and don’t require their digital or actual presence all the time. Alexander McCall Smith gets up at 4am when it’s completely quiet, to write for three hours, then goes back to bed for a second sleep before meeting the demands of the day. He produces 1000 words an hour and attributes this to an ability to write in a trance-like dissociated state, accessing otherwise locked off parts of his unconscious mind.
7. Relax: don’t short-circuit the process and try to capture your thoughts too soon (and don’t keep asking for progress reports from your team): if you intervene before your unconscious mind has finished its work, your nascent insight will disappear. You need to be relaxed for broad associative thinking to take place at unconscious level. You will even think better if you’re in a large, comfortable space. Stress – like an artificial deadline or a cramped environment - narrows your focus to the stressor. Encourage new ideas into the light and don’t frighten them off by ruthless evaluation. The artist Sir Grayson Perry compares new ideas to small furry animals who will disappear back into the wood if you frighten them.
8. Nurture your ‘slow hunches’: some ideas develop very slowly indeed. It can be uncomfortable living with ambiguity and some of us are better at that than others. Try to trust and embrace the creative process. Record your progress as the idea develops and come back to it from time to time. It took 10 years for Einstein to develop the special theory of relativity, during which time he was ‘visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts’.
9. Evaluate your ideas rigorously. You will feel the same burst of elation about a bad idea as a good one - don’t be what the early psychologist Alfred Wallas called an ‘idle genius’ whose ‘brilliant’ solutions don’t work in practice. Ideas emerge from the unconscious mind in abstract, even visual, form. Shakespeare calls them ‘airy nothings’. It’s only when you consciously evaluate them and set them out as logical propositions, that the gaps appear. Expose them to other people who will bring different perspectives. Recognise that many of them won’t fly and you must be willing to jettison them. JK Rowling – ‘You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like. It’s like learning an instrument.’
10. Know yourself and your team. Some people are more intuitive and hence more creative than others: they store away knowledge at unconscious level and are better at seeing links; others prefer to solve problems consciously and analytically. Neuroscientific investigations have found differences in the brain activity of the two groups. Creative people are also frequently introverts and, in artistic spheres, may also be less emotionally stable: see Articles 7 and 8, and Broadcast Comment Piece 3. But others are more analytical and better at evaluating, planning and putting ideas into practice. I call them Visionaries and Engineers, and you need both in the team.
Again, you put into clear terms some concepts that many of us have perhaps intuited, but not quite framed clearly; all of them make sense when applied to situations I remember from creative projects. Every leader of a creative team needs to post these 10 guides on her/his wall!
I enjoyed this article, in particular the point about observing. In some of the larger industries I have worked in, from Insurance to Supermarkets, there is a wealth of talent that is otherwise underutilised because the current processes in place are designed to cater to a particular methodology.
The best team leaders and project managers I have had always shared a common trait of malleability, they work with their team against the project, they consider strengths and weaknesses. Far too many focus on the weaknesses and assign based on perceived notions of how projects should be run, perhaps from prior teams they were on, or perhaps because of internal governance on how a team is run.
One of the most important questions that should be at the forefront of any team and goal is “Why?”. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing it this way? Why are we focusing on this area? Why do we need this process? In my personal experience one of the things that I have seen neurodiverse people bring to a team is the “Why?”. Often neurodiverse people have to achieve tasks in a nonlinear fashion, sometimes because training is not designed for them in mind, sometimes because of an abstract focus on one particular element of a task or its implementation. This focus leads to more “Why” questions which, in the short term, may lead to a rethinking of the project entirely, but in the long-term lead to better clarity about what the purpose of the project is. Once the purpose is fully solidified, it becomes easier to get rid of the extraneous elements.