THE CREATIVITY FORMULA:

(HOW TO HAVE BRILLIANT IDEAS)

By

Marc Lewis
Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of John Gillard.

Contents

Prologue – How to Treat This Book

PART ONE

Chapter 1 – Creativity; Is there a Genius Inside All of Us?

Chapter 2 – Where it All Went Wrong

Chapter 3 – Where it All Went Jung

PART TWO

Chapter 4 – The First Element; Seeds

Chapter 5 – The Second Element; a Problem

Chapter 6 – The Third Element; a Divergent Thinking Harvester

Chapter 7 – The Fourth Element; Collaboration

Chapter 8 – Putting it All Together

PART THREE

Chapter 9 – Putting it into Practice

Chapter 10 – Proof That You Have a Creative Mind

Chapter 11 – Frequently Asked Questions

Prologue: How to Treat This Book

The goal that I set myself was to construct a robust formula for the act of creativity, explain it

in a way that my eleven-year-old boy and my eighty-two year old granny would understand

and then prove its validity. In common with Csikszentmihalyi and De Bono, I believe that

creative ability is often untapped and ignored. Not only is this a shame because experiencing

the creation of an idea is so much fun that everyone deserves to experience it, but it is doubly

shameful because we rely on creativity for the evolution of everything. I started this journey

with the ambition of distilling the ‘Eureka’ moment for everything into one simple, universal

statement. I believe that the opportunity for creativity exists everywhere and in every one of

us. My ambition is that every reader of this book will understand and agree with the universal

statement and be able to use it to enhance their creative abilities.

It would be an oxymoron to attempt to write a book on the subject of creativity and not to

attempt to bring something new to the matter. I don’t have the academic wisdom to write an

intellectual tome that would challenge Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s masterful book, Creativity,

nor did I want to approach the subject like the brilliant Edward de Bono. Early on in its

development I decided that my contribution should be more personal and intimate, so each

chapter is sprinkled with stories from my journey and the lessons that I have learned.

You could turn straight to Chapter 8, Putting it All Together, and read my universal statement

on creativity without taking in anything else between these covers. I hope you don’t do that.

You don’t have to read all of ‘The Creativity Formula’, but I hope that you do. To help you

decide what you would like to do, I have organised the book into three sections, which can be

summarised as follows;

Part One – Chapters; Creativity, Is There a Genius Inside All of Us?; Where it All Went Wrong; Where it All

Went Jung

This section of the book sets out my ideas on creativity. I try to define the word ‘creativity’ and explain its relationship

with ‘genius’. I introduce my observations relating to inhibitors of creativity in our society and provide my thoughts on

how these can be easily resolved. Finally, I introduce the function of personality and behaviour within the creative
process. I share a few stories about discovering my own creative ability and there are case studies involving Big

Brother, Baywatch and bathtubs to look forward to.

Part Two – Chapters; The First Element, Seeds; The Second Element, A Problem; The Third Element, A

Divergent Thinking Harvester; The Fourth Element, Collaboration; Putting It All Together

The first four chapters explain each of the components that contribute towards the creative process. The fifth chapter

(Chapter 8) stitches them together and provides my universal statement for creativity. I talk about a few of the

creative projects that I have ‘given birth to’ and there are case studies showing; How an adman sold a brand

associated with Nazi Germany to post-War America, How the method that taxi drivers use to study for ‘The

Knowledge’ played a part in preparing Dustin Hoffman for his role in Rainman, and, How a treatment for Parkinson’s

Disease with the unfortunate side effect of inducing vomiting inspired a new use for the drug which threatens to

knock Viagra for six.

Part Three – Chapters; Putting It Into Practice; Proof That You Have a Creative Mind; Frequently Asked

Questions

These chapters are interactive and require varying degrees of your participation. The first chapter contains fifteen

exercises that will improve creative ability. One exercise, for example, introduces a very simple technique showing

you how to produce literally thousands of ideas in minutes. The second chapter is a self-assessment questionnaire

that will reveal whether you have the soul of an artist or an accountant, an entrepreneur or a social worker, an

electrician or even an astrophysicist. All types have creative potential. The final chapter is a traditional FAQ on

anything relating to either my theory of creativity or relating to the case studies brought up in this book. To keep this

FAQ is up-to-date as possible, it only exists online.

One of the first habits I implore any student of creativity to take up is to obsessively collect

little snippets of information that grab their attention. Not only do these factoids become

interesting dinner party conversation pieces, they settle in your subconscious where they are

allowed to mingle with other facts. Over time, they fuse together to form opinions. My

thoughts on creativity are partly formed through my collection of scrapbooks in which I have

squirreled away examples of innovative thinking that moved me in some way.

I have an eclectic network of friends and acquaintances and I called upon their resources to

help put some meat onto the bones of my formula. This book wouldn’t have taken shape

without the walks in parks and the liquid lunches, nor would it have been as fun to write! My

scrapbooks are swelling with new and interesting accounts of creativity, some of which I was

able to squeeze into these pages. More importantly, I was able to test my formula on some
brilliant minds before embarrassing myself and shaming my family by writing another
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worthless self help book .

I have another advantage over De Bono and Csikszentmihalyi; I am married to an

Occupational Psychologist and so this book has two minds working on it rather than one.

Whilst this is my story and my formula to creativity, it wouldn’t have come about without

Rachel’s encouragement, criticism, advice and support. It was important that my theories

shouldn’t conflict with the collected wisdom of academics that she has studied, so she helped

me test its validity from the perspective of one who understands how the mind works. She

also agreed to help write the chapter on psychometric testing without claiming a share in my

royalties.

So this is a very personal book, which I believe is an appropriate tone to explore the subject

of creativity. My first objective in creative workshops is to help remove inhibitions, because

they are often obstacles for freedom of expression; ideas travel better in an atmosphere of

trust and openness. You and I need to get to know each other and be comfortable sharing our

thoughts with one another. Before we can go any further together, I feel it is time for you to

meet my parents.

I.

I’m certain that most parents reminisce with stories about when their grown-up, baby boy or

girl was a baby boy or girl. Mine do so regularly. It only takes mum two glasses of rosé to be

fuelled-up enough for three courses of dinner-talk about the things I got up to when I was a

young lad. Most of her stories are cringingly embarrassing, so I try to switch off from listening

whilst she does her Jewish Mother thing. But one story has been told so many times that I

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In 2001 I wrote Sin to Win, which was a commercial success selling over 20,000
copies but panned by the critics. The Sunday Times rightly called it ‘Worst Business
Book of The Year’ – in March!
know her patter almost by heart - about the time when I was an nine-year-old boy on holiday

in the south of France.

Mum and dad first fell in love with the south of France when they honeymooned there in the

early 70s. They stayed in a charming chateau right on the Cap, explored the region and

decided it would become their permanent holiday destination. Our family would spend at least

a month of the summer down there every year, always in the same town, always on the same

beach, usually taking the same spot on the beach, always eating at the same time at the

same beach restaurant, ordering the same courses and the same drinks.

The beach restaurant had one of those machines that dispensed toys, wrapped in a plastic

bubble-ball, yours for the bargain price of two French Francs (about 20p). One of the stories

that my mother likes to tell over dinner is about that vending machine. This is the first story

that I wanted to share with you.

The stretch of Mediterranean coastland running from Nice to Cannes became popular with

young families in the late 1970s and early 1980s thanks to cheaper air flights and guaranteed

sun. Our spot was right in the middle, in a town called Antibes at a cove of beaches called

Plage de la Garoupe. Every year we met up with the same British crowd, parents with

children of my age, some a bit younger, some a bit older. Sometimes my parents ate their

lunch with the parents of the other children, and when that happened I was allowed to sit and

eat lunch with my friends too. Usually I had to eat with my parents and would only be allowed

to play with my friends after lunch.

I never really wanted any of the toys that came out of the restaurant’s vending machine as I

saw little value in a bouncy ball on a sandy beach (have you tried bouncing a small rubber

ball on sand?) or yet another puzzle game in which the challenge was to steer a metal ball

through a maze and into a hole. These toys were rubbish and a waste of two Francs in my

opinion. I preferred some of the more expensive toys from the real toyshop in nearby Juan-
les-Pins. A handheld electronic game called Donkey Kong had just come out and I really,

really wanted it.

So the story goes, I threw all my pocket money into the vending machine, coin after coin,

winding the dial and pulling out toy after crappy toy; a plastic fire engine, a pair of dice, a

puzzle, a plastic ambulance, another puzzle, a bouncy ball. I went through my entire £5

allowance, buying twenty-five toys. The table was full of them by the time my pizza fruits de

mer arrived, and my father was bemused.

“What are you doing? I thought you were saving for the Donkey Kong game”

“Dad, it would take me months to save up for it. Do you mind if I sit in the shade after lunch?”

Plage de la Garoupe scorched under the August early afternoon sun and I would often sit in

the shade near the beach restaurant after lunch, as did lots of other boys and girls my age

while our parents would be bronzing themselves to the colour of a cooked lobster, letting their

lunches settle. I wasn’t allowed to swim in the sea for an hour or two, so would play in the

sandy, shady bit of the beach with the other children.

This particular afternoon, I came back with 24 toys (my younger brother had bought one off

me with an I.O.U.), each one shelled from its plastic bubble-ball packaging. I lined them up in

front of me with a sign, ‘For Sale – 3 Francs Each. Take Your Pick’. I remember thinking that

it would be worth paying the extra Franc to be able to choose which toy you ended up with,

instead of relying on the luck of the drop. Boys that had already scooped the plastic

ambulance and plastic fire engine, but were waiting for the plastic police car to complete their

set, would definitely agree with me.

I cleared my stock within a couple of hours. A few children asked where the plastic bubble-

ball was, but I told them that it was not part of the deal. I stood my ground and no one really
grumbled. Seventy Francs of loose change in my pocket, representing a profit of twenty

Francs.

Later that afternoon, when the sun was no longer quite so strong and my food had settled, I

ventured out with my brother to the rocks nearby, carrying a toy fishing net that my parents

had bought me from a beach shop and my 25 plastic bubble-balls. Years of returning to the

same holiday spot gave me the local knowledge of where to find schools of bright, tiny fish,

which were no bigger than a fingernail. We scooped up a batch and manoeuvred them, one

at a time, into the plastic bubble-balls. Then we half-filled each bubble-ball with seawater,

thereby creating a sort of aquarium. I gave my brother one for his help, and we walked back

to our spot in the shade.

It was probably about five o’ clock by the time we had our stall restocked with our new

product – which I christened Fish Balls - and families were starting to leave the beach for the

day, presenting me with plenty of passing trade. Most stopped to see what I was selling and

the children immediately pestered their parents to let them have one. My parents watched on,

bemused, from their sun beds.

I quickly learned that plastic bubble-ball aquariums were worth more than plastic fire engines

or bouncy balls. We were able to sell them for 10 Francs each; I collected over 200 Francs to

go with the 70 Francs that I had recouped earlier. Enough money to buy Donkey Kong!!

That is the end of mum’s part in the story (which has possibly been exaggerated a little bit

over the years) but it is not quite the end. We are nearly two-thirds of the way through.

II.

I went back to London after the holidays with my new Donkey Kong game and moved up a

year at my school. This year we would be learning French for the first time. I felt confident that

I would be OK at this, given that I had spent so many holidays in France and had just come
back from spending my summer holiday there. I already knew how to order at a restaurant,

how to ask for fruit at a supermarket and how to find out what time the train was coming.

The first two French classes were blooming dull, mainly because we were learning things that

I already knew. I don’t think I endeared myself to the teacher by showing off, but I was so

bored with counting to ten and naming the days of the week in French. I wanted to move on.

Her style of teaching was to write the words that she wanted us to learn on the blackboard, so

that we could read them out together in class. She would hold up a random number of fingers

and we would have to chant out how many, in French. I am only grateful that it wasn’t Abu

Hamza teaching us; otherwise we would only have learned to count to six.

For the third lesson the teacher wanted us to learn different colours in French. She would ask

something like, “De quelle couleur est le ciel?“ and point to the sky. We would all have to

reply, “Le ciel est bleu.” The sky is blue. I don’t think that I would have been able to remember

all the details about my wheeling and dealing in the south of France without my mother’s

regular recounting of the story but, even though it was just a month or two later, I remember

this bit like it was yesterday. The French teacher pointed at her shirt and asked, “Quelle

couleur est ma chamise?” We all replied, “Ta chemise est blanche.”

Then she pointed through the classroom window to the grass playing fields and asked, “De

quelle couleur est l’herbe?” Everyone replied, “L’herbe est verte.” The grass is green.

Everyone except me. It had been a really hot summer and the sun had burnt the grass. The

grass wasn’t green it was an orangey-brown. I didn’t know how to say that, so instead said,

“L’herbe est brune.”

The French teacher didn’t react at all well to one of her class going ‘off-piste’ with the script.

Already, I wasn’t the teacher’s favourite. She seized this as an opportunity to make fun of me.

“L’herbe n’est pas brune. La terre est brune. Tes cheveux sont bruns. Mes yeux sont bruns.

L’herbe est verte.”

As she was doing this, she was pointing first through the window, then the floor, then touching

some of my other classmates’ hair, then her eyes and finally she pointed outside. The

classroom giggled and cackled whilst she did all this. I was humiliated and didn’t give another

answer in any class of any subject without being absolutely certain that it was the expected

answer.

Why do I remember this so clearly? Memories from my childhood are very patchy, seemingly

selective, and yet this French class feels like it happened yesterday. I can probably trick my

mind into imaging where in the classroom I was sitting and what messages had been

scratched into my desk. I believe I remember it so clearly because I learned a very powerful

lesson that day. Don’t say anything exceptional, or people will laugh at you.

III.

I am often joshed when mum tells the story about the plastic bubble-ball vending machine to

friends or family: they laugh and joke at me and beg my mother to tell more stories or to get

the albums of baby photos out. But they clearly laugh at me in a different way to that which

my classmates laughed at me for saying that the grass was brown instead of green. The first

group laugh at my natural characteristic of looking in the strangest places to make a bit of

money (more of that later), whilst the second were just laughing at me because I interrupted

the drumbeat of dull learning session with an unexpected note. If it wasn’t me for saying that

the grass was brown, it could have been to someone else for saying that the French teacher’s

eyes were red.

Sociologists and stand-up comedians would agree that there is plenty to interpret from the

way we laugh. Sometimes we laugh when we are nervous; or there’s the slightly-offended

laugh that you get when you hear a particularly raunchy or near-the-knuckle joke; there’s a

tribal, trance-like sort of laughter in which you might find yourself in a room full of people

laughing and so you laugh along, not quite sure what you are laughing at. I have a theory that
we sometimes laugh as a verbal short cut when we want to say something, but struggle to

find or say the words. My classmates were using laughter as a way of saying, “Glad it’s you

again Lewis, and not any of us this time.” Plato would have liked this example; he thought that

people always laughed as a way of making themselves feel superior whilst degrading

someone else (or something or some others).

I don’t believe that the guests at my parents’ dinner table weren’t laughing at me in a
2
degrading way though, so I conclude that Plato talks a load of nonsense. I think that what

they were saying when they laughed along at my mum’s stories was more like, “That’s just

like you, you haven’t changed, I recognise that in you.”

I wanted to start this book with those two stories because I think it is important to understand

and recognise that people will laugh at you whenever you show yourself to be creative or do

something differently. I wasted nearly a decade, not wanting to stand out for fear of being

ridiculed for being different. Things only started going my way when I lost my inhibitions.

People didn’t stop at laughing when Galileo challenged conventional thinking by coming up

with his new ideas on how the earth revolves around the sun – he was put under house arrest

and kept there until he died. Thankfully we live in safer times for daring to think differently. No

one has been stoned recently for having original ideas. (I was going to finish this paragraph

with something witty about some people being stoned whilst having ideas, but my mother is

worried that it might give some readers the wrong impression of me. So it’s time to bring the

first chapter to an end.)

The lesson from my first story is that it is OK to be different. In fact, it’s essential for creativity

to take place.

2
Plato wanted to ban laughter and all comedy material. He also wanted to send young
boys off to older men to learn about sex, so take Plato with the huge dose of salt that
he deserves.
Chapter 1: Creativity; is there a genius inside all of us?

With just a handful of GCSE’s, I was lucky to get a job flogging Royal Doulton figurines in a

department store when dad was made bankrupt in 1991. I had just turned eighteen and was

coasting through life, enjoying the trappings of wealth that were provided by my property-

dealing father. I had spent the previous summer living on his new powerboat in the South of

France and the winter on the ski slopes of Verbier. Now that I am older and wiser, I can look

back and see that I didn’t take my career or myself seriously at all – I just assumed life would

be one big party.

Dad was smacked with two hard blows at the same time; he borrowed too much to fund

investments in property as the market turned (interest rates rocketed and house prices

crashed) and a business partner with a serious gambling habit was pilfering money away

without anyone noticing. It all happened very quickly, dad went bust almost overnight. I

applied for dozens of jobs, desperate to make enough money to put food on the table for the

family whilst mum and dad coped with their world being turned upside down. My only two job

offers came from Royal Doulton and The Deep Pan Pizza Company, who wanted to train me

to serve tables. Royal Doulton paid more and sounded like easier work.

I was unfulfilled selling china figurines for Royal Doulton and bored by the monotony from it

but I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I was just glad to be able to help my

parents when they needed me. I started to consider a career in retail, perhaps working my

way up the ladder to become a department store manager, which motivated me to work hard

in spite of the boredom. My father bounced back from his crisis and was able to start earning

money - not enough to spoil us rotten any more, but enough for him and mum to be

comfortable. I found myself settling into the routine of working for a living, not feeling

completely fulfilled but very proud to be earning my own wage.

One day, on a lunch break in the staff canteen and reading through the job vacancies section

of ‘The Guardian’, I spotted a competition offering the winner a free place at the ‘School of
Communication Arts’ and a job placement at a top advertising agency. I didn’t know it at the

time but this was the world’s leading advertising school, attended by students from as far as

Australia, Mexico, Canada and South Africa. To keep this story short, all I will say for now is

that I won the scholarship.

I.

The principal of the school was a legend in the industry called John Gillard, an incredible

educator who had devoted his life to teaching the practice of creative thinking. His alumni

included some of the most famous names in fields of advertising, design and film – many of

whom came back to his school to talk about their time with John and about their body of work

since graduating. The influence that John had on them was patently obvious to see and easy

to explain. Even suffering from Parkinson’s disease and barely able to walk, he would stand

on a desk to deliver sermons about the joy of creativity with his eyes squeezed shut-tight as

he spoke passionately about something that had just moved him. The subject matter didn’t

matter because he found creativity in everything.

As part of their education, students were given job placements at advertising agencies or

design studios. This meant that I had to make decisions early on in the syllabus about

whether I wanted to go into advertising and become either a copywriter or an art director, or

go into design as a graphic designer. I even struggle to draw stick-men, so elected to become

a copywriter by default.

John would call me into his office at least twice a week for a chat, to give me feedback about

my writing and to help me work through ideas. He had a vast library of beautifully illustrated

books on subjects ranging from advertising and packaging to architecture and industrial

design and would often reference one of them when helping me work through an idea.

Students were allowed into his office at any time to read through his books for inspiration, so

long as they weren’t taken out of his room. Sometimes I would knock on his office door

wanting some advice about something or other and would find him sitting on one of the
armchairs in his office, leafing through the pages of one of the books. If he had a book in his

hands when I entered his office, I knew to expect five minutes from John talking about how

the (advert/photo/layout/typeface/words) brought tears of (joy/anger/sadness) to his eyes.

Those were the best visits.

About half way through my course, John brought me in for one of his frequent chats. He

reached behind to his bookshelves and pulled out an old, worn out book without any pictures

in it. After telling me that it had nothing to do with learning creativity in copywriting or

advertising, he asked me to make a promise - that I would read it over the weekend and to

return it to him on Monday morning. I said I would, knowing that it would require bunking off

from my Saturday job at the department store.

The book was ‘Future Shock’ by Alvin Toffler: one of the great thinkers and futurologists of his

generation. Even though he wrote it years before I was born, I was inspired by how accurately

he predicted the phenomenal speed of change in society, particularly where he wrote about

technology and computers. Here I was, 20 years old in 1993 and I was reading about an idea

that would be described today as The Internet - in a book written way back in the 1960s! I

couldn’t put it down and finished long before the weekend.

John wouldn’t take the book back from me on the Monday, he insisted that I keep it and

reread it from time to time. It’s one of the most precious things that I own and has everything

to do with creativity.

What is Creativity?

With 26 different letters of the alphabet to choose from, you could be forgiven for thinking that
3
the people who invented the English language could have come up with a better

arrangement of letters than C-R-E-A-T-I-V-E and C-R-E-A-T-I-V-I-T-Y to express two things

3
Of course, languages aren’t invented. Languages evolve over long periods of time as
new words are created and accepted into culture – a creative process in itself that we
shall explore in detail together in Chapter 4.
with important differences. So many people fall into the trap of thinking that creativity is only a

by-product of creative people, something done by wacky oddballs with eccentric personalities

in their garden sheds or by media types in the arts. We need to take a sledgehammer to this

way of this ‘us and them’ way of thinking.

Quite literally, creativity refers to the use of our imagination to produce original ideas. We

bring the vital ingredient to the process of creativity by bringing ourselves. Each one of us

being unique, the potential from a good old creativity session is infinite. In this book, my

definition of creativity is strictly, “expressing something new and of value”. Something

innovative needs to have happened and someone needs to recognise the significance of the

idea.

If the idea can’t be expressed to someone else, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that

we can’t call it ‘creativity’ – it’s simply something personal. Similarly, if the idea can’t be

valued by anyone or if it can be proven to have been expressed before, then it fails the

creativity test.

Creativity is different to discovery, but closely linked. It is perfectly possible to experience

discovery without creativity, but impossible to experience creativity without discovery.

We often associate creativity with the production of an artistic work such as a painting or a

sculpture, a song or a poem. But taking a toy in a plastic bubble-ball and selling it twice, once

as a toy and then as a miniature aquarium, can be seen as a rudimentary example of

creativity. Breaking the process down into chunks, I took a number of things that I was aware

of - (i) I had enough cash to buy 25 plastic bubble-balls at 2 Francs each, (ii) If the chance of

getting a coveted toy reached 100%, kids may be prepared to pay 3 Francs each, (iii) little

fish swim in the rocks near the beach, (iv) kids would like their own little aquarium, (v) the

plastic ball would make a good aquarium, (vi) the stock would be free, (viii) making enough

profit to buy Donkey Kong. How I put these thoughts together will make sense later in the

book.
The word creative can mean so many things too, but in this book - as a concession to the

failures of the English Language - I will be using it in the same terms as creativity: being

creative = expressing something new and of value.

This can be confusing, because it is often possible to be creative without necessarily

expressing anything new or of value – gardening and cooking are two popular ways of ‘being

creative’ in this way. Fun as they are, I do not consider deviating from recipes or designing

gardens to be ordinarily innovative. This book is not about that sort of creative unless

something new and of value is produced (but I hope it will help inspire some memorable

dishes and colourful flowerbeds nevertheless).

Please try to forget that creative can also be used to imply deception, as in ‘he was creative

with the truth’ or ‘she was creative with her expense claim’. That is not being creative - it’s

spin! Nothing original was produced. Whenever someone is being creative with the truth,

value isn’t conceived, it is being conspired.

Some people have a creative personality and could be legitimately described as being a

creative sort of person. Later in this book you will find a few tests to discover whether you are

naturally a creative person too - but the results won’t negate your ability to be creative. You

don’t have to be a creative personality to be creative. It helps for sure, but it isn’t critical. Nor

do you need to have any talent for drawing, writing, weaving, pottering, painting or sculpting. I

can’t draw to save my life and you are only able to read this thanks to the hard work from an

army of editors. I never really made it as a copywriter – technology distracted me.

This can sound confusing. What do I mean when I say that you don’t need a creative

personality to be creative? Throughout the book I will share examples from incredible displays

of creativity from people that would never have been describes as ‘creative’. More than this

though, it needs to be understood that having a creative personality is not enough to produce

creativity – expressing an original idea that has value. Take art for example, an activity that is
almost universally accepted as an expression of creativity. Throughout most of human history

there was very limited originality in art; paintings and sculptures were, in the main, replicated

to very specific orders by artisans working for religious or royal leaders. It was like painting to

numbers. Art actually started out, thousands of years BC, as a way of recording information

about an area of land (e.g. likelihood of floods, types of prey, etc.), which is a brilliantly

creative way of adding value to a nomadic existence. Our superstitious forefathers quickly

seized upon the idea and commissioned trophies to their gods. The ‘Human Enlightenment’ at

the end of the Middle Ages marks the moment when artists truly explored self-expression,

story-telling and experimental textures.

This is what I mean by the difference between ‘creative’ and ‘creativity’.

II.

Creativity is the act of expressing yourself through your imagination

Because I was born in 1973, my year at school was the first to receive computer lessons. If I

was born a couple of years earlier or later I would have missed the early influences that

computer programming held over me. We learned to write simple games and useful

applications with a language called BASIC. Soon computer lessons would change and

become all about mastering word processors, spreadsheets and presentation tools, but for a

very short period in history they were about creating and bringing to life all sorts of different

‘processes’ on a mystical machine through lines of cryptic code.

10 INPUT "What is your name: ", U$

20 PRINT "Hello "; U$

30 INPUT "How many stars do you want: ", N

40 S$ = ""

50 FOR I = 1 TO N

60 S$ = S$ + "*"

70 NEXT I
80 PRINT S$

90 INPUT "Do you want more stars? ", A$

100 IF LEN(A$) = 0 THEN 90

110 A$ = LEFT$(A$, 1)

120 IF A$ = "Y" OR A$ = "y" THEN 30

130 PRINT "Goodbye ";U$

140 END

Magazine publishers were inspired to produce new computer titles, offering page after page

of DIY code to build even more sophisticated games and applications than those taught in the

computer labs at schools. It would take many, many hours of slavishly copying the code from

page to screen but the reward was worth the effort. After a week of punching letters on the

keyboard until my fingers were nearly bleeding with the pain, and after several more weeks

looking for the clumsy mistakes I had made copying the code, the thrill of seeing my

programme finally come to life on the television screen connected to my Commodore Vic 20

had me hooked. I was fascinated with how language, used in imaginative ways and written in

a particular order, could instruct an inanimate object like a personal computer to run a game

or manage household accounts or take the pain out of printing personalised Christmas cards

and I would lay awake at night imagining new ways that programs could do something or

other. One of my early inventions was the ‘Parents Incoming Sonar System’, which used

pressure pads hidden under rugs in the hallway to warn me when unwelcome footsteps were

coming towards my bedroom.

A few years later I discovered girls, and discovered that girls don’t like to sit in their

boyfriend’s bedroom watching them type code. I cancelled my subscriptions to the computer

magazines in an effort to improve my credibility as a suitable date. I remained interested in

4
computers though, taking my first Saturday job at a computer store in Croydon when I turned

13. I remember hearing music played on a computer for the first time (a Commodore Amiga)

and wasting hours on a multi-player computer game (Elite) long before the Internet became

what it is.

4
The owner, Jan Murray, had the vision to open the first PC World a few years later.
I belong to the first generation to have been brought up with computers from childhood, and

was introduced to them before they became part of everyday culture. Early on in my

development, I spent countless hundreds of hours coding and imagining and coding some

more, sometimes from one of my magazines and sometimes without anything to go by. Soon

after, computer time became less about coding and more about playing commercially
5
produced games or writing homework assignments. By the early 1990s, when I reached my

late teens, I had completely forgotten how to write BASIC and was only really using my

computer as a games machine and a word processor.

Future Shock gave me a canvass to paint on, that’s how I would describe the influence that

John and that book had on me. I recognised that the potential for computers is limited only by

our imagination and I wanted to contribute somehow. Even Alvin Toffler couldn’t have

predicted how financially rewarding a career innovating in the technology domain would have

been. I would (and frequently do) do it for free though; I enjoy it so much that it doesn’t feel

like work to me.

What is Genius?

If asked to name five geniuses from history, we would probably build a similar list of names.

Here is mine;

(Mozart, De Vinci, Shakespeare, Churchill, Brunel)

But if I asked you to write out a list of five geniuses from the present day, your list might be

quite a bit different to mine. Try it now, and then compare your list to mine. Write yours on the

inside jacket of this book – we will be looking back at them a little bit later. Here is mine;

(Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Gordon Ramsey, Simon Cowell, Arsene Wenger)

5
Jetpack and Frogger were my two favourites. Great to see them now available to
download onto game consoles for us retro thrill seekers.
Like the word creative, genius is loaded with different meanings. We sometimes use it to

explain someone with exceptional ability, usually in the arts or science, in an ‘us and them’

sort of way. Most people believe that geniuses are born not made.

One of my favourite radio presenters uses the phrase ‘borderline genius’ when he is talking

about somebody that he reveres. I like this because it implies that genius sets a marker or

value-grading system that us mere mortals can aspire to climb towards.

I prefer the Arthur Schopenhauer quote, ‘Talent hits the target no one else can hit; Genius

hits the targets no one else can see’. In his book, Genius Explained, Michael J.A. Howe

demystifies genius by taking some of the most obvious case studies in genius history (Mozart,

Darwin, Einstein etc.) and showing that their legacy is not the by-product from a freak of

genetic good fortune, but the result of hard work, commitment, dedication and a characteristic

drive to realise a vision.

Stephen Pinker is an expert in how the mind works and wrote the definitive book on the

subject, which he creatively titled ‘How The Mind Works’. Having interacted with some of the

world’s brightest students whilst in his role as Professor of Psychology at Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (MIT), he was perfect placed to demystify genius. MIT is the world’s

leading innovation hotbed, an incubator to more revolutionary thinkers than any other

university campus in the USA. This is what he had to say on genius:

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies. Geniuses are wonks.

The typical genius pays dues for at least ten years before contributing anything of lasting value. (Mozart composed

symphonies at eight, but they weren’t any good; his first masterwork came in the twelfth year of his career.) During

the apprenticeship geniuses emerge themselves in their genre. They absorb tens of thousands of problems and

solutions, so no challenge is completely new and they can draw on a vast repertoire of motifs and strategies. They

keep an eye on the competition and a finger to the wind and are either discriminating or lucky in their choice of

problems.

These descriptions give us some insight into the relationship between creativity and genius.

Creativity is the act of expressing an original idea that has value; genius is the label that we
give to brilliant, obsessive, persistent creative people who have an all-consuming desire to

articulate their vision. Luck plays its part in creativity and the genius is more aware than most

of the idiom, ‘you make your own luck’. I consider genius to be an extreme form of creativity;

the desire to express oneself through ideas becomes a reason for living, the exhilarating

highs and lows serve to pump huge amounts of adrenalin chemicals through the body

repeatedly with every heroic achievement or dramatic near-miss and, combined with a

tendency for geniuses to display obsessive-compulsive behaviour, this chemical quickly

becomes a positive reward for certain patterns of behaviour. Creativity is addictive and

geniuses are junkies searching for a fix.

Have you ever noticed how you feel when you solve a problem like the crosswords or

sudoku? Aside from the proven benefits of protection against the vicious and destructive

Alzheimer’s disease, completing the newspaper puzzles can induce a real sense of

achievement. The buzz can come from a number of achievements; completing it for the first

time, completing it regularly, setting a faster time to complete it, beating your personal best

time, moving up a level from the basic crossword/sudoku to the advanced. The rush that you

feel is very similar to the one experienced by geniuses expressing their creativity.

Genius is in Your Stars

At the end of my course at John’s school I was offered work placements and jobs at quite a

few of London’s vibrant advertising agencies but, with my dad back on his feet financially, I

wanted to fly the nest and discover the world a little bit. Fortunately, I also received a few job

offers from international advertising agencies. I decided to take a job with Leo Burnett in

South Africa because the country was planning its first elections since apartheid and I felt that

this was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness the birth of democracy in a newly created

nation.

Leo Burnett is an international advertising agency that spawned from Chicago and has

produced a legacy of great work, creating memorable campaigns that have helped to build
numerous worldwide brands such as McDonalds, The Jolly Green Giant and Heinz Ketchup.

Creativity isn’t just a nice-to-have at Leo Burnett; it’s their currency. I was reminded of this

every day through the founder’s quote, which was displayed in various ways all over the

office;

When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one,

but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.

Dedication to a vision and the thrill of achievement

There are plenty of examples of incredible discoveries made quite accidentally, seemingly

without any hard work at all. Mostly though, when we dig a bit deeper we learn that even the

luckiest of discoveries required plenty of effort. When the apple fell from its tree in front of

Newton’s eyes he didn’t suddenly develop Newton’s Law, he had devoted years of

preparatory work studying mathematics, physics and philosophy to ready his mind to

understand the solution to gravity’s problems. Addicted to solving new problems, Newton

regularly competed with contemporary thinkers to finding answers to the day’s big

unanswered questions.

III.

To demonstrate that creativity comes in all shapes and sizes, I wish to introduce another

visionary genius who also competes with contemporaries in his field, throwing numbers in the

air to achieve unimaginable feats of unique vision. This is the story of a devoted champion

pushing his mind and body through extraordinary punishment in order to express himself

through his craft - darts.

A normal, healthy baby will be born with 656 muscles (although it depends which expert you

consult – some say the number is closer to 850). Some of those muscles, such as those

found in your stomach and intestinal wall, will spend their lives moving involuntarily. You can’t
control them without laxatives or by ramming a finger down your throat. Other muscles can be

moved voluntarily, controlling parts of your body that you can easily wiggle around; such as

your arm or your leg or your tongue.

There isn’t much that you can do to alter the performance of your involuntary muscles, other

than perhaps change your diet or swallow a few supplements. We are all capable of building

significant power and accurate control in our voluntary muscles with practice though. I’m not

just talking about a few sit-ups or a circuit at the gym to work on the pecs. I’m talking about

an almost religious vow see a vision through to completion, meditating on a goal of

spectacular achievement by rehearsing the action over and over, noticing variations in

movement that an unskilled eye would miss and recognising the nuances in results that come

from small changes in actions.

Professional darts players practice their throws again and again and again, training their

muscles to behave in certain ways. Free kick specialists in football and rugby regularly

practice for the same reasons. (A couple of weeks ago I watched Cristiano Ronaldo score a

screacher of a free kick against Portsmouth from 25-yards. After the match, manager Sir Alex

Ferguson spoke about how Ronaldo stays behind after hours at the training ground,

perfecting his trademark dead ball ability.) The greatest athletes invest thousands of hours

rehearsing a performance that commentators simply call “genius” when acted out in the

arena. Scientists recognise this phenomena and have labelled it as ‘muscle memory’ - they

have even been able to identify the chemical reactions occurring at the neurotransmitter level

in the brain when it’s happening.

Before turning professional, Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor would have felt the occasional rush of

adrenalin after a decent shot from the oche down at his local pub. He would have increasingly

put himself into situations to repeat that feeling, certainly unaware that he was chasing the

creativity drug. He was working at the time in a factory making ceramic toilet handles, so

throwing pins at cork hardly felt like hard work.

Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor was lucky enough to be born with the right dose of spatial awareness

and hand-eye co-ordination. He was also fortunate that he was brought-up in Stoke-on-Trent,
6
otherwise the great Eric Bristow MBE may never have spotted him, sponsored him and

mentored him through the ranks. Unlike Bristow, ‘The Power’ wasn’t lucky enough to have

been born with six toes on his right foot; being a polydactyl is said to have given Bristow a

massive balance advantage over his competitors. Bristow and his six toes dominated the

world of darts at the time – a sort of freaky innate ability, as it were.

Up to eleven hours of practice every day, working on his muscle memory by carefully

throwing dart after dart at the board. Day after day, week in and week out, visualizing

perfection. It took that level of commitment for ‘The Power’ to beat the odds (125-1) and his

six-toed mentor, Eric ‘The Crafty Cockney’ Bristow in 1990 and win the World Championship.

Although the level of euphoria that Taylor would have felt after smashing Bristow 6-1 to win

his first World Title was unrepeatable, he went on to become the first darts millionaire winning

a cabinet full of trophies and is recognised as the most successful darts player of all time. In

interviews and his biography he talks about the feeling of elation that comes from winning

trophies, but also that he was finding it increasingly difficult to find new motivations.

Like so many geniuses, he kept on imaging new ways to express his talent and was still

chasing the ecstasy that you feel when you achieve something through your abilities. ‘The

Power’ had often spoken in interviews about wanting to be the first player to record a nine-

dart finish live on television. Despite its inexplicable popularity on TV through the 1970s, 80s

and 90s, this feat had never been accomplished.

Dart after dart, day after day. First the treble-20, then the treble-19 and finally the double-12.

Practice makes perfect. Feel how the wrist rotates slightly after the second throw. Treble-20.

Treble-19. Double-12. Note when to breath in and when to breath out. Treble-20. Hold the

neck still. Treble-19. Balance. Double-12. There are two other ways to make a nine dart

6
Honoured by the Queen for services to darts
finish. Treble-18, Treble-17, Double-18. Or Treble-20, Treble 15, Double 18. He practiced

them all. Hour after hour. Throw after throw.

Taylor finally made history by throwing a perfect nine dart finish for first time on live television

during the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Matchplay Championship and has since repeated

the feat on five other occasions. Where he finds his next buzz from is difficult to predict,

perhaps he will find a way to beat his opponents with both arms tied behind his back.

IV.

As a fundamental Darwinist, I have developed a theory that we all have innate creative ability

because we all have a natural survival instinct to want to implant our identity in future

generations. I’m not talking about wanting to keep the six-toe thing going down the family

tree, my theory is about us all wanting to change the course of history in some enormously

important or small, unique way. Something that others will experience, maybe become

affected by, perhaps build upon or improve in their own way. They might praise your name

and idolise you, or they might never know your name. They might be the masses or just a

small circle of people in the know.

I am totally, absolutely certain that you secretly hoard at least one such creative survival gene

- you just haven’t had it explained like that before. You might not have told anyone yet about

your secret desire to change the world in some way, possibly for fear of being laughed at. But

it’s there inside you. And you know that it is too.

Creative People Have Sex Whilst They Work

If you find something interesting or rewarding, you are more likely to invest the time in

building a deeper relationship with it. I am hopeless remembering dates, particularly those of

historical battles or the birth and death of Britain’s monarchs, but I can remember intricate

details of Arsenal matches with no effort whatsoever. I call this phenomenon Sex Factor

because I lust after knowledge in some areas but I am turned off in others. Everyone has his
or her own curiosity G-Spot, but sadly it often goes unsatisfied. An important part of self-

discovery is finding what turns you on intellectually as well as physically.

The body being the greatest instrument ever created, it brilliantly expresses enjoyment when

you do the things you excel at and resists when you attempt to do things that are more

challenging. For me, the best way of discovering whether I am any good at something is to try

it. I took to skiing and enjoyed it from my first chairlift, but I struggled to get the hang of rock

climbing and was awful at it. I find that I can’t put a historical biography down once I start

reading it, but I get bored rigid from historical fiction (even if it is rooted in truth). I want to try

everything at least once, not because I want to live life to the full (I do) but because I want to

learn what I might be capable of.

Find Out What You Are Good At And Do It More Often

Fortunately we weren’t all born with six toes or brought up in the pubs of Stoke-on-Trent; we

each have our own personal and unique upbringing with our own stories of chance, fate and

good fortune. Some are harder to find than others, but everyone has them. In the nature

versus nurture debate, creativity and genius prove themselves to be the by-product of both

combined - if Mozart had never heard a note in his life or understood how to express his

compositions, he wouldn’t have developed his ability to contribute to the field of music.

Harmony occurs when the prodigious talent immerses himself in his genre, masters it and

challenges his ability to evolve it in some way. Disharmony occurs when the prodigious talent

fails to find a domain that holds interest, loses the hunger for knowledge or the quest for new

challenges.

Woody Allen imagined a sequence of imaginary letters between Vincent Van Gogh (who had

defied his father and become a dentist instead of a painter) and his brother Theo;

Dear Theo,
Toulouse-Lautrec is the saddest man in the world. He has real talent but he’s too short to reach his patients’ mouths

and too proud to stand on anything…Meanwhile my old friend Monet refuses to work on anything but very, very large

mouths and Seurat, who is quite moody, has developed a method of cleaning one tooth at a time until he builds up

what he calls “a full, fresh mouth”. It has an architectural solidity to it, but is it dental work?

And

Dear Theo,

Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit in her ridiculous mouth! That’s

right! I can’t work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with

wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire. Now she is upset because it won’t fit in her mouth!...I tried

forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful.

There are plenty of aptitude tests to help you discover where your strengths are. Amongst the

most accessible of these tests is the O*NET Ability Profiler, which is designed to help you

identify your strengths and then find occupations that fit with those strengths. The profiler

measures nine different job-related abilities; (i) verbal ability, (ii) arithmetic reasoning, (iii)

computation, (iv) spatial ability, (v) form perception, (vi) clerical perception, (vii) motor

coordination, (viii) finger dexterity and (ix) manual dexterity. You can download the test at

www.onetcenter.org although you will get a more accurate result by getting someone trained

to administer the test on you in strictly supervised conditions.

The ability profiler compares your answers with millions of others that have taken the test

before you, and then ranks you against the rest – displaying your score as a percentile. If you

happen to have phenomenal finger dexterity, the report will tell you about it. It will also

recommend any number of careers, which may or may not be worth a poke. Creativity exists

everywhere and I am totally unqualified to help you find a new career. What we go through

together in this book can be taken into any career or into extracurricular activities. One of my

goals is to help people to become more creative in their workplace or in education.

If you are on one of the social networking sites, like Facebook or MySpace, ask your friends

to take a questionnaire such as ‘What do I do best?’ There are plenty to choose from and

most are done with humour so that it doesn’t come across as foreplay to onanism. One of my

dearest friends was a set designer for West End theatre shows when, disillusioned, she

asked her closest mates what they thought she was best at. She is a brilliant storyteller, great

at explaining things in plain talk and loves ordering people what to do. So she became a

teacher and is intent on leaving her mark on the education system in her own, unique way.

Another way to become aware of your strengths is to think about the things that you lose all

sense of time doing. We all have things that we enjoy doing so much that we don’t recognise

the hours fly by. Look for the things that you gravitate towards doing when you want to put off

doing the things that you don’t enjoy doing. Whenever my wife Rachel (an Occupational

Psychologist) wants to put off doing her statistical work she looks for cupboards or drawers to

empty and organise. They start out as a mess and everything is difficult to find, so she tips

everything out onto the floor and categorises the pile according to value; whittling down the

junk and filing away the remains back into the draw.

But when she applies her ability to look for sense and order from the numbers laid out in front

of her on the spreadsheet, she moves up a metaphorical creative gear. She will swear that

she hates numbers (and she probably does) but when she embraces them in the same way

as the junk in the kitchen draw – classifying the data, evaluating which is useful and which

isn’t, compartmentalising things – she discovers answers to her questions, creatively solving

all sorts of problems in workplace behaviour.

One of the simplest tools for discovering interests was created by John L Holland, an

American psychologist who spent most of his career at John Hopkins University, working on a

model to classify people into six categories; Realistic, Conventional, Enterprising,

Investigative, Artistic and Social. Most people will recognise themselves in most of these

categories, but Holland’s technique helps to identify the strongest impulses and presents
them in a very engaging way. Rachel has written a test based on Holland’s theory for you to

take later on.

So please take the time to think about your favourite actions. Write them down on a piece of

paper, build a list and look for the link. Look for the strands that make up your survival genes.

If you don’t do this but read the rest of the book, you should be able to produce creativity - but

it won’t be as much fun. You won’t feel the buzz. Unless you stole this book, that would be a

dreadful waste of £14.99.

Can Anyone Be a Creative Genius?

It is always a good idea to under promise and over deliver and I don’t want to raise any

expectations that this book holds the answers to becoming a creative genius. Anyone can be

creative and this book explores the creative process in terms that can be applied in all walks

of life.

When certain elements are applied in the right order - and with the right catalysts - creativity

occurs. Over the next few chapters we shall discover those elements and create a universal

formula from them for the ubiquitous process creativity. Genius requires three extra

ingredients; some natural ability, absolute commitment to a cause and luck (unlucky geniuses

aren’t remembered as geniuses). Remember Leo Burnett though; we should shoot for the

stars and see where we land up.

Before we head for the stars, let’s take one last wallow through the mud together and explore

how some people have had their creative ability buried by social pressures.
Chapter 2: Getting it all Wrong

In the summer of 2008 (which is a few months into the future as I write this, but will have

passed by the time you read it) one twenty-something after another will arrive at a house to

rapturous applause or pantomime boos. They will count themselves lucky that they have won

a place in Big Brother 9, the promise of a lucrative career that follows from being in the public

eye weighing heavily on their mind. In interviews before entering the house, most contestants

liken the experience to winning the lottery.

I.

Dan Bryan was one in a crowd of 7,000 who turned up in Manchester on a cold winter

morning four years ago, hoping to raise his profile by living under the spotlight 24-hours a

day, in confinement and under strict supervision by a team of media executives with a

pathological history of humiliating the contestants chosen to perform in their televised circus.

He had just turned thirty years old and was already a successful hairdresser with a decent

client list. He also performed locally as a club DJ and had aspirations to carve out a career on

the clubbing scene, so the promise of exposure from primetime terrestrial television would

have appealed to his craving for status. A-list celebrity DJ’s like Norman ‘Fatboy Slim’ Cook

can command tens of thousands of pounds for public appearances, and Bryan would have

known that Big Brother contestants quickly find their way into the entertainment magazines.

His favourite magazine was Heat, for Christ’s sakes!

Despite lasting the entire series of 71 days all the way to the final, appearing on primetime

television every day to an audience of up to eight million, and sensationally coming-out of the

closet in front of the nation live on TV, sadly, it is unlikely that you will remember Daniel

Bryan. You might remember the Portuguese winner, Nadia, who was delightfully referred to in

the national tabloid press as a ‘Portugeezer ‘for revealing herself as a transsexual. Fame can

be a fickle mistress though, and neither Nadia nor Daniel have found the streets from the Big

Brother house to be paved with gold – although Nadia did surpass Daniel’s musical
achievements by recording a track that soared to 27 in the charts. (Not sure if it was baritone

or tenor.)

This year’s crop of contestants will have attended an audition at either the Emirates Stadium,

St. James’ Park, the Millennium Stadium or five other sites across the country. These are

enormous venues, ideal for managing large crowds. Big money will be spent hiring them and

then the security guards needed to manage crowd control. Hoards of attention-seeking

youths, high on the dream of being recognised will line up in their thousands, desperate to

trade their dignity for a taste of celebrity. The scene is a far cry from the recruitment desks set

up and hosted by University professors and their undergraduates at student fairs.

St. James’ Park and Emirates, home to Newcastle and Arsenal Football Clubs, are two of the

largest football stadiums in the UK. Less glamorous Whaddon Road is home to Cheltenham

Town FC, a football team that play two divisions below the English Premiere league. Their

grounds are the smallest in their league with a capacity of just over 7,000 - not even large

enough to host the Big Brother wannabes that turned up with Daniel Bryan in search of fame

and fortune.

And yet if every woman in higher education studying architecture, mechanical engineering,

chemical engineering and industrial biotechnology throughout UK were to take a seat at

Whaddon Road, it still wouldn’t be a full house. Their male counterparts could fill Tottenham’s

White Hart Lane (and it would be a pleasant change to see the Spurs ground filled with

humans capable of constructing a sentence) so these are not subjects that no one is

interested in learning. It just appears that women aren’t as interested in learning how things

are made than men are – either the big things like buildings or smaller things at the molecular

level.

This is plainly nonsense and needs to be understood before we can begin to grasp our

creative potential. Why shouldn’t women be as interested in studying certain subjects? I

believe that answers can be found earlier in the education system within our secondary
schools, relics of a long-extinct world in which glass-ceilings, school-tie networks and

nepotism were socially acceptable and common currency in the workplace.

Critics to my argument will point to statistics showing that higher education is in a healthier

state than ever before, and that more women are in higher education than men. These facts

are true, but do little to answer the significant imbalances in learning choices between the

sexes (males outnumber females 3 to 1 in computer science and 7 to 1 in engineering,

females outnumber males 3 to 1 in psychology studies and 5 to 1 in social work).

II.

The system in which we educate our children should ideally prepare them to survive and

flourish in adulthood. Freud once described thought as ‘an action in rehearsal’ and this

perfectly encapsulates the spirit of education – its purpose is to equip the next generation with

the skills needed to prosper in society. In the age of outsourcing and off-shoring, with an

Indian and Chinese workforce willing to follow orders to repeat repetitive tasks for less

compensation than their western brethren, creativity and free thinking are more essential

skills for prosperity than at any time in our history. Employers are waking up to the idea that

they need innovation to survive against their eastern competition.

Teaching the Birds and the Bees

When meat is scarce in the bush the Akie tribe of Tanzania live off the roots, leaves and

berries found in their homeland, and so have extensive knowledge of local botany. The land

often fails them though; rarely do they produce enough crops to last through the year.

Fortunately the Akie tribe have become masterful honey-gatherers – honey being hugely

calorific, it is a wonderful source of energy.

Fathers in the tribe teach their sons how to identify the call of the Greater Honeyguide, a bird

that feeds off the honeycomb and bees wax found in hives. They show their sons how to twist
freshly cut grass into tightly wrapped bundles, how to start a fire, and how to blow smoke into

the hive so that the bees are pacified. Finally, after harvesting the hive for its honey, the

father teaches his son how to make sure that it is undamaged so that bees will get on with the

business of making more honey.

This passing down of knowledge through generations of Akai is essential for the tribe’s

survival. With men frequently failing to return from hunts, boys become men earlier in

Tanzania - training them to put food on the table can be the difference between life and death

for an entire village. As sure as birds are birds and bees are bees, there will always be

reserves of honey to fall back on. So in the Akai culture, education can be seen as a system

that helps to maintain living standards. Teaching the past is done to protect the future.

Another Brick in the Wall – Part I

Secondary education has existed in its current (or very similar) form in our society for over

sixty years. The 1944 Butler Education Act set out to prepare our boys and girls for life

through training in practical skills such as arithmetic, woodworking and cooking. It is important

to remember that prior to the Act, the working class and girls were often deprived any

education at all. Our education system was created during a time in history in which we were

examining our collective conscience, the slow start of a shift towards a fairer culture.

th
Children lucky enough to have been born to wealthy parents in the 19 century were sent to

public school, so called because the students learned together in class rather than privately at

home with a tutor. Financial sacrifices were made in preparing students to become captains

of an emerging industrialised nation, rapidly shifting from the agricultural economy that their

parents would have been born into. The orthodox route into a University was to first receive a

satisfactory public education.

The Butler Act, and later the creation of Comprehensive schools, came from a need to

increase the supply of skilled talent into a burgeoning economy in order to compete with the
other great industrialised nations around the world. Other countries without the legacy of our

class system had already established their own state-funded education systems, and the UK

was losing its importance as a manufacturing nation. It followed that to compete and become

more productive, children should be better prepared to work in an industrialised society.

The structure of public and comprehensive schools are both very similar, throwbacks to an

industrial age in which workforces clocked-in and clocked-out to assembly lines, presided

over by a hierarchy of supervisors, factory managers and company directors. Every school

day starts with a bell calling the students to take their place (usually the same place) in a fixed

classroom grid. Class is teacher-led, guided by a national curriculum with little elasticity for

imagination. The bell rings again to announce the end of the first class, so the teacher clocks-

out and is replaced by another teacher who clocks-in to teach another subject. No

relationship is sought between the subjects; they simply co-exist independent of each other.

Then the bell rings again for a short playtime before more classes, lunch and perhaps a bit of

sport.

Players in this system are rewarded by their results. Good students will get good grades, a

sign that they were taught in good schools by good teachers. But it’s not that simple. In the

same way that supermarkets become more efficient by reducing the breadth of choice,

secondary education is deliberately geared to provide a very limited range of subjects so that

educators can be congratulated for reaching performance targets.

We don’t live in an industrialised economy any more; it has evolved to become an information

economy. The tools for survival in today’s culture are very different to those provided to

students in today’s secondary education; it is no wonder that today’s generation struggles to

find its place in society. We need to teach our children new skills that will help them to cope

with this brave new world; self-discovery, self-expression, collaboration and coping with

variety are more valuable skills than many taught in the present system.
Why must learning be arranged in fixed subjects such as maths, history or biology? Why not

base some teaching around events in the news, though helping out in the community, or by

learning to trade and collaborate? For example, climate change is a subject that

encompasses so many subjects (e.g. Geography, Maths, Physics, Biology, Politics, Social

Science, History) and, yet, it is often taught as an after-thought in secondary schools because

of a crowded national curriculum. Climate change could easily become the backdrop for a

broad range on knowledge to be absorbed by students over the course of a month, a term or

even a year.

Why should class always be led by one teacher, passing down knowledge to a roomful of

students? Why not many teachers, teaching one student? Or temporary classes of students

brought together to solve a problem, finding their own answers with the teacher only providing

supervision and guidance? We should allow pupils the freedom to choose from a far greater

number of subjects to learn about, short-term courses lasting a few weeks, so that they are
7
better informed before deciding what they want to study in depth later in higher education .

Earlier in this book I described creativity as expressing a vision, using our imagination to

produce original ideas. It is patently obvious that creativity is most likely to be starved in a

prescriptive environment in which learning is about following a rigid curriculum, and that it will

flourish in an environment that encourages self-discovery of knowledge and a collaboration of

ideas. This is why I believe that we are all born with creative potential, but that we stand every

chance of having most of it squeezed out of us by a failing education system that is long past

its shelf-life.

Fortunately, the desire to express oneself creatively is innate and never dies completely.

Some will rediscover their ability to think independently when they enter university, forced to

survive in this new environment by altering the way in which they consume new knowledge

and through forging new relationships with contemporaries. Others may discover ways to

7
Problems in our education system were spotted by Alvin Toffler when he accurately
predicted where society was heading in his 1960s book, Future Shock. He estimated
that the system would need total overhaul by 2000.
project their individuality in the arts or through a craft; these are the people we most often call

creative.

III.

Diamonds Don’t Sparkle Until You Shine Some Light Onto Them

In early 2008, Big Brother ran a spin-off series of their show featuring a houseful of talented

and creative contestants. Instead of holding auditions to find the oddballs that walk amongst

us, the producers set out to find ‘Britain’s most extraordinary and talented 18-21 year olds’.

One challenger had captained the British Boxing Team and hopes to represent his country at

the Olympics; another had exhibited at New York Fashion Week. There was the predictable

friction that comes from forcing 12 strangers to live together in confinement and without

privacy for long periods of time. But the show failed to attract anywhere near the audience of

the original format. The contestants may well have been the most creative and talented 18-21

year olds in the land, but they were starved of the tools to properly express their creativity

during their stay in the house. (How a boxer, a fashion designer, a politician, circus

performing siblings and an R&B songwriter were supposed to go about doing what they do in

the BB house is beyond me) They became just 12 interesting kids, some more likeable than

others, but none of them as attention seeking as the customary crop of freaks and zombies

that turn up on the regular show.

Secondary education does this on a much wider scale. Children with imagination and natural

ability enter the system to be prepared for adulthood. They begin to follow a restrictive and

prescriptive curriculum, often wearing a uniform that strips away their identity, day after day of

being told to give the right answers, endless tests that measure and reward performance.

Each year they are compensated by moving up a level, repeating the same tasks in the same

structured way. It’s no wonder that today’s children are the most clinically depressed
generation in our history; we have been teaching them the wrong survival tools by preparing

them for an Industrial economy instead of an Information economy.

Another Brick in the Wall – Part II

In a town called Nanyuki, found on the equator line running through Kenya, the locals wait by

the side of the roads for the busloads of educated, western tourists. They know that the males

are more likely to have been taught physics at school than their partners, so they flock to

greet them as they climb off the bus. Be warned though, they are not singling the men out

because they are more knowledgeable or brighter than the women but because they are

more susceptible to a confidence trick involving a kitchen sink.

You might remember learning about the Coriolis Effect at school, in which you were probably

taught how water travels around the plughole counter-clockwise north of the Equator and

clockwise in the southern hemisphere. Teachers explain this by telling us that the earth is

round, about 25,000 in circumference and spinning on an axis once a day. If you were to

hover over the equator and stay in exactly the same place, the world would rush past you

below at over 1000 miles per hour. Further north or south from the equator, it would pass by

slower because it has less distance to travel during the course of a day. This phenomenon

causes winds heading north from the equator to also travel east, whereas wind heading north

from Australia to the equator also travels west.

The men of Nanyuki have developed a neat patter, walking gullible tourists a few metres to

one side of the equator and then a few metres to the other side of an imaginary line, to show

them water going down a plughole counter-clockwise and then clockwise. The shtick varies

from busker to busker; one floats matchsticks in a portable sink for effect, so that the crowd

can easily see which way the water is rotating, another claims that he can prove he is

standing exactly on the equator because the water won’t rotate in his plughole.
The Coriolis Effect is real but it doesn’t effect the way that water spins around a plughole, it
8
would take an awfully big sink to do that . There are no excuses for filling a child’s mind with

incorrect facts; it is plain lazy and a waste of everyone’s time. I don’t blame the teachers, they

are under pressure to pass knowledge down to their pupils on a wide range of subjects and

often without understanding what they are teaching themselves. I blame the system in which

children are expected to receive information without first being prepared to challenge its

validity. An enquiring mind is far more likely to spot mistakes and find the right answers than a

receptive mind.

IV.

It’s All in The Mind

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were friends and contempories who developed

competing theories about natural selection independently of each other. Darwin’s discoveries

and writings about evolution challenged the conservative Creationists majority, who believed

that a superior intelligence created mankind for some sort of special project. It was

blasphemous to believe that man could have evolved from ape, insulting to the Almighty

Creator who moulded Adam in his image. Amongst those who shared this view was Wallace

who argued that man couldn’t have evolved because the size their brains (1.4kg) were too

large. Early man wouldn’t have needed such large brains, he contended, because they led

far simpler lives than modern man. Wallace’s mistake would have had blue whales as God’s

most intelligent creatures with brains weighing 6kg. Fortunately, we have developed smarter

methods to evaluate our minds.

There are at least three different methods of appraising minds; (i) personality measures, (ii)

cognitive ability tests, and (iii) attainment tests. It is important to underline that the first

technique does not rank performance or ability; it sets out on the premise that we all have

different personalities and attempts to classify them. You will have heard ‘personality

8
About the size of Milton Keynes!
measures’ and may even have been asked to do one as part of a job interview. The purpose

is to help identify personality traits that explain why we prefer to behave in a particular way

and is commonly used in progressive organisations to marry personality types with job roles.

It is generally agreed that our personality is fluid during our formative years, influenced greatly

by our environment and most susceptible to change during puberty – about the time that we

enter secondary education. It becomes most stable when we reach 25 and changes very little

from thereon in.

The most commonly accepted method for identifying personality traits is called The Big Five,

sometimes known as OCEAN or CANOE for the five dimensions being measured;

Conscientiousness – Refers to the way we control, regulate and direct our impulses. People on one end of the

conscientiousness scale prefer following schedules, paying attention to detail and getting tasks done straight away.

Their opposite numbers are more likely to perform in situations where time constraints require a snap decision.

Agreeableness – Describes differences concerning cooperation and social harmony. Some people place more value

on getting along with others and are therefore more likely to be considerate, friendly, warm and fuzzy. That can be a

disadvantage in situations that require objectivity or difficult situations that require tough decision.

Neuroticism – Can be defined as a tendency to experience negative emotional feelings such as anger, guilt and

anxiety. People who score low on the neuroticism scale are more likely to be calm and are less easily rattled.

Openness – This is the only personality measure with any real bearing on creativity. At one end of the scale, some

people favour familiarity over change and are less interested in learning new ideas.

Extraversion – Concerns our preferences for interacting with the external world. At one extreme, some people prefer

to be in their own company and dislike social situations. Their opposites draw strength from being the centre of

attention in a crowded room with a spotlight and a megaphone..

When a subject has their personality measured they generally receive feedback presented as
th th
a percentile score, with the 50 percentile representing the median. A score in the 90

percentile for the conscientiousness rating would indicate a strong sense of responsibility and
th
a desire for order, whereas an extraversion rating in the 10 percentile suggests a strong
need for solitude and tranquillity. Further insight can be attained through examining the five

subset categories in each of the OCEAN scales.

Although personality is most volatile to change during formative years, very little focus is

placed in helping students understand their unique identity and ability. Some children may

take a personality measure as part of their ’11-plus’ entrance exams, but almost all testing in

education measures ‘crystallized ability’ – the ability to learn and recall information – through

attainment tests. GCSEs, A-Levels and Degrees are all examples of attainment tests.

Pressure is applied to children from an early age to pass mock-exams and the punishment for

failure is one of the first lessons properly taught in secondary school - students are often

ranked in their class by their results and reports are sent home to parents. Many kids (mine

included) are sent for after-hours tuition to swot up and prepare for the tests, where they

practice answering questions from previous years’ exams over and over again. Children with

good GCSE results are more likely to continue in education towards achieving A-levels. Good

A-level grades increase the chances of getting in to a university to study for a degree.

If the education system was asked to complete a questionnaire in which it was provided with

ten points and asked to spread them across the three tools discussed (personality measures,

cognitive ability tests and attainment tests), the current behaviour would place at least nine of

the chips on ‘attainment tests’.

Although it is terribly important to attain a level of crystallized ability, it would be wrong to

imagine that poor test results indicate an unintelligent mind. A charismatic teacher that brings

her subject to life has a tremendous impact on getting good grades, as does the size of the
9
classroom and even the health of the student sitting the exam paper . Furthermore, it is

perfectly possible to achieve good grades in a subject without necessarily possessing an

understanding for the information being digested in class and regurgitated in tests.

9
Researchers working at University College, Worcester have discovered that one in
four children suffering from hay fever will score lower than predicted grades.
The final method for measuring the mind is through fluid, cognitive ability tests such as the

O*NET Ability Profiler referred to in the previous chapter or the Holland Test coming up later

in this book. They commonly apply to cognitive processes (such as memory, perception,

problem solving, numerical ability and spatial awareness) and are often used by employers to

help assess the suitability of a candidate to perform the tasks required in their jobs. Cognitive

ability tests measure the capacity to use learned knowledge flexibly. In common with

personality measures, very little investment is made helping students to identify and develop

their cognitive ability. Information is often learned at school without being put into any

meaningful context.

V.

Energy, Empathy and Understaing. Working Together in Synergy

The only exciting thing about learning trigonometry at school is that it comes with a rite of

passage – owning a shiny, new scientific calculator with SIN, COS and a TAN buttons.
10
Trigonometry is introduced in maths class in Year X, when the child is about 12 years old

and already cynical about learning complex mathematical rules, having just mastered long

division and multiplying fractions. You might remember learning to use the COS (Cosine)

button to work out the size of one side in a triangle where the other two sides are known, or to

calculate an angle if the length of all three sides are known. You probably weren’t taught that

Pythagoras was into his music and used his theory (Pythagoras Theorem) to design musical

instruments for his band. Most instruments produced dreadful, uncontrolled pitches and he

wanted to make a sweeter, more manageable range of sounds. He developed his theorem so

that he could solder precisely measured objects in his shed that would strike the right chord

when hit.

We stand a better chance of storing knowledge and being able to apply learned knowledge

flexibly when we are able to understand its value. John Gillard used to say that creativity

10
Just the right age to be interested to learn that the ancient Greeks and Egyptians
used trigonometry to plot the stars and to build their pyramids.
couldn’t be achieved without “energy, empathy and understanding working together in

synergy.” We always treat information differently when we are able to understand how it can

be applied in real life situations and the knowledge becomes even more precious when we

are able to relate it back to ourselves in some way.

The world spins around at about 1040 miles per hour at the equator because the
11
circumference is about 25,000 miles and a day lasts 24 hours . Earlier, when describing the

Coriolis Effect, we discovered that the world spins slower further away from the equator. The

speed at any point on earth can be estimated from multiplying the speed at the equator by the

cosine of its latitude. Here in London the latitude is 51.5 degrees north. If you don’t have a

scientific calculator, you can still work out the cosine by typing ‘Cosine 51.5’ into Google.

Multiply the result by 1040 and you will discover that the world crawls by at about 340 miles

per hour in Battersea – about three times slower than in Kenya.

It becomes easier to be enthusiastic for trigonometry when applying the theory to real

situations, not just hypothetical triangles in a mathematics exercise. Understanding the

subject increases scope for applying the knowledge in creative ways (e.g. Predicting what city

a balloon would fly to if released from your back garden). This distinction between learning

and empathising is often under-emphasised in education and unmeasured through attainment

tests. The education system should be putting more chips into measuring fluid ability and

personality measures.

The Excitement of Novelty Doesn’t Last Long

We take it for granted that the earth spins on its axis once a day, creating a pattern of night

and day that we schedule our lives around. Darkness is associated with night, and night is

associated with sleep. It has been that way for as long as anyone cares to remember, and so

it isn’t questioned that we start to unwind as the sun goes down. Maybe a night-in with the TV

11
It actually takes about 24 hours and 1 minute, collecting an extra 6 hours every year
- which is why we have leap years.
and a ready meal before bed, or down to the pub for some drinks with mates if it’s not a

school night. Then, seven hours sleep and up, with the sunrise, for another day of the same.

Reykjavik has become quite a popular party city thanks to its extraordinary summers where

daylight lasts nearly 24 hours. Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “ To get the greatest enjoyment

from life, go live on a volcano”. He would have enjoyed the non-stop clubbing and the all night

golf tournaments that attract tourists in their thousands to Iceland’s capital. Before they

become inebriated on ludicrously expensive beer, visitors may feel intoxicated by the strange

energy that reverberates in a town that never sleeps. The experience of slamming back

drinks in a nightclub through to kicking-out time at 3am only to discover that it is bright

daylight outside can be sobering. “That’s odd,” you think to yourself, “usually I fancy a kebab

and bed after pulling an all-nighter. But now I want to play cricket in the park. Why is that?”

The experience of being in a strange environment reignites a flame inside you that is often

burned-out by adulthood, fuelled by the desire to make sense from a curious situation. Every

child learns the word ‘Why?’ soon after ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’, and most continue to use it

incessantly as they try to come to terms with their new environment. Why does mummy not

have a willy? Why do I have to go to bed? Why can’t I have chocolate?

VI.

Learning how to make sense of situations and environments is an important part of growing

up and children quickly learn that they are rewarded for passing maturity milestones such as

sleeping through the night or eating a healthy dinner. They race towards their teens with a

ferocious desire for the responsibilities that come from reaching new milestones, so try to find

meaning and logic from their role models. I see it in my eleven-year-old son, Luc, who caught

me using my debit card to download music from iTunes.

Because he has his own computer and iPod, Luc was interested in how online transactions

work and so I explained it the best I could, showing him the security features on my debit card
and then the differences between a debit card and a credit card. I gave him a crash-course on

PayPal and how I sometimes pay for things this way because I don’t want to give out my debit

card details on websites that I don’t completely trust. Then I told him that credit cards are only

for adults, and even then, only for adults that are careful to avoid debt. He asked ‘Why?’ so I

tried to explain interest rates and minimum payments. We did a few exercises together,

working out how much a £1,000 plasma television would really cost if we bought it on credit

card and only made the minimum payments and it reminded me of when my grandpa forced

me to smoke his pipe when I was five, hoping it would put me off smoking for life.

Luc went off and researched further on the Internet. I have installed some parental controls

onto his computer so that I can monitor his usage and restrict access to inappropriate sites. I

can see, from the logs, that he typed ‘Debit Card’ into Google and clicked on a link to a

website promoting ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ debit cards. The house was quiet for about half an hour

and then Luc returned with some printouts to show me. He had found a way to get himself a

debit card that he could use online as well as in normal stores and at cash machines. I

rewarded him by taking him down to our local newsagents to pick up a card and gave him a

tenner to put onto it so that he could see how easy it is to add funds.

It is often said that children grow up too fast these days - that they lose their innocence too

young - and a part of me feels uncomfortable about encouraging Luc to take more control of

his finances too early. Time is precious though and without close encouragement it won’t be

long before Luc’s desire to gain understanding begins to dwindle. Asking ‘Why?’ is a bit

childish and not the sort of behaviour expected of a teenager. Teenagers think they know it all

(well, I did) and stop searching for answers. Learning is done in schools, for test. It stops

being important to know how something works, so long as it works. How many 14-year-old

text addicts stop and think about how text messages actually work? What would be their

reward if they did know?

th
That’s why I am looking forward to taking Luc to Reykjavik on his 18 birthday, for a drunken

game of golf under the midnight sun – to hear him ask ‘Why?’
 VII.

When WHY Stopped Being a Creatively Productive Word

I created some technology a while ago that received critical acclaim and plenty of industry

awards – in a nutshell; it made it easy to save money at the supermarket using a mobile

phone that stored discount coupons. A successful pilot of the system was conducted in a

small number of convenience stores, supported by some of the world’s largest food

manufacturers. Members signed-up in their thousands and turnover considerably increased in

our test stores.

Against this background, it would be easy to imagine that supermarkets would have been

biting my arm off for a piece of the action. Sadly, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The

effort involved in understanding how my system works and how it could benefit retailers was

too demanding for some managers. They were too busy doing the things that they do to

survive in their jobs, no time to spare for learning about bleeding edge digital marketing

techniques. Why should they invest their time?

Some managers were a little bit more receptive to learning about my system and invited me

in for discussions. But they expressed concerns about being the first retailer to launch

nationally, not certain that the consumer acceptance that we saw in pilots would be replicated

on a wider scale. Why should they be the first?

My system requires integrating with a retailer’s cash register, a process that would take two

programmers about a month to work on. Most retailers employ programmers to work on their

cash registers and have a long list of improvements that they would like made to improve

things at the checkout (e.g. Print out a coupon, support ‘Chip & Pin’). Generally, a retailer’s IT

department is understaffed and overstretched. Why should they prioritise development

resource over other projects?

My system interacts with several departments within a retailer’s organisation; category buyers

need to be aware that manufacturers are promoting discount coupons via mobile so that they

can make sure the shelves are stocked up with product, the account department needs to

track discounts given to shoppers so that we can reimburse them, the HR department needs

to train checkout operators, store managers need to promote it using in store marketing

material which needs to be signed-off by the retailer’s marketing department. This all needs to

be signed-off by someone very senior. Why should they stick their neck out and commit

several departments to something that their competitors aren’t doing yet?

Eventually I found a company with a management team full of people who prefer to ask, “Why

Not?” At time of writing, my system is being made live in about 14,000 convenience stores
12
throughout the UK and has been licensed to companies around the world.

There’s no F in Failure

Thomas Edison’s name crops up in most books about creativity because he is regarded as
th th
one of the most prolific inventors of the 19 and 20 centuries. He racked up nearly 1,100

patents in the US alone (with many more filed in UK, France and Germany) and is often

credited with inventing, amongst other things, the universal stock ticker, the light bulb and the
13
phonograph. In truth, he frequently improved on other people’s inventions using a system of

trial and error. This doesn’t make him any less of a genius, but the way he went about making

his discoveries should become an inspiration to us all. He loved to play, loved a challenge

and loved making mistakes.

12
If you live in the UK you can try it for free by texting SHOP to 62111. You will be
sent money-off coupons to your mobile phone, which you can use wherever you see
the PayPoint logo.
13
The first stock ticker tape was invented 2 years before Edison improved on it and
made his first fortune. 21 different inventors had filed patents for incandescent light
over the course of 75 years before Edison’s discovery. The phonograph owes its
existence to the phonoautograph, a French invention predating it by 20 years but
incapable of playing back recorded music.
In 1866, nineteen year old Edison left home to take a job in Kentucky where he worked the

night shift on the Associated Press bureau newswire. He wanted the graveyard shift because

it meant he could pass the time away doing his two favourite things – reading and

experimenting. Unfortunately the latter cost him his job about a year later when he spilled

sulphuric acid onto the floor – it ran between the floorboards and dripped down onto his boss’

desk below. Both pastimes were essential to his early success: Edison had already made his

first fortune from the stock-ticker by the age of 21 and achieved worldwide fame before he

was 30 with the phonograph.

The light bulb, for which Edison is most famous, was first invented by Sir Humphry Davy in

1802 and worked by passing an electric current through a thin strip of platinum. Why

platinum? Because of its high melting point. Not only was this too expensive to be practical,

the light emitted wasn’t bright enough to be useful and only lasted a few moments before the

burnt out platinum strip had to be replaced. Dozens of inventors worked on adaptations over

the next 75 years, experimenting with charcoal, gas, and vacuums. None were good enough

to commercialise, though numerous patents were filed.

After 75 years of great scientists trying and not really getting anywhere, Edison could be

forgiven for thinking that the dream of a long lasting, affordable electric light bulb was the stuff

of fantasy. The modern day equivalent would probably be to work on a time-travel machine.

This is probably what attracted Edison, now 32 and wealthy beyond his dreams, to turn his

attention on solving the problem. He started playing in 1878 and worked obsessively at it,

testing every sort of metal filament he could imagine and then anything else he could think of

starting with platinum and working his way through the periodic table. Eventually he managed

to produce an experiment using a carbon filament that lasted over thirteen hours. Presenting

it to the public for the first time, he said, “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich

will burn candles.”

Edison continued to improve his light bulb and in 1880 he discovered that a carbonised

bamboo filament could last over 1,200 hours. He kept a journal of all the mistakes that he

made on the way. It’s bigger than this book!

It is completely natural not to want to fail – who wants to be known as ‘the person who got it

wrong’? No one wants to feel like a fool. It’s probably better not to risk it, right? Wrong. Failing

is one of the most important actions anyone wanting to achieve creativity can hope to

experience. It is impossible to fail at anything without trying first, and it is better to try to do

something than passively watch on wondering what might have been. It just isn’t possible to

have good ideas without having bad ones too, and sometimes it is impossible to know which

are the good ones without testing them out first. Having a bad idea isn’t the end of the

journey, it’s one less obstacle on the path to discovering a good idea.

Charles Kettering, another prolific inventor credited with over 300 patents and pioneer of solar

energy once said, “Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. We fail towards success”.

Thomas J. Watson, the President of IBM that spearheaded the company’s growth to become

an international force said, “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”

VIII.

Greg Bonnan had a thought for a television series in the 1980s when he worked as a

lifeguard in Los Angeles. He knew that lifesaving action mixed with beautiful girls, sand, sea

and surf would make for addictive viewing, he just didn’t know at the time what format the

show should take. “First it was Baywatch: the mini-series, then it was Baywatch: the half-hour

sitcom, then it was Baywatch: the Saturday morning cartoon show.” he remembers. Then his

sister married a TV producer called Doug Schwartz, who shared his vision for a recipe of

drama and dolly-birds. Together they pitched NBC who commissioned a two-hour film

Baywatch: Panic at Malibu Pier, which aired in April 1989 with decent viewing figures,

reaching sixth spot in the Top Ten TV programs of that week. NBC invited Doug and Greg to

develop a weekly format and the series was first broadcast in September that year.
The NBC executives started to panic after the third episode, concerned that the series would

run out of steam through a lack of original ideas. After all, how many different ways could they

spin out a beach drama? They weren’t sure whether the show would be better with a new

action-packed rescue plot each week or whether it should focus on developing the

characters. Audiences started to switch-off in droves and by midseason the ratings were at an

all time low. Baywatch finished in seventy-fourth place in the Nielsen ratings – out of about a

hundred shows aired on the three major networks. NBC pulled the plug and cancelled the

show.

Feeling that there was still a big idea hiding somewhere, the lead actor of Baywatch (David

Hasselhof) revived it in 1991. Despite flopping terribly in its domestic market, it had been the

number-one US import in Great Britain and Germany. Inspired by the ‘first-run syndication

market’, in which programs are sold to television networks around the world, he invested his

own money towards the vision of getting Baywatch back on air. The budget was scaled back

from $1.3m to $850,000 per episode and new actors were brought in to replace those who

quit ‘through creative differences’. Season Two would have more emotional storylines and

more shots of beautiful girls in beachwear – ‘The Hof’ knew that his international audience

would tune-in to snack on the American beach culture of stunning surfers and skimpy

swimsuits, arranged in a familiar family setting like The Waltons or The Archers.

According to The Guinness Book of Records, Baywatch is the most watched television

programme of all time, attracting more than 1.1 billion viewers from over 100 countries around

the world. It lasted 11 seasons and elevated many of its cast to superstar status. The first

season may have been a failure by NBC’s high standards, but their real mistake was failing to

see the bigger international picture and they simply stopped trying. In their pursuit of

immediate success to satisfy ratings-hungry advertisers, the network was geared towards

making ruthless decisions about its precious airtime. The mindset of the executives at NBC

was focused exclusively on squeezing every drop of value from its domestic market, without
thinking creatively about its sizeable international network of contacts. They allowed someone

else to reinvent their light bulb.

Creativity Begets Short-Term Thinking. Short-Term Thinking Destroys Creativity

In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote about the accelerative thrust of change. He starts out by

observing that “all things - from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy – are, in reality, not

things at all, but processes.” He observed that different processes evolve at different paces,

but that society and culture evolve faster than biology and nature. Most importantly, Toffler

recognised that the speed of change in society and culture was gaining momentum and

would continue to accelerate – with significant consequences. In 1850 there were only four

cities in the world with over a million inhabitants, by 1900 there were nineteen, by 1960 there

were 141 and in 2008 there are 471. Tokyo now has over 35 million inhabitants, making it the

most populous city in the world today. In 1950 that accolade went to New York with ten

million, in 1900 it went to London with five million and in 1800 it went to Beijing with one

million citizens.

This accelerating pace of change can be seen everywhere throughout society and is perfectly

demonstrated through an account of the history of transportation. The fastest way to get from

A to B in 6000 BC was with a camel caravan, travelling at speeds of up to 8 miles per hour. It

wasn’t until the chariot was invented about 4400 years later that travellers reached a dizzy 20

mph. This really was fast – twice as fast as sailing ships – and not even the first steam

locomotive, introduced in 1825, could get close to matching it. But by 1880 steam locomotive

technology had advanced enough to reach a speed of 100 mph. As Toffler points out, it took

the human race millions of years to achieve that record, but by 1938 pilots were clocking

speeds of 400 mph and the rocket jets of the 1960s projected astronauts into space at nearly

5,000 mph. Discoveries are being made faster and brought to market faster; the first patent

for a typewriter was issued in 1714 but it didn’t become commercially available for nearly 150

years and it was a full century from Nicholas Appert discovering how to can food until canning
becoming a regular process of the food industry. Nowadays, the proverbial new baby of an

idea is out of the door and in the market with barely enough time to cut its umbilical cord.

When discoveries are brought to market they inspire further discoveries; improvements,

offshoots and alternative applications. These are, in turn, brought to market to inspire further

discoveries. And so on. The impact of this is more and more change, with fewer delays

between idea and application.

IX.

This significant acceleration in the speed of change has had a considerable effect on our

psyche. Where previous generations’ understanding of the world was rooted in a relatively

static past and reasonably predictable future, the impact of ‘Future Shock’ has created a

culture of short-term thinkers amongst today’s generation. The behaviourist and sociologist

Stephen Klineberg describes ‘an increasing concern with distant future events’ as a sign of

maturity. When more of our cognitive resources are directed towards short-term thinking, the

consequence is a reduction in resources towards reflecting on the past and contemplating the

future.

During the dot-com boom, many of my friends and contempories floated their companies on

stock markets for astronomical sums. Nearly every one of them spoke negatively about the

experience of facing quarterly analyst meetings, dreading the short-term demands placed

upon them by relatively recent and fickle investors. Products were rushed to market before

they were fully tested and money was often wasted because it was spent without a mature

strategy. One friend ploughed through over $100 million building a system and acquiring

members without truly understanding how he would ever make any money back for the effort.

There is no ‘F’ in failure though; he sold the patents to his system for a couple of million when

his business went ‘tits-up’ and he learned from his mistakes. He now owns a tremendously

successful company in the mobile sector, profitable from day one and privately funded.
Organisations that are entrenched in short-term thinking can appear fleetingly as being hives

of creativity. NBC would possibly have considered themselves to be a beacon of original

thinking and leaders in the field of producing hit television shows. But their field of vision was

blinkered; they were so focused on immediate revenue from the closest source available to

them that they couldn’t see the larger opportunities around the corner.

Attempting to produce creativity in an atmosphere of short-term thinking inevitably reduces

the chances of developing anything with lasting value. The process may start out with good

intentions of producing something innovative that contributes something worthy, but, in a

culture with an insatiable demand to consume the next new thing, the pressure to turn out

something – anything – becomes the driving force for change. The by-product of this

atmosphere is often transient and plastic; in the music industry we see ‘dime-a-dozen’
14
manufactured bands like Steps churned out and, in the technology sector, points-of-

difference between retired products and their new replacements have become increasingly

negligible. Taken to its extreme, this type of behaviour can destroy companies and even

whole industries. In 1983 it nearly wiped out the video game industry, and is credited with its

power shift from Europe and America to Japan. To quote Bill Gates, “The video game

business is bigger than the movie business.” This is the story of how E.T. nearly took his

revenge.

“Avoid missing the ball for high score.” – the instructions for the first mainstream computer

game couldn’t have been any simpler. It was early 1972 and a steady stream of new

technology breakthroughs was creating a buzz in computer circles. A year earlier Intel had

released the world’s first microprocessor, opening up new possibilities for creating the first

wave of commercially viable ‘consumer machines’. Until then, computers were quite literally

the size of houses. Nolan Bushnell, a twenty-nine year old graduate in electrical engineering

from Salt Lake City, recognised the opportunity to be a pioneer by combining two of his

favourite passions – technology and having fun.

14
Dan Bryan was once Steps hairdresser, before entering the Big Brother house. Do
you see how this all fits together?
Bushnell had worked in amusement parks through high school and university and had

become deeply interested in watching how people acted when they played on the attractions

that required an element of skill and luck. He was attracted by the idea that people were

happy to pay a fee in order to test their ability to knock down a coconut or ride their luck in

games of chance and so he set out to create the perfect game. Pinball was the most popular

arcade game at the time, usually played with a few beers to lubricate the hand-to-eye

coordination. Bushnell knew that he had to create a game that “any old drunk could play”. It is

a relief that he skidded past his first idea – an attempt to create the first driving arcade game

– and turned his attention to Pong. He did so because he feared that his team did not have

the accumulated knowledge to create something as complex as a racing game (yet).

The idea for Pong came to Bushnell when he visited a trade show in May 1972 and saw the

first game console being demonstrated – the Magnavox Odyssey. Three months later he

founded Atari with $500 of start-up capital, raised between him and his new partner Ted

Dabney and they recruited their first employee to build a prototype. Bushnell had noticed that

Pinball could only be played one-player-at-a-time, even in two-player mode. He recognised

that gamers would enjoy playing against each other, so instructed his team to make it

possible.

Pong’s inaugural commercial test was at an intimate drinking hole in California in late 1972.

Word quickly got around that Andy Capp’s Tavern had a futuristic new arcade game and

people lined up outside to play. After a little while, the machine broke down, so the bar owner

called Atari to come and remove it. Al Acorn, Atari’s first employee, remembers opening up

the unit and discovering the problem - the milk carton placed inside to catch the coins was

overflowing with quarters, causing the coin switch to become jammed. With the commercial

pilot an overwhelming success, Atari could have been forgiven for thinking that the leading
15
manufacturer of Pinball machines would be interested in manufacturing Pong arcade

machines. They weren’t (scared of being the first) and so Bushnell decided that Atari would

build them themselves. Within months they had sold their first 10,000 arcade machines.

15
Bally/Midway
Atari made their first move into home consoles in 1975 after two years of research and

development. Their first machine only played Pong, but was a significant improvement over

the Magnavox Odyssey because it had on-screen digital scoring and sound. The microchips

used were the most complex developed for a consumer product at the time. It became so

popular that Sears were prepared to pay Atari a hefty premium in order to secure exclusivity

and double production. Just like at Andy Capp’s, customers queued around the block to get

their hands on the hottest Christmas present of the year – forking out today’s equivalent of

£200 for a machine that could only play one basic game.

When innovative products are brought to market they inspire improvements- the accelerative

thrust of change. The day after Pong Home Console launched, Bushnell and his team started

to consider their next version – a flexible video games console that could play all four of

Atari’s then-current catalogue of games. The fruit of their efforts, the Atari 2600, was to

become one of the most successful consoles in history. Warner had been tracking Atari’s

meteoric rise and decided to buy them in 1976, signalling the moment that video gaming

became a part of the entertainment business. The Atari 2600 was so successful (selling

millions and millions of units) that it accounted for one-third of Warner’s entire revenue and

Atari was the fastest growing company in America at the time.

Bushnell soon left the company to build his fledgling fast food chain, Chuck E Cheese, and a

culture of short-term thinking started to seep into Atari from their new owners. Some terrible

decisions were made (more of that in a moment). Atari’s game console and arcade divisions

operated independently of one another and rarely cooperated. Against this backdrop, the
16
home computer revolution was starting to take place , resulting in ever more powerful

microprocessors that would enable a new generation of home computers and video games.

16
The Commodore Pet, the first home computer with all-in-one keyboard/screen/tape
storage was launched in December 1977. My first computer, the Commodore Vic 20,
was launched in 1980.
 17
During the early 1980s the market was saturated with literally dozens of new consoles from

various manufacturers, mostly copycats of the 2600, and Atari’s market leading device was

now in its sixth year and starting to look stale. Each one of these new consoles had its own

library of games - and many had large third-party libraries. Atari had delayed the release of

their next generation of consoles, leaving consumers hungry for the next big release

unsatisfied from the lack of new hardware to buy. They could turn to the flood of third-party

games being developed by software start-ups in bedrooms and garages all over America and

Europe to crave their hunger – much to Atari’s frustration.

A team of Atari programmers quit their jobs to found Activision in 1979, peeved-off with

Warner’s policy of not allowing their names to appear on the credits of games. This wasn’t

just a vanity issue; it meant that royalties couldn’t be paid to employees based on sales. The

developers thought that they should get the same treatment as singers, producers,

musicians, actors and directors – just like in the other Warner divisions. Atari tried (and failed)

to get a restraining order blocking Activision from selling their wares in 1982. The floodgates

were open – anyone could write games for Atari, or the other machines on the market.

In January 1983 the head of Commodore announced that he was slashing prices of the Vic

20 to $139 and the newer C64 to $399, making home computers truly affordable for the first

time. Days later, Texas Instruments announced that their similarly imaginatively named

device, the 994/A, would be cut to $149. Commodore responded by taking the price of the Vic

20 down to $99. A price war was taking place in home computers, just at the moment that the

floodgates were opening-up in the game development market. The climate for short-term

thinking was developing nicely and the result would be seen almost immediately.

Investors became dizzy by the promise of fortunes that would be made feeding consumers

with new games for their video console or home computer. Fortunes were ploughed into start-

17
The Bally Astrocade, the ColecoVision, the Coleco Gemini, the Emerson Arcadia
2001, the Fairchild Channel F System II, Magnavox Odyssey2, Mattel Intellivision
(and its just-released update with several peripherals, Intellivision II), the Sears Tele-
Games systems (which included 2600 and Intellivision clones), the Tandyvision, the
VTech CreatiVision, and the Vectrex.
ups, often without the experienced developers or passionate gamers who understand how to

make a game that stands out and draws its players in. Even the cereal manufacturer Quaker

Oats started a gaming division, hoping to impress its shareholders and customers.

Thousands of new games were released between 1982 and 1983 - far too many for retailers

to squeeze on their shelves – and the quality of many could be kindly described as dubious.

One Mattel executive of the day described the problem, “Two years of products have been

pushed into the channel in one year, and there’s no way to re-balance the system.” Retailers

would try to return unsold games to the game publishers, only to discover had publishers had

neither new products nor cash to refund the retailers’ money. Some publishers rushed out

even more dubious games to offer retailers in return for unsold inventory; others (including

Quaker Oat’s poorly thought through start-up) quickly folded.

The game industry was still at a peak in 1983 with some notable new releases including Star

Wars and Dragon’s Lair. Atari was expecting a hit from its tie-in to the film blockbuster, E.T.

and decided to print millions of units in anticipation. Unfortunately Atari only invested about

six weeks in development time and the game was rushed to market undercooked and a poor

imitation of Spielberg’s multi-award winning masterpiece. It quickly picked up a bad reputation

in the school playground and went on to become the first great bomb of the video game age.

Warner’s share price halved, and then halved again. Over half a billion dollars of value was

wiped from game publishers almost overnight.

Toy stores that were stuck with unsold inventory threw them into discount bins at marked

down prices. Before the ‘Great Video Game Crash’ titles typically cost $34.95 (about $75 in

today’s money) but they were trading at just $4.95 by June 1983. Gamers would head straight

to the discount bin when they visited the store, seeing cheaper games as more appealing

regardless of quality. However, after a while they grew tired of buying substandard games

and quit entirely. Retailers soon stopped selling video game consoles or their cartridges,

convinced that the fad was over - and it wasn’t until 1987, when two Japanese companies,

Nintendo and Sega, announced a new generation of consoles that the party got going again.
The video console industry learned its lessons and has developed new levers to reduce the

risk of short-termism destroying it again. Game distribution is carefully controlled by the

hardware manufacturers who deploy encryption and lockout technology to prohibit publishers

from releasing games without their sanction. Permission isn’t granted unless a game can be

described as worthy for the seal of approval, so that gamers have some degree of faith that

they aren’t buying a dud. A good friend is developing a game for the X-BOX 360 at the

moment and expects it to take his team of engineers and artists about three years to produce.

Where Did it All Go Wrong?

If you come away from this chapter feeling depressed and questioning your creative ability

after learning that your education failed to prepare you for a world of Future Shock, you

should take comfort from learning that you are alive during the most creative time in the

history of our species. New discoveries are made daily in science and nature, technology is

advancing in complexity and becoming increasingly affordable, more books are been written

by more authors than ever before and entrepreneurialism has never been in such a healthy

state.

None of this would be possible if the approach to learning knowledge and valuing ability

bestowed by secondary schools had any real importance on real life. In the battle to prepare

you for survival, the environment of a fast-changing culture has had a greater influence on

you than the traditional method of passing down staid information prescriptively. You know

how to adapt because you have been adapting to the world around you all your life.

Sometimes things evolve so slowly that it’s hard to notice it happening in the moment, but

think about any facet of your life and it won’t take long to see how things have changed

considerably over time.

If you managed to get this far into my book you must have some curiosity for knowledge –

either that or you are being forced to read this for a GCSE comprehension test! If you had
your personality measure recorded, you wouldn’t score so low in the Openness scale like

those who would have believed the world was flat. Half the battle is simply learning to only

say “Why?” in positive ways and forgetting the word “Can’t”.

Without wishing to appear cruel, I hope that you have experienced failure and recognised that

it isn’t terminal and is never as bad as it seemed at the time. Instead, you will have learned

that failure is just a way of eliminating wrong ways of doing things before discovering the right

way. That which doesn’t kill us can only make us stronger.

I decided to call this chapter ‘Getting it Wrong’ because I wanted to describe some of the

environmental concerns that reduce opportunity for creativity. Relying on a few personal

experiences and some of my favourite stories, I have tried to explain how they inhibit our

natural ability to innovate. We are only a few pages away from exploring the elements that

make up my formula but, before we go there, I feel it is important to get the environment for

creativity right. My other reason for wanting to call this chapter ‘Getting it Wrong’ was so that I

could shoehorn a pun into the book.

The next chapter will take us closer towards understanding how creativity happens. It’s called

‘Getting it Jung’. Now that the puns are out of my system, things can only get better.
Chapter 3: Getting it Jung

Understanding how the human mind works has preoccupied mankind for thousands and

thousands of years. The ancient Greeks were amongst the first to believe that dreams

presented the key to unlocking behaviour and built special temples called Asclepieions where

they sent sick people to be cured of their mental illnesses. Treatment involved creating an

environment conducive to lucid dreams – including littering the floor of dormitories with

snakes and providing patients with a special, herbal bedtime tipple before sleep. The

following morning, patients would report their dreams to a priest who would prescribe a cure
18
(often a trip to the baths or a workout in the gym ). Pilgrims flocked to their nearest

asclepieion for treatment in much the same way that we enjoy health clubs and spas today.

It wasn’t just the Greeks analysing dreams – Egyptians priests were also regarded as dream-

interpreters. According to the Old Testament, Joseph (the one with the multi-coloured coat)

was blessed by a God-given talent to decode dreams, which made his brother so jealous that

he was sold into slavery. So the story goes, his gift was spotted whilst in slavery and the

Egyptian Pharaoh freed him and made him his chief vizier.

I.

The first attempt to distinguish between dream interpretation and the causes of dreams were

made by Al-Farabi, one of the greatest scientists and philosophers of the Islamic world in his
19
time . He wrote a chapter called On the Cause of Dreams in his seminal Book of Opinions of
th
the People of the Ideal City. About a thousand years later (towards the end of the 19

century) Sigmund Freud continued in Al-Farabi’s footsteps by investigating the relationship

between state-of-mind and the dreams which that mind produced.

18
Gymnasium is a derivative of the ancient Greek word for naked because clothing
wasn’t allowed – athletes competed in the nude. Gymnasiums were used for exercise,
communal bathing, and scholarly and philosophical pursuits.
19
And this was a particularly vibrant time for creativity within the Islamic world.
Algebra (al jabr) and philosophy (falsafah) were just starting to get interesting.
Freud believed that each person is a unique character as a result of the cumulative history of

his or her experiences – particularly early experiences. He simultaneously developed a

theory of how the mind is organised through these experiences and how this translates itself

into behaviour. All of this was very interesting to Carl Jung, who had written a dissertation

from observing the ramblings of a young woman in a psychiatric hospital. When Freud’s

Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, Jung rushed to read it. It then took Jung

three years for what he had read to sink in and, in 1903, he recognized the book’s potential

for explaining the mechanism of repression. It took another three years for Jung to send his

first letter to Freud, together with a copy of one of his books containing six studies from the

psychiatric hospital where he was now working. Freud responded with a note and a copy of

another one of his books, Collected Short Papers on the Theory of the Neuroses. Jung sent a

letter back, thanking him for the book but questioning Freud’s theory that sexual traumas are

at the root of all repressed behaviour.

The two met a year later and hit it off immediately. During their first meeting they chatted

continuously for thirteen hours about their theories and quickly forged a very close

relationship. Over the next six years Freud and Jung were regular travel companions and

wrote many letters to each other. Slowly though, Jung began to realise that his theories
20
differed from Freud’s. The catalyst in their falling out was another of Freud’s students, Alfred

Adler. Freud believed that the origin of all neurosis came from sexual conflict whereas Adler

held that it came from society, especially the desire for power. To Jung, the difference was in

their competing ways of experiencing the world. Some people are more inwardly orientated

and he dubbed these people as ‘Introverts’. Others are more outwardly orientated and he

dubbed these people as ‘Extroverts’.

20
Freud and Jung had a heated argument at a meeting of the International
Psychoanalytic Association in 1913 and never spoke again to each other. Freud
calling for Jung to be made ‘President for Life’ of the IPA in 1910 can be seen as
proof of how close they were. Jung resigning his post and membership to the IPA
shows just how hugely important he felt his differences were. That Freud refused
Jung’s offer of help to escape Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 is evidence that the
protégé was never forgiven.
To Jung, an Introvert is likely to prefer spending time alone and may feel uncomfortable or

clumsy in large crowds. An Extrovert is more likely to enjoy interacting with the world (people,

places, situations) and finds it easier to make connections with them. They are usually less

comfortable in their own company than Introverts. Jung’s field-changing revelation was that

two types of behaviour exhibit themselves at polar opposites on a scale – Introversion and

Extroversion.

II.

Jung believed that one type of attitude is dominant in each person’s behaviour and is easily

recognizable through our preferred thoughts and actions. He argued that this type of

behaviour is just us behaving how we feel most comfortable (our ego). When we express our

non-dominant type of attitude we sometimes feel awkward and can land ourselves in trouble.

For example, an introvert may blurt out something totally inappropriate at a dinner party

whereas an extrovert may find it difficult to relax on a deserted beach.

No sooner had he written-up his thesis on Introversion-Extroversion, Jung concluded that it

wasn’t sufficient for understanding all types of behaviour and so he spent a further ten years

in research before identifying two other scales; Sensing-Intuition and Thinking-Feeling.

People on the Sensing end of the scale are interested in facts, things and how they work.

Their opposites prefer to perceive things through hunches, making connections by

hypothesising. Both ends of the scale relate to receiving information without selecting,

evaluating or bringing order to the information that has been received. The preferred method

for making judgement on information is measured through the Thinking-Feeling scale.

Thinkers prefer to work in a binary, true or false, objective manner whereas people that prefer

to reach conclusions through Feeling do so subjectively, through internal evaluation.

Isabel Briggs-Myers, who was home-schooled by her mother, was made to read Jung’s book,

‘Psychological Types’, and developed the Myers-Briggs Typology Indicator with her mum over
the kitchen table. In doing so, she created a fourth scale (Judging-Perceiving) and worldwide

fame. Her test is widely used by many companies for selecting the right candidate for any

particular job. Whereas Jung and Freud spent most of their time in the company of extreme

personalities that, perhaps, clouded some of their views, the MBTI has the benefit of over 50

years of refinement and development through more than 3.5 million tests being administered

annually. Last year, as research for this book, I asked my wife (an Occupational Psychologist)

whether she would be prepared to administer the test on me if I paid her in kind.

The MBTI reports your preferences on four scales, each consisting of two opposite poles.

According to the theory, everyone has a natural preference for one of the two opposites on

each of the four MBTI scales. You can use both preferences at different times, but not, in

most cases with equal confidence. When you use your preferred methods, you are generally

at your best and feel most competent, natural and energetic.

The MBTI indicates the differences in people that result from where they focus their attention

(E or I; Extraversion or Introversion), the way they prefer to take in information (S or N;

Sensing or Intuition), the way they prefer to make decisions (T or F; Thinking or Feeling) and

how they orientate themselves to the external world – whether they primarily use a judging or

perceiving process (J or P; Judging or Perceiving).

E You prefer to focus on the outer world of Or I You prefer to focus on the inner world of ideas and
people and things. impressions.

S You tend to focus on the present and on Or N You tend to focus on the future, with a view
concrete information gained from your towards patterns and possibilities.
senses.

T You tend to base your decisions on logic Or F You tend to base your decisions primarily on
and on objective analysis of cause and values and on subjective evaluation of person-
effect. centred concerns.

J You like a planned and organised approach Or P You like a flexible and spontaneous approach to
to life and prefer to have things settled. life and prefer to keep your options open.

I came out as an ENFJ. Rachel has given permission for me to reproduce her report below;
Extraversion – Introversion

Those with a preference for Extraversion tend to focus their energy on the outer world of people and external events

so may be very attuned to external environments, and be sociable and expressive. Due to this focus on the external

world, they will often have a broad range of interests and learn by ‘being out there’ and doing and discussing and

communicating with others.

You actually display a borderline preference for Extraversion suggesting you may equally prefer Introversion. An

introverted person tends to be someone who gets their energy from their internal thoughts, feelings and reflection.

They would tend to have a depth of interest in a few areas, seeking to learn about those areas by research and

mental reflection. A person with a strong preference for Introversion may come across as private and contained.

As you demonstrate a borderline preference on this dimension, this may indicate that although sometimes you are

energetic and sociable and expressive, as this is not your strong preference, you may either find this ‘outward self’ to

be tiring and hard and may find yourself having to retreat to a private space (either physically or mentally).

Something to be aware of is that this may result in others not knowing how to take you - you may come across as

energetic and sociable, but, within the same occasion, or at another time, are as likely to become quiet and

withdrawn. In extreme cases this could appear rude or aloof.

Sensing – Intuition

Your responses indicate a very strong preference for Intuition, suggesting that you like to take in information by

seeing the bigger picture, focusing on the relationship and connections between facts. You are likely to value

inspiration, abstract and theoretical thinking, and often might find your thoughts jump around and leap across to the

future possibilities. Your strength is in seeing new possibilities and different ways of doing things.

It is worth noting however that, as your preference is so strongly towards the Intuition end of the scale, you may find

that qualities associated with the opposite end of the scale (Sensing) are sometimes neglected. You may find it

difficult to be practical, focusing on the future and possibilities, rather than the here and now or the real and the

factual. A further example of this may be when conveying information, or briefing employees on projects, you might

miss out sequential details or facts and be unable to give information in a step-by-step format.

Thinking – Feeling

Your responses indicate a very strong preference for Feeling, which indicates that you may tend to make decisions

based on your values and your beliefs rather than always from an objective viewpoint. This preference indicates a

real strength with appreciating, supporting and accepting others, with decisions often made paying attention to

people’s wishes rather than from an impersonal point of view. This will mean you will be appreciated by your

employees, and will create an atmosphere where employees’ feel valued and appreciated.
You may find that you are warmed by approval, responding with energy and enthusiasm, but may equally be very

sensitive to criticism and take constructive criticism in a personal way. Although a very loyal and trustworthy person,

you equally bear grudges and find it hard to forgive those that have mistrusted you.

As this is such a strong preference however, an issue to be aware of is that you may find yourself making hasty

decisions without always reaching them with logic. This will be especially true in a time of pressure or where you feel

you are being personally attacked. At these times you will find yourself having to make a conscious effort to be

rational and objective.

Judging-Perceiving

A preference for Judging typically indicates a person who would like to live in a planned, orderly way, wanting to

regulate and control life, coming across as methodical, systematic and organised. As found on the Extraversion

scale, your preference for Judging is borderline, indicating an equal preference for the opposite end of the scale:

Perceiving. A person strong on the Perceiving scale would prefer to live in a more flexible and spontaneous way,

preferring things to evolve than be planned and enjoying change and adaptation.

As this is a borderline preference this shows that you are likely to have a rounded skill base, enjoying change and

spontaneity but, equally, being able to live within a planned and organised way of life. That said, the relatively strong

Perceiving side of your personality means that although generally you will be able to be organised and planned,

when busy or under pressure, you may find that you start to overlook relevant details or may try to overextend and try

to do too much. This is particularly likely given your strong preference for Intuition – the bigger picture side of your

personality. You may also find that you are able to be organised and ordered at the beginning of projects, but then

will lose attention and move on without completing what you have started. This is also because you tend to find new

challenges more appealing that what is new and verified.

Not only is this an incredibly accurate projection of my personality, it provides some important

clues as to how I prefer to go about performing the ‘act of creativity’. My strong preference for

Intuition means that I start out looking for innovation through abstract ideas and possibilities –

daydreaming and fantasising about what could be created. When I have a hunch, in order to

validate it, I turn to facts and figures and hope that my perceptions won’t be changed. If they

are, I generally find it easy to call on my intuition to produce more abstract ideas…..and so

on. Eventually, an idea worth something pops out.

My brother-in-law is the complete opposite; he is most relaxed when reading about quantum-

physics or studying engineering manuals. This doesn’t make him any less creative than I am,

in fact he invented several world-changing technologies including a new type of engine that

produces more power while using less energy than traditional engines, and has government

organisations around the world lining up to work with him. His discovery came about through

absorbing the information and applying meaning to it - both natural types of behaviour for him

- and then calling on his less-dominant reserves of Intuition and Feeling to sense a better

solution than the traditional combustion engine.

III.

I believe that the Eureka moment happens when we alternate between dominant and non-

dominant behaviour types. This action serves as a catalyst for creativity to happen and ideas

to formulate. The best example of a Eureka moment that I can hope to call upon as evidence

of this theory is from when Archimedes famously pronounced “Eureka” when getting into his

bathtub.

The Eureka Moment and Non-Dominant Thinking

Archimedes was a studious and very well respected mathematician, physicist and inventor

living in Syracuse in ancient Greece. He was a very close friend of the tyrant king, Hiero of

Syracuse, who had been given an ornate, handcrafted crown that, it was claimed, was

produced from pure gold. Hiero suspected that the crown actually contained silver and asked

Archimedes to prove it one way or the other. Archimedes knew the specific weight of gold (its

weight per volume unit) and so he knew that, if he could measure the volume of the crown, he

would be able to determine whether it was pure gold or not. (Sensing)

The problem was that the crown wasn’t a regular shape and so it was difficult to measure its

volume. It would be easily solved if Archimedes could melt the crown down and measure the
liquid gold by the pint or hammer it into straight lines. (Sensing) But that wasn’t an option, so

the dilemma persisted.

One day, while getting into his bath, Archimedes noticed that the water level rose as he

dipped his body in to it, and it occurred to him in a flash that the volume of water displaced

was equal to the volume of the immersed parts of his own body – which could be measured

by the pint. (Intuition) In doing so, he had worked out how to test whether the crown was a

fake or not. He jumped out of the bath shouting, “Eureka” which is ancient Greek for ‘I have

found it’.

Archimedes preferred behaviour types were Sensing and Thinking (perceiving information

through facts and considering those facts objectively) but when he adjusted to his non-

dominant behaviour types (Intuition and Feeling) he was able to develop an original idea that

solved his problem. A reason that creativity comes awkwardly to most people is because it

comes about from acting in ways that are opposite to our preferred mode. Moreover, most of

us don’t necessarily know our dominant and non-dominant types of behaviour.

IV.

In writing his brilliant book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed nearly one hundred

creative people – leaders from all sorts of fields, including many Nobel Prize winners – and

applied his thirty years of training in psychology to identify trends in patterns of behaviour.

Amongst his findings, he noticed that creative people often fluctuate between having lots of

physical energy and then long periods of quiet and rest. I recognise this pattern in me, and in

most of the creative people that I know. I attribute it to three things; (i) exhibiting non-

dominant behaviour types is tiring and can’t be sustained for overly long periods of time, (ii)

parts of the creative process require introspective behaviour to process the idea internally,

which can make a natural Extrovert feel restless, (iii) the process of ‘kicking an idea around’

often requires interaction and an ability to receive feedback, which might be awkward for a

natural Introvert.
Another trait that Mihaly identified was that his interviewees were able to ‘….alternate

between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.’ This

ability to zigzag between two very different modes is critical in the process of creating an idea

because it is essential to be able to simultaneously visualize an ‘alternative reality’ and show

how that alternative reality can become ‘real’ using established facts and truths. If you can

only visualize alternative realities, but can’t lay your hands to the tools to explain how to

understand them to the layman, the idea only exists in your own mind and it’s not going to be

worth anything. Creativity has to have value.

Mihaly also noticed that creative people tended to exhibit opposite behaviours on the Introvert

– Extrovert scale. Although the majority of his subjects demonstrated the stereotype of a

‘solitary genius’, even the most extremely solitary creative disciplines (composer, research

scientist, sculpture, astronomer) called for the need to “see people, hear people, exchange

ideas and get to know another person’s work and mind.” As we shall discover later in this

book, creativity can’t happen without some level of collaboration.

V.

For all the reasons described in Chapter 1, we are most likely to express creativity in pursuits

that we feel passionately about. If we lacked the passion, it can become difficult to expend the

energy required to create the Eureka moment and we would possibly lose the desire quicker.

An important part of the creative process is to be objective about our ideas, filtering out the

bad ones so that we can quickly move on to finding more good ones. If we try to perform this

function with Feeling rather than Thinking, the selection process becomes subjective and may

lack reliability. I have discovered Thinking (reaching conclusions objectively) to be my biggest

weakness and so I compensate by employing very objectively minded people whose

feedback I have grown to trust.

Companies that successfully manage to produce an environment for creative harmony do so

by establishing a channel for ‘Feeling’ people and ‘Thinking’ people to collaborate and

exchange ideas openly and without making either group feel too awkward. Before

brainstorming sessions, warm-up exercises are often employed to encourage the logical

thinkers to embrace lateral thinking and vice versa. If the session goes well, and if the

purpose of the session is to solve a problem, both Thinking and Feeling types should

experience the Eureka moment.

Summarising ‘Jungian’ Behaviour in the Creative Process

We have come quite a long way together already on our journey towards discovering the

formula for creativity. First we developed an understanding of creativity as expressing an

original vision that has value. Then we discovered that genius is simply creativity + natural

ability + dedication to a cause + luck. We went on a trip through some of the influences that

have chipped away at out natural creative tendencies (school, badly managed companies,

fear of failure and short-term thinking) and finally we uncovered the catalyst for creative

thinking – behaving in atypical ways.

Catalysts are substances that cause a chemical reaction to take place faster when added to

elements, but that are not themselves changed by the reaction. Almost ninety percent of

commercially produced chemical products owe their existence to a catalyst somewhere along

their manufacturing process – the most famous being Ammonia. When two gasses that are
21
both commonly found all around us - Nitrogen (N2) and Hydrogen (H2) - are passed over an

iron catalyst in the right conditions, the new compound created is a smelly, dangerous gas

called Ammonia (NH3). If it were so easy to make Ammonia from Nitrogen and Hydrogen

without a catalyst, we would be buggered every time we put the kettle on to make a cup of

tea!

21
Air is made-up of 78% Nitrogen, and water contains two Hydrogen atoms for every
one Oxygen atom.
So if creativity can be described as a type of action that changes things in some way, shifting

between dominant and non-dominant behaviour is the catalyst. It’s time to meet the elements

that get changed in the process - and the formula to creativity.

Chapter 4: The First Element; Seeds

The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

D.H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence - Feb. 12, 2002

Philosophers have being chewing over the riddle of how to define knowledge ever since

Plato’s explanation that it is ‘justified true belief’. Some people aren’t satisfied with this

description though, leading to the creation of a branch of philosophy called Epistemology –

the theory of knowledge. Deep thinkers gather together to debate big questions such as;

‘What is knowledge?’ ‘How is knowledge acquired?’ ‘What is the difference between knowing-

how and knowing-that?’ and ‘What do people know?’

According to Christian tradition, the Holy Spirit is said to have given mankind seven gifts to

help “complete and perfect the virtues”. (i) Wisdom – to help us see, (ii) Understanding – to

help us make good choices, (iii) Knowledge – to learn about God, (iv) Counsel – to make the

right judgement, (v) Fortitude – courage to do the right thing, (vi) Piety – to pay reverence to

God and (vii) Fear of God – which is meant to protect in a father-to-son sort of way.

Theologians say that the first four gifts direct the intellect, whereas the last three gifts direct a

Christian’s relationship with their god.

Hindu Scriptures present two kinds of knowledge, Paroksha Gnyana and Aporoksha Gnyana.

Paroksha Gnyana is second-hand knowledge: knowledge obtained from books, hearsay, etc.

Aporoksha Gnyana is the knowledge borne of direct experience, i.e. knowledge that one

discovers for oneself. As is often the case, I find that the Hindus offer the most balanced

explanation for helping us to understand ourselves: they are simply saying that some

knowledge can be transmitted between people and cultures whereas other types of

knowledge can only be experienced internally. For example, we can study the laws of physics

and perpetual motion until our head hurts with facts, but the only way to understand that we

won’t fall off a moving bicycle is to try it.

I.

The Wachowski Brothers tapped into religious and philosophical uncertainties about

knowledge in their Matrix trilogy, in which humans perceive reality through a computer-

generated virtual-reality. A group of rebels set themselves free from being prisoners to a

sinister, machine-manufactured alternative existence by unplugging themselves from ‘The

Grid’. Neo, the hero hacker played by Keanu Reeves, is thought to be their ‘Chosen One’ who

will liberate the rest of mankind by gaining control of The Matrix. He masters kung fu by

having the knowledge of it transferred to him through a socket in the back of his skull (the

same socket that had held him hostage to The Grid) and starts mashing up the baddies. One

of the agents shoots a gun at him, but he raises his hand and stops the bullet in mid-air.

How? Neo suddenly sees The Matrix as it really is – lines of streaming ones and zeros. It is

only when he realises this that he understands how to destroy the enemy and rescue

humanity by waking them up from their virtual-reality, thus fulfilling the prophesy by becoming

the ‘One’.

Introducing the Concept of Fields

Kung Fu is a field of martial arts, as is judo, Taekwondo and boxing. Neo was having the facts

of everything ever known about kung fu transferred to him – the streaming numbers being the
information represented as computer data – so that he could become an expert and duff

people up. All second-hand (Paroksha Gnyana) knowledge can be attributed to at least one

field and knowledge from one field can often help another to evolve (or even get started). The

Chinese practice of reflexology inspired fields of martial arts that focus on striking pressure

points to inflict pain. In turn, some of the principles of martial arts have inspired fields of
22
wellbeing through meditation techniques, bone-setting and acupuncture.

The word field can be used in a number of different contexts, including; (i) an area of open

ground often used to grow crops or graze livestock or for playing a particular sport, (ii) an

area of land that is rich in an exploitable natural resource, and (iii) an activity or subject that is

somebody’s particular interest or responsibility. It can be used in many other contexts (e.g.

battle) but I am drawn to the word because of these first three definitions.

You can think of a field as a place where knowledge is planted and where harvesters gather

to reap the rewards in some way. Creativity is the process of either sowing some new

knowledge into the field or – occasionally – persuading harvesters that there is a new field

worth stopping in at from time to time. In this analogy, knowledge can be understood as

‘seeds’.

In my ‘agricultural’ analogy, the one universal law of any field is that all harvesters are equal,

but some harvesters are more equal than others. Every field needs expert harvesters to take

responsibility for maintaining the field and we shall discover, in a moment, how the behaviour

of these experts can affect the process of creativity in their fields.

All fields require a steady flow of harvesters to flourish and to persuade harvesters to visit and

explore the field, knowledge is arranged in a structured manner. If it were easy to get lost and

intimidating to find one’s way around the field, harvesters would be less inclined to take-in the

sights. Fields always have their own rules and symbols to help harvesters make sense of the

knowledge and these need to be learned first – for example, music and ballet both have

22
The art of healing through bone manipulation.
notation systems and it is easy to see how one inspired the other, but even the most

accomplished musician would have enormous difficulty following ballet notation without first

understanding its symbology and rules. We can think of symbols and rules as ‘the map’ that

harvesters use to find their way around the field.

My agricultural analogy has four metaphors for the four most important attributes;

Field = Land set aside for one particular subject matter

Map = Symbols and rules used to navigate the field

Seeds = Pieces of knowledge planted in the field

Harvesters = People who profit from the field in some way

Fields that don’t have many clear rules or symbols find it harder to attract new harvesters,

which is disadvantageous for encouraging creativity. Similarly, a lack of rules and symbols

makes it harder for expert harvesters to recognise a novel contribution to their field because it

is more difficult for them to verify and classify it. The field of mathematics is very well

structured with rules and symbols, making it relatively easy to acquire a grounding of

knowledge and understanding. New ideas in the field of mathematics can be quickly

explained to ‘maths harvesters’ and they can promptly prove or disprove its validity. Compare

this to the field of philosophy, which has fewer rules and symbols and so has evolved far less,

despite the best efforts of philosophy harvesters.

Popular fields would quickly become un-harvestable if someone didn’t claim responsibility for

maintaining the land; deciding which newly proposed rules and symbols become commonly

adopted, and carefully controlling the seeds sown. The map would become unreliable, as

would the crop being harvested. With plenty of autonomous harvesters applying themselves

to the field, new ideas are likely to be proposed all the time. Somehow these ideas need to be

authenticated and evaluated so that other harvesters know whether to invest their time getting

acquainted with them. This process of authentication needs to be carefully controlled so that

untrustworthy and potentially false knowledge isn’t allowed to rot the field. Similarly, ranking

and evaluating ideas is important because fields need to be conservative cultures – creative
people tend to harvest from multiple fields and they would struggle to keep track with a rapidly

evolving field.

My wife harvests in the field of Occupational Psychology, along with thousands of others.

These psychologists toil in their field to help inform them about workplace issues, with good

intentions of making organisations more productive while ensuring workers lead physically

and psychologically healthier lives. As part of the cost of entrance into the field, would-be

psychologists are asked to develop their own thesis towards achieving their academic

degree. Thousands of new occupational psychologists enter the field each year, generating

thousands of new ideas. One or two might be good enough to advance the field, but the

majority won’t be and need to be weeded out. In this field, the selection of new ideas is made

by a few academic experts and is communicated through to harvesters via papers and

organised lectures. As a result the field of Occupational Psychology doesn’t evolve all that

quickly, but when changes are made they can quickly catch root.

Occupational Psychology is a slow-changing field because the ideas that are being proposed

first need to be evaluated and carefully considered before they can be planted and there are

very few experts trusted to manage this complex filtering process. Bottlenecks are improved

because expert harvesters reside within a number of universities and so are able to apply

objectivity to proposed a few ideas simultaneously. The field of Law evolves slower than the

field of psychology because its expert harvesters all reside in the same House.

In writing this book, I am harvesting in the field of literature. Hundreds of thousands of new

books are written each year so, to make the field accessible to other harvesters, (e.g. buyers

working for book shops and readers of books) all manuscripts need to filter through various
23
expert harvesters (agents, publishers, etc.) who have an interest in protecting their field .

Professional critics will get involved later in the process, after the book is published, applying

23
A self-published book is often a sure sign that the seed wasn’t good enough for a
publisher to sow in their field. This is changing though with technology, making it
even easier for authors to get their books out into the field.
some further weeding so that readers find it even easier to lay their hands on the most

nutritious fruit. Even book critics have their uses!

Within the field of Law, one unified and selected group of expert harvesters apply themselves

to the function of weeding out badly conceived ideas in a carefully organised and strictly

controlled manner. The field of publishing is very different; expert harvesters work

independently of each other and the rules for determining a good seed are harder to agree

upon. Both groups of expert harvesters attempt to fulfil their duties objectively, however

differing experts from the field of publishing will have alternative perceptions of the rules for

producing a good book.

If my book somehow manages to slip through all the filters and make it out onto the

bookshelves, a third type of filtering process begins to take place - people might actually buy

it! If lots of people buy it at the same time then I will make it into the charts, persuading more
24
stores to order more copies and attracting more attention from would-be buyers. In this way,

the general collective of harvesters become experts – perhaps the best sort of experts

because the filter process is purely objective. The Internet has advanced this third method in

revolutionary ways.

Within the field of computer programming there is a sub-field called Open Source. This is an

example of a new field created by harvesters familiar with computer programming and its

rules and symbols, but disillusioned by some of the filter processes being applied. With the

intention of making software free (or at least cheaper) and more flexible than commercially

produced applications, harvesters in the Open Source community agree to allow others to

share, modify and redistribute their code without any claim to copyright. A benefit of this

approach is that the combined energy from large groups of independently minded harvesters

approaching any chosen problem individually is more likely to discover good solutions than a

department within a software publishing house. Productivity is further improved because the

important problems often receive the attention of more harvesters than obscure ones, and the

24
Just been told that I’m not allowed to buy 5,000 copies from Amazon and that their
systems are designed to stop this sort of thing effecting their recommendation process.
validity of produced code is improved because anyone sharing an interest can review or

critique it. Wikipedia is another example of collective responsibility being shared amongst

harvesters – users are encouraged to contribute towards pages light on facts and to weed out

erroneous information.

Occasionally fields can become occupied by incompetent experts - who assume control of

processing, authenticating, evaluating and ranking all ideas. Politicians often do this in health

and education – in America, for example, where lobbyist fight to dissuade the learning of

Darwin’s theories of evolution within the academic syllabus. The governance of fields is best

left to expert harvesters who have the wisdom to make objective decisions, rather than relying

on subjective values. Galileo was locked up because the Church took responsibility for

weeding the field of science and strongly disagreed with any advance that conflicted with their

narrow-minded view of the world.

So at least three things are needed for creativity to flourish within any field; (i) easily

accessible rules and symbology to find and make sense of the seeds of knowledge, (ii) a

recognisable method for contributing new ideas to the field for (iii) expert harvesters to

objectively evaluate their worth.

II.

Doing the Knowledge – Gathering Seeds From the Field

Epistemologists have coined the term ‘situated knowledge’ for the type of knowledge that is

very particular to a specific location within a field. (That’s what happens when a field lacks

enough rules and symbols to make it exciting and alluring – it starts to create rules just for the

sake of creating rules.) The discovery of situated knowledge usually comes through trial and

error and by learning from mistakes - for example a backpacking traveller could learn which

mushrooms are tasty and which are harmful in a particular forest by trying small portions and

monitoring their effects. If the experience doesn’t kill them, epistemologists would call that
‘situated knowledge’. Epistemologists would also say that they have experienced ‘a posteriori’

– knowledge generated through experience. The counterpart ‘a priori’ is knowledge assumed

without prior experience. Hindus would say that the traveller had an Aporoksha Gnyana (a

personal experience) and that they could pass on knowledge to others - Paroksha Gnyana.

To become a London taxicab driver, aspiring cabbies must first go through a rigorous study of

London’s 25,000 streets and then pass one of the toughest tests of any profession anywhere
25
in the world . The rules of engagement are covered within the ‘Blue Book’ (officially known

down at the Public Carriage Office as ‘The Guide to Learning the Knowledge of London') and

to pass the test the would-be cabbie needs to learn them all. 320 routes are listed in the book,

covering all the major ‘runs’ within a six-mile radius from Charing Cross. A London taxicab

driver needs to know all of them, as well as the points of interest along those routes including;

courts, hospitals, historic buildings, hotels, police stations, parks and open spaces, places of

learning, railway stations, sports centres and Underground stations. They even need to know

the sequence of theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue!

The training process usually involves the wannabe cabbie buying a moped and driving

around the streets of London for hours and hours, attempting to learn the routes ‘a posteriori’

- by experiencing the routes firsthand. The oral test (also known as ‘An Appearance’) involves

receiving a number of routes between two points from an examiner and then talking them

through the journey, street-by-street, without the use of a map. If they are able to plot the

most sensible and direct routes whilst reciting the names of all the roads used, including the

junctions crossed and the roundabouts navigated around, and if they don’t forget any of the

landmarks passed along the way – their reward is to finally get their hands on the coveted

green badge that marks them out as a licensed taxicab driver.

25
I interviewed dozens of cabbies for a project that I was working on and became
fascinated by the stories of legendary examiners from the Carriage Office. My sources
tell me that it takes between 24 and 36 months to pass the test – usually after ten or
fifteen attempts at trying.
If one cabbie tells another that Park Lane is closed because Moonies are on a march, the ‘a

priori’ might help the newly informed cabbie to plan a new route to avoid probable

bottlenecks. This doesn’t solve the riddle for working out the formula to creativity, but it does

offer up some clues.

Scientists have been getting themselves excited recently from studying the brains of London

cabbies; they have observed larger than normal hippocampus. Cab drivers love telling their

passengers that little seed of knowledge. Of course, knowing that cabbies often have an

abnormal hippocampus is little use to anyone unfamiliar with the rules and symbols of

neuroscience. It’s not completely useless though, so long as the seed is learned in context. If

the passenger leaves the cab only remembering that cab drivers have a bigger bit of their

brain but not understanding what that means, the seed won’t take root and will never be

harvested. However, if the passenger leaves the cab understanding that taxi drivers have a

bigger bit of the brain responsible for long-term memory, the seed stands a better chance of

taking root and has the potential be harvested. Creativity usually involves taking seeds from

different fields and bringing them together in some way.

John Gillard once told me a story about the great Bill Bernbach – generally considered to

have been the greatest and most influential person ever to have contributed to the field of

advertising. Before Bernbach changed the rules of the field, copywriters and art directors

worked in separate departments (usually on different floors) and almost never bounced ideas

off each other. Bernbach brought the two together and crammed them into office cubicles,

believing that ‘one plus one equals three’ would produce a better quality of advertising ideas.

He was right – and now almost all advertising agencies are organised this way. I could fill this

book with anecdotes that John told me about Bill Bernbach, but if one story best explains the

theory of harvesting in multiple fields to inspire creativity it has to be the one about how he

turned a brand associated with Nazi Germany into an American icon in the early 1960s.

When Volkswagen pulled up into car showrooms across America in the 50s, no one would

touch them. It was too soon after the war and they were tinged with the reputation of being
Hitler’s People-Wagons. Besides, it was believed that VWs were too small and ugly for a

market obsessed with the adage ‘bigger is better’. American cars in the 1950s were marketed

as fashion statements, fuelled by designers in Detroit competing to produce ever more

ostentatious models. The economy was booming and automakers exploited this to sell the

‘American Dream’ – express yourself and your wealth through the choice of car that you

drive. Bernbach’s challenge was to find a way to reposition the perceptions of VW in the

psyche of the American automobile market.

Bill Bernbach’s philosophy on advertising was that the message had to be honest. Adverts

often made overly ambitious claims in those days, nowhere more so than in America.

Bernbach felt that companies employing this strategy would eventually struggle to

communicate with consumers because they would have destroyed trust. In order to sell the

product, he believed it was essential to know the product. In fact his favourite mantra in his

office was, “The Product. The Product. Stay with the product.” To help solve the challenge of

repositioning VW’s image, Bill didn’t just stay with the product - he brought the product into

his office to stay with him.

According to folklore, Bernbach and a team of his closest writers and art directors took a field

trip to a VW dealership and purchased a Beetle ‘incognito’ – his agency was pitching for the

VW account, but he didn’t want them to know what he was planning. The team took it in turns

to drive the car back to their office block and parked outside. Bill got out and told the others to

wait in the car whilst he headed up to his office. Minutes later he returned with an engineer

carrying a toolkit and duly instructed his team to roll up their sleeves and help to dismantle the

car. They loaded the parts onto a mail trolley and wheeled it into the lift, up a few floors and

into one of the meeting rooms, where they arranged the parts out on the floor. When they

were finished transferring the Beetle from the parking space below, bit by bit, up into the

meeting room they began the business of learning how to reassemble the car. When the time

came for the Volkswagen executives to visit the offices to discuss their marketing account, a

perfectly built Beetle was waiting for them in the agency’s boardroom. More impressively,
Bernbach’s team had become experts and knew almost everything there was to know about

the Beetle.

The first thing that the team noticed was how small the Beetle was: standard American cars

would have struggled to fit in their boardroom. Bernbach was a keen student of human

behaviour and he sensed that they would struggle to position the Beetle as a ‘keeping up with

the Jones’’ sort of car. It didn’t stand out enough compared to the flashy motors with big fins

and roaring grills that were the competition. He fused his knowledge about how well built the

Beetle was (most of the engineering was streets ahead of Detroit’s monster machines) with

his awareness of consumer psyche to carve out a new position for VW – the thinking man’s

motor. In epistemological terms, he combined his ‘ a posteriori’ knowledge of the car with his

‘a priori’ knowledge about how consumers decide to buy a new car.

One of the first adverts screamed the bold headline ‘THINK SMALL’ and listed some of the

intelligent things about owning a Beetle - implying that people who chose a beastly tank

instead were not smart thinkers. The body copy went on to read,

“Our little car isn’t so much of a novelty any more. In fact, some people who drive our little flivver don’t even think 32

miles to the gallon is going any great guns. Or using five pints of oil instead of five quarts. Or never needing anti-

freeze. That’s because once you get used to some of our economies, you don’t even think about them any more.

Except when you squeeze into a small parking spot. Or renew your small insurance. Or pay a small repair bill. Think

it over.”

Another Bernbach advertisement of the time with just ‘Lemon’ as the headline below a

stunning photograph of a gleaming new Beetle, using body copy to cleverly position the car

as superior in quality;

The Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced.

Chances are you wouldn't have noticed it; Inspector Kurt Kroner did.

There are 3,389 men of our Wolfsburg factory with only one job; to inspect Volkswagens at each stage of production.

(3,000 Volkswagens are produced daily; there are more inspectors than cars.) Every shock absorber is tested (spot
checking won't do), every windshield is scanned. VWs have been rejected for surface scratches barely visible to the

eye.

Final inspection is really something! VW inspectors run each car off the line onto the Funktionsprüfstand (car test

stand), tote up 189 check points, gun ahead to the automatic brake stand and say "no" to one VW out of fifty.

This preoccupation with detail means the VW lasts longer and requires less maintenance, by and large, than other

cars. (It also means a used VW depreciates less than any other car.) We pluck the lemons; you get the plums.

Bill Bernbach’s positioning turned the fortunes of the Beetle around overnight and the

campaign was later voted the best ever by The Advertising Hall of Fame. By the mid 60s’ VW

had over 60% of the US import market and Beetlemania was more than just adulation of a

Liverpool Rock and Roll band. Bernbach continued to create a stream of classic

advertisements, always combining seeds that he harvested from learning about the product

with things that he recognised in consumer culture. The result was a body of work that

connected with consumers on an emotional level at the same time as providing all the

important information that set the Beetle apart – always in a clear and entertaining way. As

simple as this sounds, it was revolutionary at the time.

III.

There is a famous story, probably rooted in myth, about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman

when they were working together on Marathon Man. To prepare for a scene, Hoffman had

gone for a few days without sleep and looked pretty rough. Olivier asked him why he was

putting himself through such an ordeal and Hoffman replied that he was trying to be

convincing in the role. Olivier retorted, "It’s called acting dear boy".

Dustin Hoffman calls on the art of method acting to create convincing characters for his film

roles and, in doing so, he was won two Academy Awards, three BAFTAs and six Golden

Globes. Method actors utilise ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ knowledge to stimulate creativity in
the same way that Bernbach and his team created their masterpieces – harvesting in different

fields of knowledge and fusing seeds to come up with something totally original.

Method acting involves developing a total empathy for the character by combining learned

knowledge with personal emotions and senses. It is incredibly difficult to teach because it

requires the student to instinctively summon their own, intimate emotional memories and

blend them with known facts and assumptions about the character in order to create a

believable performance. The idea is to fully immerse into the character in order to sense all of

the experiences that the character would.

Whilst studying for the role as Raymond Babbit in Rain Man, Hoffman immersed himself in

learning all the facts and details of Autism that he could find. In interviews he talked about

tracking down the author of a leading book on the subject (an Autistic herself) who told him

something that would help to define the character;

“She said the one thing she wanted more than anything else in life was for someone to hug

her, but the second anyone did, she couldn't bear it. That sentence just destroyed me. On a

certain level, that's all of us. We want praise more than anything, but once we get it it's

sometimes painful.” Hoffman told Playboy magazine.

In the process of learning about autism, Hoffman instinctively blended his personal

experiences of life – that it is difficult to receive praise (‘a posteriori) - with the knowledge that

autistics often struggle with the need to be hugged but can’t bear to be touched (‘a priori). He

added texture to his character by observing other behaviour through field research, for

example noticing that autistics often found it impossible to make eye contact, and reapplying

those seeds of knowledge to his own sense of the world.

When Playboy asked Hoffman if he ever thought he had gone too far in researching a part,

this is what he had to say,

“No. My wife told me on a couple of occasions that I carry baggage home with me after work. It's not that you're in

character, because I've never understood what that means. You're not some character, you're just yourself, always,

and you're just messing with yourself. You're more in an exaggerated zone of yourself, and that happened to me in

Straight Time, certainly. I hung out with convicts for a couple of years. That was the hardest time my wife had living

with me. The easiest, she says, was during Tootsie. She said I was the best girlfriend she's ever had.”

As John would have said, Hoffman was channelling his energy towards combining his

understanding and empathy to create synergy.

Milking the ‘Field, Harvester, Seed’ Analogy a Bit More

No book on creativity is complete without mentioning some of the great accidental discoveries

that have evolved (or started) fields over time. One of the most commonly told is the story of

the microwave, which was discovered when a chocolate bar melted in the pocket of a

scientist working in the field of radar technology. They don’t often reveal that the scientist,

Percy Spencer, happened to have been a serial innovator and holder of over 100 patents.

Just like Edison, Spencer also enjoyed experimenting through trial and error and, although he

wasn’t the first to notice his snack melting by the microwaves, he was the first to consider

how to apply the experience in other fields. He first tried out making popcorn, which worked

fine, and then he attempted to cook an egg, which exploded and made an almighty mess of

his laboratory. Eureka – he came up with the idea of feeding microwave power into a secure

metal box. In doing so, Spencer called upon his ‘a posteriori’ knowledge of microwave

technology and the experience of microwave power melting his chocolate bar. He combined

this with his ‘a priori’ knowledge that he could control microwaves in a small and secure

environment.

IV.

If I was ever asked to guess what the first food type ever discovered was, I would answer

milk. After all, it is the first thing consumed by newly born babies and something we humans

share in common with almost all other mammals. As inventions go, the idea of drinking the
milk of farmed animals must surely be one of the oldest - goats and sheep were first

domesticated in the Middle East between 9000 and 8000 BC when someone noticed that

they graze on grassland which would not normally be farmed and therefore wasn’t providing

any sustenance. Putting cattle on the land improved the land’s productivity. Soon after,

someone nearby worked out that killing a goat was a less efficient way of providing food than

milking it - and discovered that a goat can provide years of delicious and nutritious milk,

whereas its meat only lasts a few meals. Humankind has been accidentally and deliberately

discovering ways of advancing the uses of milk ever since – creating all sorts of new fields in

the process.

Initially milk would have been consumed almost immediately after being extracted from the

teat, but soon the idea of storing milk started to take root. When freshly expressed milk is

allowed to stand for 12 to 24 hours it starts to separate into a high-fat creamy layer on top of a

larger, low-fat milk layer. Trial and error would later instruct humankind how to produce a

whole variety of creams from milk.

Travellers started taking units of milk out on journeys to keep them nourished while away

from home. They often rode on animals to find food and trade further away from home and

since even accidental agitation can turn cream into butter, it is likely that this too was an

accidental discovery. Some clever so and so combined an experience (of seeing milk turning

into cream and of cream turning into butter when agitated) with an assumption (that milk can

be made to turn into butter with the right combination of manmade instruments). The journeys

made by travellers became longer and longer and eventually a further discovery was made,

providing them with the knowledge to make yoghurt and cheese.

Milk (along with other foodstuffs) was commonly transported in storage vessels made from an

animal’s skin and its internal organs. It is believed that the process of cheese making was

discovered accidentally through storing milk in a container made from the stomach of an

animal; the acid would have started off the process of separating the milk into curd and whey
- and if rennet was lurking somewhere on the stomach lining, then so to was bacteria.

Something acidic and something with bacteria are all that’s needed to turn milk into cheese.

Mankind has been experimenting with ways to make different types of cheese ever since,

using different types of vinegar as the acidic agent and various strains of bacteria, sometimes

adding salt and other flavourings, cooking and aging them in all sorts of ways. Users of
26
Wikipedia have submitted thousands of types of cheese, listed by their country of origin.

Camembert and Cheddar are two examples of cheese produced from cow’s milk that were

first made and accepted locally before achieving national, and then, later, international

recognition.

Summarising Knowledge in the Creative Process

In Chapter 2, Getting it Wrong, I suggested that, through patterns formed in education,

knowledge is often transmitted from person to person without enough of a focus on

understanding and empathy towards the seeds of knowledge that are being received.

Attainment tests are specifically designed to measure the volume of seeds stored in the

examinee’s jar, but not their understanding of how to grow anything useful from those seeds

of knowledge – particularly in fields outside of the one in which the seed is located. This is

compounded by changes in our attitude as we grow up and become less inquisitive and start

to take received knowledge for granted without asking “Why?” or “Why not?” like five year

olds do.

In Chapter 3, Getting it Jung, we learned that some people prefer to take in information ‘as it

is’ in order to reach a perception (Sensing), whereas others prefer to take in more holistic

information or rely on hunches to reach their perceptions (Intuition). We also learned that

moving between our dominant and non-dominant behaviour types isn’t only possible, it’s an

essential catalyst towards achieving the creative process.

26
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cheeses
In this chapter we took a closer look at knowledge and discovered that the Hindu religion

recognises two types of knowledge; ‘Paroksha Gnyana’ being second-hand knowledge that

can be transmitted from person to person and ‘Aporoksha Gnyana’ which is the knowledge

borne from personal experience.

We developed an understanding of ‘fields’ as a metaphor for organising knowledge into

subjects (e.g. kung fu, boxing, acupuncture) and observed that fields with clearly defined

rules and symbols encourage harvesters to explore and discover seeds – which provides

more opportunity for creativity. We also learned that fields need to be carefully maintained by

objectively minded experts who take responsibility for filtering new ideas and we saw three

different filter models commonly applied in everyday fields.

Then we heard how London cabbies use their store of experienced knowledge (routes of

London – ‘a posteriori’) and their assumptions (overheard traffic conditions – ‘a priori’) to

develop a new journey in their mind, but that the seeds were from the same field. I conceded

that this might not be creativity by my earlier definition, but that it provided clues towards the

creative process.

We observed Dustin Hoffman bringing together assumed knowledge and experienced

knowledge to creative unique characters in his films. He did so in Rain Man by fusing together

knowledge from a number of fields (e.g. Himself, Film Making, Autism) to develop an original

interpretation that evolved at least one of those fields in the process (probably all three). Bill

Bernbach did the same by taking seeds of knowledge about the Beetle with American culture

and combining them to produce the most revered marketing campaign of all time.

Finally we discovered that even so called ‘accidental’ discoveries, such as cheese and

gravity, are the result of personally experienced knowledge and assumed knowledge from

more than one field coming together and being processed simultaneously - with empathy and

understanding.
This provides us with the best understanding of how knowledge is applied in the process of

creativity; using seeds harvested from more than one field, personally experienced

knowledge and personally assumed knowledge (Plato’s definition – ‘justified true belief’)

collide to provide an opportunity for the spark of an idea. In the next chapter we will meet the

second important element and the accelerant that provides fuel for the flame; the problem.

27
For now though, I’m all out of cheesy stories and so it is time to wrap up this chapter.

27
Sorry! I know that I promised no more puns after ‘Getting it Jung’ but I just can’t
help myself. If it’s of any consolation, even Bill Bernbach loved a pun.
Chapter 5: The Second Element; A Problem

Nearly 30 years after Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist François Jacob wrote “….the

sole ambition of a bacterium is to produce two bacteria”, the behaviour of a brightly glowing

strain led a young scientist, Bonnie Bassler, to discover that the real purpose of bacterium is

to adapt to its environment. She noticed that, even at the microbe level, life evolves through

an intricately networked web of receptors that relay information back to the cell. This allows

bacterium to evaluate its surroundings, collaborate with its own species and build mutually

beneficial alliances with other types of bacteria. Her achievement didn’t just offer the field of

science greater knowledge to help understand how to use bacterium to advance the field of

medicine: it revealed that, even at the microbe level where life is said to have began, survival

depends on the evolution of ideas and the solving of new problems.

The concept of collective strategising had already been widely observed in nature; ants are

well known by their colonies with collective responsibility and distributed roles - and the

survival of bees and flowers are intricately linked. In nature, evolution comes through the

development and refinement of processes that improve the chances for survival. Alvin

Toffler’s insight, that ‘all things from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy’ are, simply

processes, is important to understand. All processes can be improved, either deliberately or

accidentally.

I.

Humankind has been solving problems ever since evolving from the ape or eating the

forbidden fruit or whatever theology you subscribe to. The writer Peter Watson traces all

ideas back to fire in his brilliant book, Ideas; A History from Fire to Freud and sets out the ‘Big

Ideas’ that he considers to have contributed towards our evolution, tabled in chronological

order and separated by category – Ideas Before Language; The Emergence of Language and

the Conquest of Cold; The Birth of The Gods, The Evolution of House and Home; Cities of

Wisdom etc.
Observing the pattern of ideas in Watson’s book, it is possible to classify problems into two

distinct categories; problems waiting to be solved and problems needing to be discovered

first. Following on from the agricultural analogy in the previous chapter; the former could be

understood as problems marked on the map for all harvesters to ponder over, whereas the

latter wouldn’t have been spotted yet, and therefore are unmarked.

Finding a quicker, faster, cheaper, stronger, smarter, brighter, tastier, healthier, more fuel-

efficient way of doing something would be described as solving a problem that is waiting to be

worked out. These are solved through a combination of Sensing-type behaviour (being able

to spot the problem on the map) with Intuition-type behaviour to recognise potential solutions.

Discovering an unidentified gap in the market would be described as solving an unmarked

problem. These are usually first identified through Intuition and then resolved with a

combination of Intuition and Sensing-type behaviour. In both examples, the two ends of

Jung’s Sensing-Intuition scale are called into action.

Some problems don’t exist until other problems are first discovered and solved. The

whiteboard was invented to provide classrooms with a more efficient communication device

than its predecessor, the blackboard. Its creation begat the problem of needing a marker pen

with ink that can be easily wiped away at the end of the lesson. The need for a non-

permanent pen didn’t exist in the field until the whiteboard had been seeded.

II.

th
The Prohibition Act in early 20 century America meant that the problems associated with

hangovers barely registered on any map, if at all. Recovery formulas were generally

amateurish and dubious in their effectiveness. In 1928, in the middle of a serious flu

epidemic, the president of Miles Laboratories Inc, Hub Beardsley, visited the offices of a local

newspaper and was impressed to find that none of its employees had been taken ill. He

discovered that the editor had foreseen the disease coming and instructed his staff to drink a
daily dose of aspirin and bicarbonate of soda. When he returned to his office, the president

asked his head chemist to make a batch of tablets following the same formula. A year later,

Hub took his family on a Mediterranean cruise and packed some of the tablets with him. The

holiday was dealt two harsh blows and an opportunity; terrible weather compounded with an

outbreak on influenza, causing general vomiting throughout the ship. Hub remembered his

pills and liberally handed them out to his fellow passengers. Two apparently died of

pneumonia, rubbishing the claim that this formula could ward off the flu, but all the surviving

passengers reported that the tablets had vanquished their seasickness. Hub Beardsley knew

that he was onto something and, in 1931, started marketing it as Alka-Seltzer.

If the quest for a cure to nausea was, at least, faintly marked on the field of medicine’s map

before Hub Beardsley’s made his discovery, the same cannot be said for one of the many

discoveries responsible for sickness at funfairs. Two friends and confectioners from Nashville,

Tennessee discovered how to make a new, wispy snack from spinning heated sugar in a

rotating bowl that had small holes drilled into it. Centrifugal force causes the melted sugar to

spin through the tiny holes, where it solidifies in the air creating strands of yummy candyfloss.

The problem of how to make candyfloss from sugar didn’t exist on any maps before 1897,

when John Wharton and William Morrison made their discovery. The field of confectionary

simply wasn’t trying to solve the problem of making wispy hairs of spun sugar and so the

invention blindsided everyone. Seven years later candyfloss had become the ‘feast of the

fair’, selling an impressive 68,655 boxes for the then-high price of 25c each at the 1904

World’s Fair in St. Louis. Candyfloss was on the map.

Another unmarked discovery made in Tennessee was that the running of a store could be

made more efficient if its customers were made to fetch and pack their items. Leading up to

the First World War, all grocery shoppers would have been served by an assistant from

behind the counter. The very thought that patrons should be expected to help themselves to

consumables was preposterous. Virtually no goods came ready-packaged – everyday items

such as cheese, butter and soap were cut and sized to order. Cereals, sugars and spices

were mixed and weighed before being handed over to the customer. The concept of a
supermarket wasn’t on anyone’s radar in early 1916, when Clarence Saunders filed his

patents and then opened the world’s first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, at 79

Jefferson Street, Memphis. By 1923 there were nearly 1,300 Piggly Wiggly stores across

America. Saunders found a problem on the map that no one knew existed and, in doing so,

brought savvy industrialists to the attention of new and lucrative problems waiting to be

solved.

The nascent Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry mushroomed in value during the

early 1920s and has been projecting forwards through innovation ever since, building

powerful conglomerates out of the smartest thinking and most adaptive of the entrepreneurs

(e.g. Proctor & Gamble, Nestle, Kellogs, Cadburys). Retail experts would say that much of the

innovation that shoppers see in their supermarkets first originates from the CPG industry. The

field has a long heritage of searching for problems, so there are many unsolved problems

marked out on its map. The field also regularly employs the techniques discussed in the next

chapter which, as we shall discover, lead to successful ‘new product development’.

III.

I was very fortunate to accidentally discover a problem that the CPG industry had marked out

on their map when, in 2001, I was thinking about what problems I wanted to solve next. I had

recently sold an Internet company and was getting restless after innovating in the ‘dot-com’

field through the entire boom-and-bust cycle. I wanted to play in a new sandbox and I

considered the wireless space to be an obvious place to explore.

Back in 2001 we all had mobile phones glued to our ears but the screens were usually much

smaller than today’s and bandwidth was slower and more expensive than it is now. Ringtones

were just starting to take off and texting had become a part of our culture. Other than that,

phones were mainly used for making phone calls. It seemed obvious to me, after witnessing

the Internet map being redrawn so quickly and powerfully, that the ‘mobile field’ was virtually

barren and primed for seeding. I did OK financially from running a creative agency during the
 28
dot-com cycle, but quite a few of my mates had banked hundreds of millions from owning

their ideas. The experience taught me the value of intellectual capital and I made the decision

to stick to a business model where my company owned the ideas in the next cycle.

In late 2001 an old client-mate of mine from one of the CPGs told me that the industry has an

enormous problem with money-off coupons being wrongly used to claim discount at

supermarkets. Because of flaws in the redemption process, it was estimated that shoppers

were redeeming 80% of their coupons without the sponsoring brand being present in the

shopper’s basket. With nearly six billion coupons distributed in the UK each year by the

CPGs, this was a huge problem waiting to be solved. My hunch was that mobile phones could

provide a solution.

I studied the history of the supermarket and learned how shopper behaviour has changed

since the first Piggy Wiggly in 1923. The note below is taken from one of my 2001

scrapbooks;

We changed the way that we shop for things about 50 years ago when our parents or grandparents bought

themselves a car and a fridge-freezer. We went from shopping every day at the greengrocer, butcher and general

store to filling our new Ford with food three or four times a month. Supermarkets encouraged this in the 50s by

building their stores around a car park. Then supermarkets developed loyalty programs that rewarded customers with

nice perks, and used this as a tool to collect information from transactions. This helped them make better-informed

decisions about what products to stock in stores and gave them a bond with their customers. The loyalty statements

arrived through the post every month, showing the house budget keeper how near they were to having enough points

for that coveted reward. There was harmony between the frequency of store visits (about 3 or 4 a month) and contact

(monthly). The cost of sending out the statements was soon absorbed by CPGs, who were invited to produce money

off coupons to be inserted within the monthly statements. Finally, we became convenience shoppers and reverted to

visiting the shops almost daily again, encouraged by supermarket owners hungry for growth but restricted from

opening too many new superstores through Government legislation. This happened at more-or-less the same time

that postal costs started to soar above the rate of inflation, motivating the supermarket to send out loyalty statements

quarterly instead of monthly.

28
My company Web Marketing was sold to Chime Plc for £19 million
I thought that I may have uncovered a problem within the field of retail; that there was

disharmony between the frequency of loyalty statements and the increased shopping visits
29
made by convenience shoppers . I started thinking about the membership number on my

loyalty card and then about numbers in general. I noticed how I didn’t know my wife’s mobile

phone number because it was programmed into my phone and I realised that people hate

changing their phone number. It’s the last thing that they want to change. Email accounts

come and go and we lose our home phone number when we move towns, but handing out a

new mobile phone number is a total pain.

This inspired me to design a system that could instantly identify a customer at the checkout

from a barcode displayed on their mobile phone. I conceived a process in which the cash
30
register would interact with remote computers whenever one of our unique identifiers is

presented in a transaction, passing transaction data across to our servers in real-time. Our

remote servers were trained to pass real time instructions back to the cash register whenever

certain rules were met (e.g. 2 packets of cereal on offer, seen to have been scanned during

the transaction). This provided a solution to the issue of 80% malredemption of discount

coupons. I was early to the idea and was able to secure valuable patents that protect it.

The CPG community supported my innovation and committed large budgets to help towards

my research and development. Retailers were a little bit slower in recognising the opportunity

and it took about two years before the first pilot took place. Thankfully, it was recognised as

successful by CPGs and retailers - and won heaps of awards and acclaim from both fields in
31
2006. At time of writing, the company is still waiting for the first UK supermarket to adopt its

solution but has rolled out services into over 14,000 smaller, independent stores and the

29
Supermarkets didn’t share this view between 2002 and 2007 when I tried pitching
them my ideas (as described in Chapter 3). Or if they did, it wasn’t a priority problem
that needed a solution urgently.
30
The unique identifier would start out as a barcode, sent to the phone by text
message. We soon started working with handset manufacturers to understand how
smart NFC chips, found in Oyster cards, would make their way into mobile phones.
31
I stepped away towards the end of 2007 to spend more time innovating and less
time bluffing my way around trying to manage an international company.
technology has been licensed internationally - all from a simple idea that was waiting to be

discovered.

Summarising Problems in the Creative Process

We learned from Alvin Toffler that all things, from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy, are

just processes. The microbiologist, Bonnie Bassler, taught us that even microbes of bacteria

evolve over time by adapting to their surroundings. They are smart enough to collaborate with

their own species and build alliances with others to solve environmental problems.

Borrowing from the agricultural metaphor, we came to understand how some problems are

known by the harvesters and are marked on their maps, whereas other problems haven’t

been spotted yet (or at least brought to the attention of expert harvesters) and so are

unmarked on the map. It can take some time for a field to agree that a problem exists and

sometimes the field finds it difficult to acknowledge that a problem does exist until a solution

is proffered (e.g. candyfloss).

Creativity requires harvesters to consider those problems in order to arrive at a solution. How

this is achieved will be revealed in the next chapter.

Chapter 6: The Third Element; Divergent Thinking Harvesters

From a very early age, it was his passion for writing that pulled Alfred Harmsworth towards

the field of journalism. He had already edited his school newspaper and was working for a

magazine publishers when, in 1886, he was made editor of Bicycling News. Karl Benz,

generally acknowledged as the inventor of the modern automobile, had only built about a

dozen of his cars by this time, so we could consider the young Alfred Harmsworth to have

been the Jeremy Clarkson of his day. His magazine road-tested and reviewed the latest

bicycle models released, and reported on events that would have been of interest to cycling

enthusiasts.

A very different type of magazine flying off the shelves at the time; a weekly title called Tit-

Bits, crammed with human-interest stories focusing on shock and sensation, was selling

nearly a million copies a month. Harmsworth couldn’t help but notice that it was feted as

being one of the most popular publications, appealing to the voluminous working classes. The

Elementary Education Act in 1870 had made huge improvements in raising literary levels
32
outside of the traditional, privileged Educated Classes , providing the opportunity for

entrepreneurially minded innovators to feed a new hunger for knowledge among the lower
33
classes. Tit-Bits was one of dozens of fast-food publications targeting the hoi polloi in the

mid-1880s, which contributed to a subfield emerging from within the traditionally more refined

and serious field of publishing. Sensing an opportunity, Alfred packed in his job at Bicycling

News, got on his bike and started a magazine that would compete with Tit-Bits – ‘Answers to

Correspondents’.

Harmsworth started Answers with issue three in order to create the pretence that the answers

had been contributed by real readers, and some of the questions that he dreamed up were

truly dreadful; Why don’t Jews ride bicycles?’ was one early question. It isn’t difficult to see

32
These were the last days of Queen Victoria’s reign and the Class System was
running deeper than at any time in British history.
33
Known as ‘Penny Dreadfuls’.
where he drew his inspiration from for that one! As we shall discover, the exceptionally

creative Alfred Harmsworth was, predominantly, a Divergent and Literal thinker.

I.

Answers to Correspondents was struggling to survive and teetering towards bankruptcy,

which would have brought shame to Harmsworth and his family. The Harmsworths mixed in

High Society circles and the scandal of insolvency was an indignity that Alfred feared more

than anything else. He begged his brother, a sensible and business minded civil servant, to

take a look at the company accounts and help him out. Upon realising how serious the

situation was, his brother, Harold, quit his job so that he could provide the stewardship and

support that would save his brother from financial ruin - and protect the family name. They

would forge a formidable partnership and, together, revolutionize the field of journalism.

With the daily pressures of managing the financial affairs now handled by the very capable

Harold Harmsworth, Alfred was able to turn his attention towards creativity. His first problem

was to increase the circulation of Answers to Correspondents and he solved this by asking a

tramp to tell him his idea of happiness. The tramp answered, “If I knew that I would have a

pound a week for life, I would be happy.” Alfred rushed back to his office and instructed his

team to run a competition in the next issue of Answers, offering the prize of ‘£1 a week for life’

to the person that could guess how much gold and silver was stored in the Bank of England

on a given day. The idea was a storming success and the issue printing the winning answer

sold over 200,000 copies. The Harmsworth Brothers were back in the black and on their way
34
towards earning a profit of £30,000 a year. Alfred was in his late 20s, three years older than

Harold.

The new wealth and success didn’t cause Alfred and Harold to think about taking things easy

and settling back on luxury yachts and exploring the Empire, as was common amongst the

wealthy classes of the time. Alfred did enjoy blowing his money on other boys toys though

34
About £1.5 million in today’s money.
and there were many to choose from because plenty of new gadgets were being invented

during this episode of history (the first cameras, radios, telephones etc.); he even bought the

very first Mercedes Benz that was imported into the UK, to drive from his palatial, waterside

home in Kent to the London office on Fleet Street. Being an early adopter of technology was
th
an expensive habit in the late 19 century but fortunately Alfred had an incessant appetite for

solving problems that would prove to be financially rewarding.

The newspapers of the day were stuffy, boring, dull broadsheets that were produced

exclusively for the Educated Classes. They were full of sleep inducing journals reporting from

the worlds of law, politics and business; nothing about them appealed to the ordinary man.

Alfred spotted a problem in the field that no one else had recognised; that the market was

primed for a popular newspaper aimed at the masses. He sensed that a daily paper filled with

short, simply told stories and features borrowed from the Penny Dreadfuls would have broad
35
appeal and so he set about producing the first tabloid - The Daily Mail.

Everything about his newspaper was revolutionary when compared with other papers of the

era. There were eleven broadsheets at the time, selling less than a million copies daily

between them, at three pence a copy. Despite choosing a better grade of paper to print on,

Alfred decided to undercut his rivals and boldly printed the promise, “A Penny Newspaper for

One Halfpenny” on the front page. Next to this he added a second promise, “Busy Man’s

Daily Journal”.

th
The first issue rolled off the press on 4 May 1896, a year before Queen Victoria’s jubilee.

Alfred sensed that the mood of the nation was upbeat and celebratory and pitched his tone

accordingly. Daily Mail was an entertaining concoction of domestic news (robberies, murders,

scandals) mixed with plenty of ideas taken from Penny Dreadfuls (plenty of illustrations,

competitions, human interest stories, recipes). None of this had been printed in a newspaper

before and the idea was immediately brushed aside as lunacy by the establishment and their

35
Harmsworth even invented the word Tabloid, which doesn’t refer to the shape of
the paper, as most people imagine. Instead it is his description of the type of writing
style used in his papers – tabloid writing involves using “boiled down language”.
newspaper barons. “It’s not to be taken seriously,” one was reported to have said, “It’s just a

paper by office boys for office boys.” As we shall discover, the establishment should have

taken Harmsworth and his creation much more seriously because The Daily Mail would soon

influence the world of politics in all sorts of ways and Alfred would become an important

statesman. They also missed a massive financial opportunity; soon after its launch the paper

had over half a million readers and grew rapidly to reach a multimillion circulation.

II.

Let us investigate how Alfred was able to outsmart the establishment through divergent, literal

thinking.

What is Divergent Thinking?

Divergent thinking is the process of coming up with plenty of solutions to a problem that has

more than one right answer. The purpose of divergent thinking is to provide a wide range of

ideas for the thinker to evaluate later on in the creativity process. Some of the ideas produced

will probably be discovered to be completely inappropriate later, but they perform an

important function in helping the thinker to pour out his or her thoughts randomly – in a
36
controlled way .

The opposite of divergent thinking is convergent thinking. Convergent thinking is a very

important function for reaching a solution where a problem only has one answer (e.g. 2 +2 =

4). After the convergent thought is developed, the thinker can then evaluate the idea and

decide whether it solves the problem. If it is judged to have passed the test, the problem is

solved and no further solutions are required. Convergent thinking is the wicked enemy of

creativity for three reasons;

36
I have provided some training exercises that stimulate and improve divergent
thinking, later in the book.
 - Objectively evaluating the validity of ideas interrupts the process of developing further

ideas.

- There is usually more than one way to solve a problem.

- The first idea is not likely to be the best idea.

With practice, a divergent thinker becomes comfortable with the concept of pouring out ideas

without being (too) judgemental. In training sessions it is easy to spot the participants that

have released their natural tendency to immediately want to judge each idea because their

suggestions become more varied, whereas people who find the process more difficult tend to

propose ideas with a common theme. Earlier in the book, in Chapter 1 when I asked who

were your five geniuses, you solved the problem using divergent thinking. Mine were Steve

Jobs, Warren Buffet, Gordon Ramsey, Eminem and Arsene Wenger. Were your results as

unrelated as mine? If you wrote them on the inside cover, take a look.

Underground tube drivers display convergent thinking to calculate the route from one station

to the next. London cabbies rely on divergent thinking.

When they are going through the arduous learning of the Knowledge to prepare for their

exams, would-be cabbies often start out by plotting the route out on a map using two pins and

a piece of string before getting onto their moped and experiencing the journey for themselves.

It is a habit that sticks with them after they have earned their badge and become professional

taxicab drivers. Next time you find yourself in the back of a Black Taxi, ask the driver about

‘Seeing The Line’. He will look at you strangely because it is a phrase only used by cabbies

and refers to the process of selecting a route after picking up a fare.

Cabbies see London as a grid with areas that are either North, South, East or West. When a

driver picks you up and asks you where you are going, he starts plotting lines in his head to

help solve the problem of how to take you there. Usually, his first line will be straight ‘as the

crow flies’ but these routes are never possible. After thinking about traffic conditions, one-way
zones, availability of taxi lanes and the time-of-day, the cabbie will have mentally plotted

several lines. Only then does he step back and ‘see the line’.

III.

What is Divergent, Literal Thinking?

Alfred Harmsworth was a prolific divergent, literal thinker. Through closer examination of how

he formulated his ideas (and later in this chapter, through similar close examination of

divergent, lateral thinkers) we should understand the differences between literal and lateral

thinking. Exercises to help develop both types of thinking appear later in the book. Remember

though; there are no attainment tests in this book and we are seeking knowledge with

understanding in this journey together. Don’t be tempted to jump to the back too soon!

Alfred’s first problem that needed solving was to boost circulation of Answers to

Correspondents. He may have considered a number of ideas including;

(i) Dropping the cover price, (ii) Getting celebrity endorsement, (iii) Getting it more widely distributed, (iv) Increasing

the frequency of publication, thereby selling more copies over the period of a month - assuming circulation holds

steady, (v) Run a popular competition.

I recounted the story about how Alfred’s conversation with a tramp led to a brilliantly

successful competition that contributed towards a healthy increase in readership and profit. It

wasn’t the only path that he took; Alfred also exploited the emerging rail network to reach

towns, villages and hamlets that weren’t ordinarily serviced by competing Penny Dreadfuls.

We can begin to see how he must have listed the various ways to impact readership and

then, after evaluating which of those ideas were worth pursuing, turned his attention to

thinking about them in closer detail. The concept of offering £1 a week for life would have

been one of many ideas proffered up by Alfred before he struck gold. Later he would offer

£1,000 to the first reader to fly across the English Channel and £10,000 to fly from London to

Manchester. Alfred Harmsworth had no shortage of ideas!

We can see how he considered a number of factors when creating the first tabloid

newspaper; the process almost certainly started with him pontificating over the gaps in the

market and the opportunity for a new publication. He already owned ample and state-of-the-

art printing machinery to produce the burgeoning range of magazines that his company was

publishing; in the few years between Answers and Daily Mail the brothers launched an

average of two new titles a year. Alfred and Harold would have known that their printers

would be more productive if they ventured away from publishing weekly magazines and into

the business of producing a daily newspaper. They could have considered increasing the

frequency of launching new magazine titles in order to make their printing machines more

productive or perhaps subcontract time on the presses to other publishers. Instead they

decided to take on the newspaper Barons and launch a daily of their own.

In designing The Daily Mail, Alfred pulled one off one of the easiest divergent, literal thinker

tricks in the book; he stared at a copy of The Telegraph and listed everything that he

considered to be its opposite quality.

(i) Conventional newspapers were full of long articles; the opposite was to make the articles short and snappy. (ii)

Conventional newspapers focused on Court, Politics and Business; the opposite was to focus on social issues, (iii)

Conventional newspapers were stuffy and dull; the opposite was to make them entertaining. (iv) conventional

newspapers were expensive; the opposite was to make them affordable.

Opposites are useful for helping to solve a problem using divergent, literal thinking –

particularly when the problem is already known in the field. It is important to remember that

this is a type of divergent thinking, and so each statement (e.g. Conventional newspapers

were full of long articles) will have numerous opposites;

(i) A newspaper with just one, long article. (ii) A newspaper with some short and some long articles. (iii) A

newspaper that starts out with short articles and gets longer towards the back, (iv) Articles of random length. (v) Just

one short article and lots of white space. (vi) Long articles in the middle of the page, with short articles written around

the edges.
I wrote these ideas whilst holding my breath, which is a technique that I sometimes use to try

and force ideas out. The crazier ideas often pop out just as I am about to give up and draw for

breath. John Gillard taught me that trick during one of our private chats in his office and called

it “an inspiration moment”. He felt that pots of golden ideas waited in those last, panicked

moments before gasping for oxygen, when the mind was totally unfocused on evaluating and

processing the ideas that had just been produced. It doesn’t always deliver the goods but I

am very grateful for having been taught the practice and use it often. I recommend it to all my

students.

A very close friend of mine, Andrew, is a successful property developer who has achieved a

level of fame for creating some landmark properties, and is in the press at the moment

because he has built a development of luxury, environmentally friendly houses in a smart part

of London. He uses divergent, literal thinking to help him discover problems and provide

inspiration for new projects. His system is very similar to Harmsworth; one technique that he

shared with me involves writing down a few key attributes related to property and then

searching for opposites.

One attribute was entitled ‘Type of Property’ and the first example was ‘family home’.

Underneath this he added a never-ending list of opposites (e.g. pied-a-terre, bachelor pad,

granny flat). Another attribute was ‘What Sets This Property Apart?’ The first example was

‘designed for entertaining’. Below was another long list of opposites. (e.g. spectacular garden,

hi-tec, oversized bedroom). After doing this with a few other attributes, Andrew links together

the opposites to create several possibilities (e.g. a pied-a-terre with a spectacular garden, a

hi-tec granny flat etc.) and then, finally, evaluates whether the idea is worth pursuing.
 IV.

Fleet Street to Fleets of Battleships

Alfred struck gold with his ideas and the popularity of The Daily Mail soon contributed towards

him being perceived as one of the most influential men in the country – possibly the world.

His approach to journalism (“When a dog bites a man, that’s not a story. When a man bites a

dog, that’s a story”), and his awareness of applications for the emerging new technologies,

contributed towards a rapid rise to power and a long period of influence when he got there.

Seven years after founding The Daily Mail, he started The Daily Mirror (originally conceived

as a newspaper “By women and for women”) and introduced photography to journalism.

When the Boer War came along, Alfred’s papers were perfectly poised to bring home the grim

realities of war to the common man. The effect that this must have had on the psyche of
th
ordinary men and women in the early 20 century is difficult to comprehend today because

we have become so desensitised to seeing war zones on Sky News or CNN, but the harsh

and honest representation of the battlefield must have put fear into most who had never seen

action in the trenches. Sadly, the First World War was just moments away.

In 1915, now one of the world’s most influential men and proprietor of numerous newspapers

including former competitors, The Times and The Observer, Alfred exerted his influence to

remove the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, from his job. The First World War was a year old

when Alfred’s newspapers revealed how woefully unprepared Britain was for the battle. His

publications rallied a cry for the Government to create a Minister for Ammunitions and then

called for Lloyd George (the first Minister for Ammunitions and close friend of Alfred’s) to be

made Prime Minister. In 1916, Prime Minister Lloyd George made Alfred Harmsworth his

Director for Propaganda. Alfred had become so powerful that the German enemy moved their

battleships towards his mansion on the Kent coast and fired shells at it in an attempt to

assassinate him. They missed him, but killed his gardener’s wife.
The German battleship would have been relatively easy to spot in the water and shoot down.

British battleships were a lot trickier to hit, thanks to the divergent, lateral thinking of an artist

who was serving his country during the First World War.

What is Lateral Thinking?

Pre-1902, soldiers went into battle dressed in brightly coloured uniforms, making them an

easy target for the enemy snipers who saw them coming from miles away. Some clever spark

spotted the problem and the idea of wearing camouflage in battle was invented. One ponders

how the expert harvesters took so long to discover the problem – marching in bright colours

with a loud drum and a trumpet is hardly going to make them inconspicuous. The newly

formed field of camouflage quickly drafted a set of rules to help conceive disguises for any

given entity. Efforts should be made to conceal any combination from; shape, size, shine,
37
shadow and silhouette , so as to blend the entity into its environment or confuse the viewer

in some way. There are no straight lines in nature, but there are plenty of them on a battleship

and it was this problem that Norman Wilkinson was considering when he had a Eureka

moment of life-saving significance.

Two art students living in Paris, one a Frenchman called Georges Braque and the other a

Spaniard called Pablo Picasso, began experimenting together towards producing a new type

art that became known as cubism in 1907. Their work has a very distinctive look; on first

glance it often isn’t very obvious what the subject of the painting is. When Wilkinson stood in

front of the painting Harlequin with Guitar by Juan Gris (a friend and contemporary of Picasso

and Braque), all those straight lines and angles helped the proverbial bulb to light up in his

head. The answer to his problem was in optical illusions.

Every schoolchild knows that it is possible to create an optical illusion by laying diagonal lines

over concentric squares. To see what I mean, take a look at the diagram below;

37
New rules were added later – for example, after the discovery of thermal imaging it
became necessary to conceal heat.
Norman Wilkinson realised that, if a battleship were painted in a cubist style with lots of

angles and blocks of colour, the effect would be to make it difficult for the enemy to predict its

size, shape or direction. This would make it a lot more difficult to fire missiles at with any

accuracy. He described his technique as Dazzle Camouflage and demonstrated it first on

HMS Alsatian. The Royal Navy and the US Navy both adopted the idea and quickly worked

towards refining it for their fleets. Towards the end of the war, all sorts of creative types

(sculptors, set designers, artists) were summoned to London’s Royal Academy of Arts to help

design templates for Britain’s fleet. Small wooden models of battleships were first built in the

workshop, then painted in the studio and finally taken to the local park’s pond where they

were viewed through a telescope. Through trial and error, expert harvesters were able to

evaluate which designs performed the best before sending them down to the docks to be

scaled-up on the real thing.

Norman Wilkinson’s type of thinking is often described as lateral thinking. Whilst literal

thinking generally starts out with Sensing type behaviour, lateral thinking almost always starts
out with Intuition type behaviour. Both behaviour types are called into service in both systems,

but it is interesting to see how the seeds of knowledge tend to germinate differently in the two

models.

Lateral thinking was popularised by the psychologist and creative writer, Edward de Bono, in

the late 1960s and hoards of authors have been contributing fine work on the subject ever

since. Although it is only one type of thinking (and only one element of the creative process)

the majority of books covering creativity focus on lateral thinking. De Bono himself has written

dozens of books on the subject.

One way of understanding the difference between literal and lateral thinking is that, where

literal thinking usually starts off with a known problem and a list of things that can help to

produce further lists of opposites (e.g. Conventional newspapers were full of long, dull

articles), lateral thinking may or may not start with a known problem and doesn’t use

structured lists to help through exercises like ‘opposites’. Lateral thinking is more random.

V.

Most word association games sit on the boundary between literal and lateral thinking. Literal

thinking requires a step-by-step, structured approach to problem solving whereas lateral

thinking involves finding unobvious relationships between things. A literally minded answer to

the word Red might be Orange or Purple or Green. A laterally minded answer would be

something like Traffic-light or Brothel or Sunburn.

De Bono proposed a number of techniques to stimulate lateral creative thinking and, so long

as these are followed with strictly divergent behaviour, they can help to inspire brilliant ideas.

As is so often the case, De Bono’s simplest idea for inspiring creativity has turned out to be

amongst the most widely acclaimed techniques for lateral thinking – random words. His idea

is to pick a word at random (preferably a word that you can put the word ‘the’ in front of) and

use it to help solve a problem.

To show this concept in action, let’s assume that we are working for Alfred Harmsworth and

that he has a problem with his newspapers – they aren’t making him enough money. He

wants us to come up with ideas to sell more copies so that he can afford to get his garden

wall fixed after having it shelled by the Germans. I am going to play with the word ‘River’

because I learned that he had a coastal property and I live close to the River Thames. Let’s

see what happens while I hold my breath again;

(i) Rivers have mouths – maybe we can get people to shout out the daily news. (ii) Headlines in a bottle. Send them

down the river as a way of teasing people into buying the day’s papers. (iii) In typographical terms, a river is the

name given to gaps between paragraphs. Maybe we could squeeze some more news in the spaces between

paragraphs by using a different shade of ink? (iv) Rivers have bridges. We should build bridges with some of those

new self-service supermarkets that are popping up. They might be able to sell newspapers for us. (v) You can set

your clock by the time of the tides. If newspapers could be reliably delivered at a certain place by a certain time,

maybe people would congregate at that time and place to buy their copy.

These ideas are even more random than in the earlier example that I shared from divergent,

literal thinking. The intention of lateral thinking is to challenge traditional perceptions by

freeing the thinking mind to harvest from any number of fields, connecting seeds of

knowledge in the most unsystematic of ways.

Alfred could have helped us out by making his problem even broader. Instead of asking us to

solve his problem of not having enough money to fund his new garden wall by selling more

newspapers, he could have just asked us to come up with ideas that would help him make

some money – specific to him and still using the word river as the focus point;

(i) Turn his garden into a fairground and invite people to throw money into the water at the end of his garden to make

a wish, (ii) Float his company. (iii) Rivers have beds. Who has lots of beds? Hotels! Sell them copies of the

newspaper in bulk for their guests. (iv) Sell advertising in the river part of the newspaper. (v) Rivers have banks.

People trust banks. Do they trust his papers? If so, he could start the Daily Mail bank and use the money to pay for

his new garden.

Lateral thinking can be used to solve both types of problem on the map; marked and

unmarked. The earlier examples solved problems that already known in the field. For the last

story in this chapter, I want to share the last idea I had for my last company before leaving to

write this book. It solved a problem that wasn’t on any map and so I was able to give my

company a very tasty leaving gift.

VI.

It was early 2007 when I first felt that my company wasn’t really my company any more. It had

raised millions of pounds of funding and I now owned less than 50% of the shares. The

investors had hired their own managers – a sensible move, because I am an awful Chief

Executive – and I had very little to do except fly around meeting international partners and

play the role of ‘charismatic, quirky, visionary founder’. I act the part well with my unkempt

hair and unorthodox dress sense, but it was becoming a little bit tiresome to be a glorified zoo

exhibit and I was craving to get back to solving new problems. We had just signed a contract

to roll our mobile coupon technology into thousands of stores and I felt it was time to move on
38
soon. My investors had already come to that view too .

I thought that moving on was a cause for celebration and so I decided to focus on the word

celebration for a private session of brainstorming. I set myself the problem of finding more

ways of utilizing our technology in the thousands of stores beyond just mobile coupons. The

discount provided through these coupons are funded by big CPGs and my company

competes with other digital marketing companies (and other advertising platforms in general)

for a share of their marketing budget. Rather than just make the problem specific to gaining

more market share, I decided to keep my problem as open as possible.

38
Lesson for entrepreneurs; venture capitalists are making three decisions when they
choose to invest; Do they like the idea? Do they trust you to pull it off? Can they
bring anything besides money? If you do manage to get your idea up and running,
their focus for future rounds of funding will invariably change. If you don’t plan on
being involved with your start-up long term, this can be a good time to start
succession-planning for you and for your company.
I imagined that the staff might want to buy me a leaving present and I thought about how I

could apply that to our technology. Then I thought about how some of the staff might want to

stay in touch with me and that led me to thinking about social network websites such as My

Space and Facebook. It wasn’t a massive leap from there to remembering that ‘virtual gifts’

are sold on Facebook – people pay real money to send digital icons to their friends! Eureka,

we could set up a gift shop on social networking sites that provides users with the ability to

send real chocolate to their friends. We would sell the chocolate and take the money online

from the gift-giver and then text a redemption code to the gift-receiver with instructions on

where to go and collect their present. (From our network of thousands of local newsagents)

I quickly phoned our patent attorneys and asked them to run a patent search for the idea and

report to me by the end of the day. They reported back that it appeared wide-open for us to

file for patent protection and so I instructed them to do it straight away. Then I called a board

meeting and shared the idea with my investors and asked them to approve the budget to file
39
for protection . Thankfully, they agreed.

I left the company long before the service went live on Facebook, but I am very pleased that

they kept the name Celebrate for the application. I am still waiting for any of the staff or

investors to send me a gift through it though!

After using lateral thinking to solve the problem with Celebrate, I turned to literal thinking to

discover what other ideas might be out there. First, I thought about all the things that are sold

in newsagents apart from chocolate (opposites) and produced a long list. Magazine

subscriptions are sometimes given as gifts, so I sent out an email to management suggesting

that we send someone to meet with publishers. Facebook had rules that prohibit the

promotion of alcohol on their website so I drew a red ring around beer, wine and spirits on my

list.

39
This probably explains why they were keen to see the back of me!!
Then I thought about opposites of ‘newsagents’ that might be useful for a similar service to

Celebrate and quickly developed a list of ideas. The application could easily be transferred to

a coffee shop chain for buying a friend a coffee or doughnut, a florist for sending a romantic

gifts, a cinema chain for arranging a night out with friends via the social networking sites etc. I

rang the patent attorneys and made sure that the company was protected by owning the

intellectual property for these instances too.

Next I considered opposites of ‘Celebrate’, looking for applications that utilized the newsagent

network and social networking sites – but not in a celebratory setting. I thought about setting

up a site where students living on campus could provide shopping list requests to their

parents, who could then approve or disapprove each item before paying.

There were other ideas that came from these sessions, but they need to stay private for now.

Hopefully they won’t be that way for too long because ideas only really begin to gain any

currency when they are shared with someone. This is the subject for the final chapter before

we put the four elements together; Collaboration.

Summarising Divergent Thinking Harvesters in the Creative Process

We learned that divergent thinking is critical for creativity to happen because evaluation

interrupts to process of volunteering ideas. In Jungian terms, we are working with Intuition

more than Sensing during this element of the creative process. The opposite of divergent

thinking, convergent thinking, solves known problems that ordinarily only have one right

answer.

Problems that require creative thinking usually have more than one right answer. A divergent

thinking harvester senses these problems and applies intuition towards finding a solution,

working hard to stay on the Perceiving end of the scale to build a list of ideas. They can do

this with literal or lateral thinking techniques.

Literal thinking is particularly useful for coming up with new ways of doing things in a carefully

controlled manner; it’s a great technique for new product development, creating new

marketing strategies or solving a very clear objective. (e.g. Ideas for a competition).

Lateral thinking is an edgier and more random way of solving a problem and the results of a

brainstorm session using lateral thinking are totally unpredictable.

In sharing the story of the story of Celebrate, we discovered how I started out with lateral

thinking and then moved across to literal thinking to develop the idea further. In between

these two steps I collaborated with my patent attorney and my Board for their objective

judgements of the idea (the attorneys used their expertise to determine whether the idea was

protectable in law and the board judged it to be a potentially lucrative channel to invest in).

The final of the four elements in creativity is Collaborators. As we shall discover in the next

chapter, these are just as critical to the creative process as the other three elements.
Chapter 7: The Fourth Element; Collaborators

If we are all free on a Friday evening, a crowd of my friends congregate at one of our homes

after having dinner with our families. It is a habit that has been followed for as long as any of

us care to remember and a highlight of our week. We meet up, without our partners or our

children, to gossip and share news over a friendly game of tournament poker. No one gets

hurt because we don’t play for serious money, but we take the rules of the game very

seriously. Admittedly, some of us take the rules more seriously than others.

We occasionally take field trips to poker clubs, where we try out our luck against other poker

players for slightly larger stakes. Having a sense of the rules – and knowing that there is a

common set of rules amongst the players – makes it easy for the game to attract plenty of

players.

My mother is a very keen bridge player and taught me the rules of the game when I was

young so that she had someone to practice with. Although bridge and poker both use a single

deck of playing cards (and both provide the potential for gambling) there are very few

common rules between the two. Bridge is descended from the game of Whist and is always

played with two teams of two players. One team take the positions North and South at the

playing table and the other team take the positions East and West. In poker; it’s every man for

himself – there are no teams at the table.

I.
There are two stages in a game of bridge; the auction and the play. The purpose of the game

is for a team to win the contract during the auction stage and then fulfil (or better) the contract

during the play stage. The team that loses the auction stage adopts a strategy to try and

block their opponents from fulfilling their contract. It can be a tense, nail-biting affair.

The auction involves each player, one at a time going around the table, looking at their cards

and bidding for the contract. In doing so, they are offering their partner clues about the 13

cards that they are holding. A contract either involves one of the playing card suits (Spades,

Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs) or it is called No Trumps. If North is first to bid in the auction and

calls, “One heart”, they may be telling their partner that they have a few decent hearts

amongst their cards and that hearts should therefore be the trump suit. North isn’t allowed to

speak to South in plain English (or use a secret signal) to offer any clues about their cards.

The bid ‘one heart’ is committing the North-South alliance to win seven tricks; a fundamental

rule of the game is that the team with the highest bid needs to win six tricks plus whatever the

number is in their contract. (i.e. 3 Hearts would be committing the team to winning nine tricks)

Hearts would become trumps.

During the play stage of the game, there are thirteen tricks that can be won by either of the

two teams. A trick starts out with one of the players laying down a card and then the other

players around the table taking it in turns to put a card of the same suit down. The card with

the highest value wins the trick. (i.e. An ace beats everything else). If one of the players

doesn’t have any cards left in the suit being played, they can chose to put down a trump card

to win the trick or a card from any other suit and lose the trick. This part of the game can

become very strategic and an ability to count cards is very useful. In fact, the combined action

of storing and processing this information has been proven to be powerful protection against

Alzheimer’s disease. Bridge is better for your health than poker.

The bid, ‘one heart’ doesn’t necessarily mean that North has strong hearts; bidding languages

have developed over the years with their own systems for partners to communicate clues
within the rules of the game. There is such a thing as an artificial bid, in which a coded

message is passed from one player to the other that may be unrelated to the suit. The team

would still be held to their bid if they were to win the auction with an artificial bid and the suit

would still become trumps. Various systems of communicating through coded signals have

been developed in bridge and these systems are known as conventions. Some are very well

known and have become very famous. If North tried to negotiate through the auction using

one format of convention for bidding and South tried to use another, the team would struggle

to communicate – so it is important that both players agree on their convention and learn its

rules before they start playing.

When playing in a tournament, contestants must declare their favoured convention with the

organisers or judges and some tournaments are very strict about which conventions they

allow to be used. Borrowing again from the agricultural analogy, this enables the tournament

officials (expert harvesters) to ensure that the rules (map) are being followed by the players

(harvesters) according to a particular convention (seeds). This is important because, as we

shall discover, harvesters have a tendency to become increasingly creative whenever status

or money are involved.

II.

Bountiful Fields Attract Crowds of Creative Harvesters

Before 1995, which was the year that Netscape started the buzz that would become the dot-

com boom, the field of technology was reserved for geeks like me. Harvesters in our field

were often stereotyped for our looks and our peculiar pastimes – it was said that our skin was

paler because we rarely saw the sun, preferring to code away on our computers. The geek

pigeonhole still exists, but it is no longer a label that can be applied to all harvesters working

in the dot-com field these days because the Internet quickly became mainstream. New

technology millionaires had a healthier complexion and a snazzier style at the end of the 90s

than at the beginning. The Google boys may be the exception that proves this rule.
Venture capitalists arrived in the Internet field earlier than most harvesters, carrying pots of

gold, which they promised to swap for shares in new technology companies that might

emulate Netscape’s success. Gold can be very alluring and the promise of new, fast wealth

attracted bustling crowds of prospectors. I was one of the first harvesters to arrive at the

beginning of the infamous ‘bubble’ and I soon discovered that the field was abundant with

opportunities. My observation was shared by thousands of others and the venture capitalists

were soon flooded by business plans, created by harvesters who were panning for their share

of the gold. Some ideas contained in those business plans were excellent and revolutionary,

others were diabolical and un-investable. Systems were required by the venture capitalists to

separate the wheat from the chaff.

Whilst speaking with investor friends of mine who were veterans of the Internet boom for

research towards this book, many admitted to me that they struggled to understand the rules

of technology investment during the early days of the field’s growth - because so few rules

had been written. They were investing in technologies with no imminent sign of a profit – or

even revenue. As one seasoned investor told me, “People didn’t understand the Internet and

mistakenly thought that any company with an ‘e’ prefixing its name could become successful.

We hadn’t learned, yet, that the Internet becomes most powerful when it connects people and

information together without traditional geographical barriers. The best ideas create value

from those relationships by aggregating the people and the information. In 1995, we didn’t

really get aggregation and so we adopted a strategy of investing in plenty of offal in the hope

that we might, accidentally, end up with Wagyu beef.”

This strategy produced one of the greatest gold rushes in history. The media was awash with

stories of fledgling Internet companies that had attracted astonishing valuations, persuading

even further waves of would-be entrepreneurs to dream-up their own dot-com business

models. Soon though, the trickle of ideas being emailed to venture capitalists from

speculative entrepreneurs became a flow - and then a flood. This provided the venture

capitalists with an ability to benchmark and evaluate ideas – and so they quickly became
competent expert harvesters. When the bubble finally burst in late 2000, venture capitalists

had enough of their map drawn out to understand the rules of engagement in making

investment offers. They had also come to recognise the importance of consulting with

independent, objectively minded experts from within the fields that the prospective investment

intersected (e.g. Before making an investment in an online gambling company, a good

venture capitalist would consult with leaders from traditional, real world gambling companies).

This provides venture capitalists with the opportunity to ask other experts whether the

prospective idea solves a ‘known’ or an ‘unknown’ problem in their field.

The Venture Capital Institute recorded investments totalling just $10 million in 1975 from the

entire venture capital community (the year that Atari launched their first home video gaming

console). By 1980 that figure had grown to nearly $600 million and, after a particularly

turbulent period in the 1980s caused by unrealistic investors expecting consistent returns

above 30%, the figure soared to $1.4 billion in 1991. Nine years later, the annual inflow of

capital to fund investments made by venture capitalists shot past $100 billion. When a field

becomes so bountiful, harvesters are naturally keen to reap value however they can and so

become compelled to create ideas that they hope will be fruitful for them.

Although powerful, wealth isn’t the only stimulus for persuading harvesters to develop ideas

that might advance a field. For example, the urgency of war has focused many creative minds

and produced thousands of wonderful ideas (including Dazzle Camouflage for battleships

during the First World War) and mankind’s lust for exploring space has led to a number of

inventions that have greater value here on earth (e.g. SCOBA - Self-Contained On-Ground

Breathing Apparatus used by firemen around the world).

III.

A good technology entrepreneur quickly develops a sense of the rules that a venture capitalist

is likely to evaluate an idea against; ideas need to solve a demonstrable problem and be

shown to have scaleable potential. If it fails to meet either of these two criteria, the concept
and its originator are unlikely to collaborate with the venture capitalist and the seed of an idea

will, perhaps, wilt towards a slow, uncomfortable death. Venture capitalists aren’t the only

expert harvesters filtering the fields within the sphere of technology and the idea could be

shared with a different collaborator; but if no one in the field sees value in the idea then it is

worthless – and therefore fails my description of creativity. Creativity requires the

endorsement of expert harvesters.

Collaboration Requires a Common Understanding of the Rules

It is every bridge player’s dream to hold the Bermuda Bowl (which is actually a cup) up in the

air and shout those immortal words, “I am the champion of the world.” Top players have

congregated to outwit each other for more than fifty years in a tournament that has become

one of the most competitive and coveted in the sport. The event takes place every second

year and is hosted in a different city each time. Shanghai hosted it in 2007, Estoril in 2005

and Monte Carlo in 2003. It is called the Bermuda Bowl because the first tournament was

held in Bermuda in 1950 (where USA won, beating Great Britain). We return to Bermuda to

demonstrate the significance of expert harvesters using their rules to protect the integrity of a

bountiful field that had become infected by creative pirates, through one of the most infamous

scandals in the history of the game.

Italy were playing the United States in the 1975 finals and the atmosphere was electric

because it was a repeat of the previous two finals, in which the Italians pipped the Americans

both times. The voltage was ramped up by the American captain, a journalist for ‘Popular

Bridge’ magazine, who wrote an incendiary article just before the tournament implying that

‘the Blues’ would struggle to compete when tournament organisers eventually get round to

putting blocks between the feet of players. His article hinted towards secret, illegal messages

passing backwards and forwards between the Italian partners by the tapping of feet.
Lo and behold, a reporter covering the final match spotted some unusual behaviour between
40
Gianfranco Facchini and Sergio Zucchelli. Every so often, one would initiate a sequence of

tapping their feet on the other’s feet. The reporter asked a couple of other spectators whether

they saw the incident too and they confirmed his suspicions. With tapping of feet being strictly

against the rules of the game, the crowd were incensed and a brouhaha kicked off. The

tournament organisers didn’t want the negative publicity that they feared would be inevitable if

the Italians were, rightfully, expelled from the tournament and so they decided to severely

caution them instead. The Americans were defeated in the end, possibly because they were

distracted by the fracas caused by the cheating Italians. Fortunately, the rules were improved

at the behest of expert harvesters and bidding screens were placed between the legs of

players in subsequent tournaments. Gianfranco Facchini and Sergio Zucchelli quickly faded

from the tournament scene soon after.

The Bermuda Cup was rocked by another cheating scandal in the very next tournament.

During the playoffs for the 1977 tournament, two American players were said to have been

using a secret hand signal to illegally transmit information backwards and forwards. They

resigned before any formal accusations could be made, causing the entire US team to be

disqualified. The players later attempted to sue the organising body for defamation of

character, false allegations of misconduct, and forced resignation and claimed $44 million in

compensation. They settled out of court when the two players were allowed to be reinstated

into the American Contract Bridge League so long as they agreed never to play with each

other again. No money changed hands in the settlement.

The game of bridge demonstrates three things about the relationship between creativity and

collaboration; (i) divergent thinkers will be more likely to come up with imaginative ways of

exploiting the rules if there is a reward for the effort, (ii) if the expert harvesters believe that

unbreakable rules are being broken, they will disallow the idea and may develop further rules

to block similar attempts in the future, (iii) divergent thinkers can witness other harvesters

failing to innovate within those unbreakable rules and may decide to test them in another way.

40
For clarity, these were Italian players. I acknowledge that they may be popular
family names on the east coast of USA; particularly in cities like Providence, RI.
This feedback loop is virtually identical to the way in which the bacterium was seen to evolve

in Chapter 5. It is a clear parallel to the method in which bacteria life evolves through an

intricately networked web of receptors that relay information back to the cell, informing it

about its surroundings and enabling collaboration with its own and other species.

Collaboration Requires Expert Harvesters to Recognise that Rules Can Change - Part I

Every field has the right to be cautious and conservative about change – the fields of

psychology and law are two that benefits from this approach – but harvesters should avoid

those in which absolutely no change in the culture is tolerated. At risk of receiving my own

personal fatwa, I don’t believe it would be contentious to hypothesise that Al Queda practice a

subset of Islam that has had its evolution stunted by expert harvesters who have an

unalterable belief in their rules and are unwilling to accept that they could evolve. This

phenomenon is not typical in most branches of the religion; Afghanistan and Iraq have both

been progressive and creative capitals of Islam during less turbulent moments of their history.

Religious beliefs are no different to Toffler’s viruses or galaxies; they are just processes that

should naturally evolve over time. Al Queda is sometimes likened to a cancer because cancer

cells reproduce identical cells without any consideration to environmental factors. The

uncontrolled growth of an abnormal cancer cell can quickly pollute the body unless detected

and treated.

IV.

A few years ago, when my son, Luc, was eight years old, I noticed that he was struggling a bit

with his reading. In his eagerness to get to the end of a sentence, he was missing the short

words ( a, of, the, at, by, etc.) and this was causing him to lose the meaning of whatever he
was reading. He quickly became bored and frustrated. To help him out, I designed a simple

little computer application that took words from a book and displayed them on a screen, one-

word-at-a time. Luc would be able to control the speed of the words being displayed by

holding down one of two buttons – faster or slower – and could pause, rewind or fast forward

through the text using other controls.

The idea inspired me to migrate the application to mobile phones; I had recognised that a

problem with mobile phones is that they often have very small screens and this makes it an

unnatural environment to read books from. I sensed that my new application might solve this

problem. After learning from cognitive psychologists that the one-word-at-a time reading style
41
is most comfortably used by children , I developed three further reading styles that would

give my application broader appeal.

By the time I was ready to show the application to book publishers in 2005, it was so polished

that it even managed to subtly and automatically adjust the speed of the words that were

flashing up one-at-a-time so as to convey sentences of drama or poetic description. I begged

one of my friends, a managing director who was working for an international book publisher,

to quit her job and run my new company. Our idea was to provide publishers with a new

channel to sell their books to readers. We built a store that was kind of a hybrid between

iTunes and Amazon, in as much as customers could explore their way through our library and

then purchase and download a book to their phone. Within 12 months my friend had
42
successfully signed up more than 90% of the UK’s leading publishers to our new service.

When we launched our mobile bookstore, I imagined we had struck gold. This company had

separate shareholders to my ‘mobile payments’ company. The patents that I filed soon after

creating the application for Luc would earn me a few pennies each time a book was

downloaded. I imagined that we would achieve thousands of downloads a day, maybe more.

41
It relies on something called working memory which children have plenty of, but
we tend to start losing soon after puberty.
42
The company, ICUE, has partnerships with 90+% of ‘non-illustrated’ book
publishers.
After all, revenue from sales of chart music to mobile phones had just overtaken sales derived

from CD singles. As I was to discover, publishers weren’t behaving as objectively minded

expert harvesters. I failed to consult and collaborate with the most important expert

harvesters of them all – paying customers.

Our business model involved offering publishers a risk-free method to sell books through the

mobile channel. We converted their books into our proprietary format and hosted them in our

online store for free. They set the price of their books and we promised to deliver customer

footfall and provide the billing systems to collect the revenue. Many publishers had become

hypnotised by the promise of new fortunes that could be found from mobile and so concurred

with our view that there was a problem waiting to be solved; delivering books to mobiles so

that can be read from cover to cover like traditional books.

Good Collaboration Involves a Meeting of Objectively Minded Harvesters

Thinking objectively, this may not have been the most urgent problem relating to the fields of

literature and mobile technology. If they wanted to consume an entire book on a mobile

phone, maybe users would find different ways of doing so (i.e. audio books). By looking to

solve the problem of how to read from cover to cover, it is possible that we were scratching

for the wrong solution. In any event, we sold less than a thousand mobile books over the

course of 24 months. Consumers were not prepared (yet, perhaps) to pay £4.50 to download

a book to their mobile phone and read it from cover to cover.

As is so often the case, we had a huge dollop of good fortune when an expert harvester, a

manager of the marketing department for one of our partner publishers, agreed to sponsor an

experiment to evaluate how our reading application could solve a different and more

immediate problem for the publishing industry. Publishers invest fortunes on outdoor

advertising to market their new blockbusters – especially around train stations with posters on

every platform. Normally the advert shows the book’s cover and a few messages to convey

why we should rush out to the shops and buy the book. One publisher shared our view that it
would be smart to offer chapter samplers, downloaded for free to the mobile phone of anyone

who chose to interact with the advert. This would provide publishers with greater value from

their outdoor advertising (or any advertising) because it offered an interaction with potential

readers of their books, and it would provide readers with greater value because (for free) they

could download a chapter sample and read it before deciding to make the investment in

buying the book.

This new use for our application was an immediate success – within the first weeks of our first

campaign nearly as many downloads of chapter samples were recorded as sales of mobile

books in our first two years of business. The solution only became seeded when we

collaborated with objectively minded expert harvesters who recognised the value in our idea.

We hope that our innovation will add value to the field of publishing and that it will change the
43
way (i.e. Rules/Map) in which new books are marketed to prospective readers . At time of

writing this book, most of the leading publishers have agreed to incorporate our technology

within some of their advertising.

V.

If I had failed to think objectively about how my book reading application might solve

problems, I may have missed the opportunity to contribute to the field and reap my rewards.

In my case, this is inherently more difficult to do because I register so strongly as a ‘Feeler’ on

Jung’s Thinking-Feeling scale.

Jung believed that we all suffer from an inferior function on his personality scale – mine is

undoubtedly Thinking! I struggle to evaluate objectively and so I have found it necessary to

employ all manner of filter systems to protect the expert harvests that I collaborate with from

being swamped by my flow of ideas. This challenge is compounded by the fact that I have a

compulsive-obsessive character that requires my constant resources of discipline to keep in

control. Aside from recommending that you hire very objectively minded people to help

43
Try it out for free (well, the cost of a text message). Text xxxx to 64888 to receive
the first chapter of this book on your mobile.
control your output of ideas, I have provided some more useful exercises towards the end of

this book in the section ‘Putting it into Practice’.

Collaboration Requires Expert Harvesters to Recognise that Rules Can Change - Part II

th
Chemical analysis of the opium poppy was first conducted in the late 19 century and

revealed opium to be the combination of two compounds; codeine and morphine. Knowledge

about this flower has provided scientists with the ability to produce a range of opiates

including heroin and morphine. Heroin is most famous for being a recreational drug that with

a high potential for being addictive, but its discovery (or rediscovery, to be more accurate)

came about when a chemist working for Bayer & Co was attempting to produce codeine – a

similar compound to morphine, but less potent and less addictive. The chemist, Felix

Hoffmann, was retracing the steps taken by C.R. Alder Wright, made 23 years earlier in 1874

in St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, London. Wright was the first person to produce

heroine, but soon abandoned his efforts when he realised the many negative side effects that

it generated.

Instead of producing codeine, Hoffman produced heroin; a substance that is estimated to be

twice as powerful as morphine. Wright had never given his drug that name – it was just

referred to as diacetylmorphine or diamorphine. Bayer named it heroin after the German word

‘heroisch’ because field studies recorded that the drug made people feel heroic.

Morphine is the main active ingredient in opium and can be seen being used successfully to

solve all sorts of problems in almost every hospital. Common uses of the drug include

epidurals, chronic pain relief, as an adjunct to general anaesthesia, as an antitussive for

severe coughs and as an antidiarrheal for severe cases (e.g. AIDS patients). None of these

are instances in which a patient would enjoy the experience of being high on the drug and no

sensible patient would choose to consume morphine without good reason. The story of a

morphine derivative, Apomorphine, will reveal that this drug is very different. It also
demonstrates how new rules in a field can make an enormous difference in helping to have

an old idea accepted by expert harvesters years after they had first rejected it.

Apomorphine is only two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom away from being morphine.

But when these three atoms (which make up one complete water molecule) are snipped off of

a morphine molecule, the newly created substance bares almost no resemblance to its close

cousin. One report about Apomorphine described it as ‘less effective at dulling pain than a

shot of Southern Comfort”. Although it carried the unfortunate side effect of inducing strong
44 th
bouts of nausea , Apomorphine was presented as the solution to two problems in the 20

century; Parkinson’s disease and homosexuality.

It was first suggested as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease in the early 1950s, but the first

clinical trial wasn’t conducted until 1970. The drug was initially administered orally, but

caused such a vomiting reaction that it was soon prescribed through injections. However

Apomorphine’s short half-life made this impractical too – injections were required every

couple of hours and became less effective as the disease developed. It was decided that

apomorphine was not an effective solution to Parkinson’s disease - other drugs such as L-

Dopa offered greater benefits and less severe side effects.

Truth really is stranger than fiction. In the 1960s homosexuality was labelled as a mental

disorder and solutions were sought to fix the problem of deviant minds. Like a scene out of A

Clockwork Orange, patients were forced to ingest a dose of Apomorphine and then shown

homoerotic images until they started barfing. It was believed that they would associate

throwing up with thinking homosexual thoughts and that the treatment would correct this by

persuading the patient to alter their behaviour through aversion therapy. Unsurprisingly, this

was an even more ineffective use of Apomorphine than attempting to cure Parkinson’s

disease. Although the expert harvesters mistakenly believed homosexuality to be a problem

requiring a solution, Apomorphine certainly didn’t provide any answers.

44
Apomorphine was first marketed as a purgative, alongside castor oil and other
Victorian remedies.
The wonderfully named CEO of a biotech company, Vincent Romeo, discovered something

else about Apomorphine when he was reading through some old medical notes taken from

the Parkinson’s trial – patients became frisky and ‘solid in the wood department’ soon after

receiving their shot of the drug. It was a running joke amongst the nurses that the ward

descended into Carry On type behaviour whenever the jabs were handed out.

Viagra was created by chemists working for the drug giant, Pfizer, and received its patents in

1996 – a year before Romeo was discovering that Apomorphine had caused bed sheets to

rise around the groin department. Viagra is worth billions of dollars to Pfizer and is even

advertised on television in the US with endorsements from celebrities including Pele. The

famous blue pill works by releasing nitric oxide into the bloodstream, inflating the vessels

around the penis. Apomorphine goes straight to the brain, targeting the region responsible for

primitive urges such as hunger and sexual arousal. Simply put, Viagra merely puts a ‘bit’ in

the drill whereas Apomorphine turns it into a Black & Decker and switches the power on. It is

unfortunately then that vomiting is a side effect of ‘the chemical Tom Jones’.

An earlier invention made by Pfizer, way back in 1972, was the nasal spray. Besides being a

useful decongestant when steroids are sprayed up into the nasal passages, the delivery

method is also very effective at delivering chemicals straight to the brain without first passing

through the liver or gut. Vincent Romeo sensed that he could use a commonly known drug,

Apomorphine, to solve a commonly known problem, sexual dysfunction, – without the barfing

that was usually associated with the drug. Previous episodes of collaboration between

divergent thinkers and expert harvesters had been seeking to solve the problems of

Parkinson’s disease and homosexuality. More than twenty years later, using seeds of

knowledge that had been available in the field during that first period of collaboration, Romeo

fused the seeds together in an innovative way to solve a different problem.

In a 2006 trial of 11,000 patients with an average age of 61, approximately 17% reported that

the wrinkles in their winkles vanished almost immediately after sniffing the aphrodisiac.

Doctors aren’t convinced yet and Apomorphine, which is marketed as Uprima, is not generally
available on prescription in the UK. If you can get your hands on a prescription of Uprima, you

won’t need any Alka-Seltzers. There were no reported nausea side-effects.

Summarising Collaboration in the Creative Process

In the previous chapter we described divergent thinking and established the importance of

removing evaluation and objectivity from that part of the creative process. This chapter has

demonstrated the role of expert harvesters in evaluating and organising proposed ideas

before accepting them into the field. This part of the creative process requires objectivity and

evidence, whereas the earlier chapter focused on drawing on subjectivity and hypotheses.

Collaboration requires the creative thinker to employ both types of behaviour (Thinking and

Feeling), albeit at different stages of creativity.

Early in this chapter we explored the value that rules provide in helping expert harvesters to

recognise a valid idea – and the motivation that those rules can provide in a bountiful field

when creative harvesters conceive new ways of testing those rules. We saw how the card

cheats exploited gaps in the rules of bridge by communicating with secret messages and how

the organisers quickly responded by introducing bidding screens in subsequent tournaments

to stop this happening. Rules of any healthy field should be fluid to change.

Collaboration between the creative harvester and expert harvesters demonstrates that

creativity in any field is no different to any other process (from the tiniest virus to the greatest

galaxy). The proposal, rebuttal, refinement and finally the acceptance of my reading

application is an example of the typical sequence of relays between; (i) a divergent thinker

wishing to test out the validity of their idea and (ii) objectively minded expert harvesters who

will instruct the thinker as to the validity of their idea. If the expert harvesters perceive the idea

to have value then it will become seeded within the field.

Collaboration is the last of the four elements in my quest to produce a robust formula for

creativity. Now that we have an understanding of the four elements; (Seeds, Problems,
Divergent Thinkers and Collaboration) and some evidence of behaviour on both ends of

Jung’s scales (the catalyst), let us see what happens when we spill them out into a test-tube

and shake it vigorously.

Chapter 8: Putting it Together

Unless you have decided to be particularly creative and read this book out of sequence, you

should be about three quarters of your way through your journey. I am right at the beginning

of mine and very soon – when we finish this chapter together – we shall start to say our

goodbyes. I hope that you will be entertained by some of the stories but, more importantly,

that you are beginning to come to an understanding that the potential for creativity exists

everywhere, in every thing and in every one of us.

I wrote this chapter soon after completing my first draft of the Prologue. In that first chapter I

set myself the challenge of constructing a robust formula for the act of creativity, explaining it

in a way that my eleven-year-old boy and my eighty-two year old granny would understand

and then proving its validity. I also wanted to prove that creativity is not a mystic trick
45
performed by a rare breed of person with an unusually formed brain .

My first problem was to define creativity. This was trickier than I had anticipated and is

arguably the most contentious editorial decision that I would have to face because I found

nearly 60 competing descriptions in my research. I decided to examine the roots of the word

and discovered that the Latin for ‘to have grown’ is creatus. This matched the perception that

I shared with Alvin Toffler, that all things from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy are just

processes - and that all processes naturally evolve over time.

This persuaded me to sail closest to the definition made by Graham Wallas and Richard

Smith in their 1926 epic, Art of Thought. They were amongst the first to link creativity with

solving a problem and their perceived five-stages of creativity ended with verification when

the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied. Colloquial uses of the word

45
I found one research paper claiming that less than 20% of the population have the
ability to think creatively. Unsurprisingly, someone working for a company that runs
tests to identify these ‘special people’ wrote it. Employers are prepared to pay good
money to agencies that can identify creative employees.
creativity always imply something new being introduced and so I finally settled on my

description of creativity for this book being ‘expressing something new and of value’.

When I was looking through some of my old scrapbooks to try and find inspiration for this

book, two old quotes from my old mentor, John Gillard, screamed louder than all of the others

that I scribbled down during my time at his school;

- “Your head is round so that ideas can bounce around in all directions.”

- “Energy, empathy and understanding working together in synergy.”

I grasped these two seeds and used them as the building blocks to this book. My

interpretation of the first quote is that anyone with a head is capable of bouncing ideas inside

it. I dispute the claim that creativity is a rare genetic talent; the chapter ‘Getting it Wrong’

illustrates that we are all born with creative potential but have most of it squeezed out of us

during our formative years. The second quote became my mantra for this book; I wanted to

transmit every seed of knowledge with a certain confidence that it would be received

empathetically.

I.

One of the greatest ideas to have been introduced to the process of writing is the ‘copy &

paste’ function. I remember the old typewriters that my father’s secretaries worked on;

mistakes were corrected with Tippex and it was impossible to move text around a document.

We take this feature for granted these days. Partly in homage to the creation of the ‘copy &

paste’, partly because it subscribes to my fixation with understanding and empathy (and partly

to reach my word-quota more easily), I turn to the CTRL-C and CTRL-V buttons to help

construct my formula and complete this chapter. Please be patient with me whilst I plagiarise

my own work.
The four paragraphs below are copied and pasted from the summaries of the previous four

chapters. Please ignore the fact that some of the words are printed in a lighter shade of grey

– for now;

Seeds

This provides us with the best understanding of how knowledge is applied in the process of creativity; using seeds

harvested from more than one field, personally experienced knowledge and personally assumed knowledge (Plato’s

definition – ‘justified true belief’) collide to provide an opportunity for the spark of an idea. In the next chapter we will

meet the second important element, the accelerant that provides fuel for the flame.

A Problem

Borrowing from the Field/Map/Seeds/Harvester metaphor, we came to understand how some problems are known by

the harvesters and are marked on their maps, whereas other problems haven’t been spotted yet (or at least brought

to the attention of expert harvesters) and so are unmarked on the map. It can take some time for a field to agree that

a problem exists and sometimes the field finds it difficult to acknowledge that a problem does exist until a solution is

proffered (e.g. candyfloss).

Divergent Thinking Harvester

Problems that require creative thinking usually have more than one right answer. A divergent thinking harvester

senses these problems and applies intuition towards finding a solution, working hard to stay on the Perceiving end of

the scale to build a list of ideas. They can do this with literal or lateral thinking techniques.

Collaboration

Collaboration between the creative harvester and expert harvesters demonstrates that creativity in any field is no

different to any other process (from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy). The proposal, rebuttal, refinement and

finally the acceptance of my reading application is an example of the typical sequence of relays between; (i) a

divergent thinker wishing to test out the validity of their idea and (ii) objectively minded expert harvesters who will

instruct the thinker as to the validity of their idea. If the expert harvesters perceive the idea to have value then it will

become seeded within the field.

I finished the last chapter by suggesting that we should spill these four elements into a test

tube, shake it around a bit and see where we end up. By taking the words printed above in

grey and putting them into a new arrangement, I have constructed my description of the

creative process;
The Process of Creativity - Explained

Some problems are known by the harvester and are marked on their maps, whereas

other problems haven’t been spotted yet. A divergent thinking harvester senses these

problems and applies intuition towards finding a solution, using seeds of experienced

and assumed knowledge from more than one field.

A sequence of relays between objectively minded expert harvesters will instruct the

thinker as to the validity of their idea. If the expert harvesters perceive the idea to have

value then it will become seeded within the field.

As Toffler and Bassler observed, everything that exists, from the tiniest bacterium to the

largest galaxy, from mathematics to microwave ready meals, from global warming to

newspaper publishing, exists as a consequence of a number of processes working together in

harmony. All processes evolve over time and the speed of change amongst natural

processes (i.e. those that cannot be effected by human intervention) has been relatively

consistent for hundreds of thousands of years.

Evolution involves making advances that either; (i) solve a recognised problem, or (ii) provide

a solution to an unpredicted problem.

The evolution of processes that can be effected by human intervention have accelerated

throughout history and continue to accelerate with no sign of slowing down. Creativity

involves producing an original process that either; (i) improves on a previously discovered

process, (ii) disproves the perceived value of a previously discovered process, (iii) provides

perceived value for its perceived novelty.

Creativity cannot be achieved without at least two different snippets of knowledge, each from

a different field. The originator of the new idea must understand and empathise with this

knowledge, which requires a combination of; (i) collected personal experiences of known
knowledge, (ii) a justified personal belief in some assumed knowledge and (iii) the

determination to prove its validity.

The creative process starts with a problem, however the originator of the solution needs to be

prepared with knowledge before they can hope to contribute. The incubation of internally

understood information is an essential prequel to the generation of new ideas.

The observation that all processes evolve as a result of a sequence of relays and interactions

between stakeholders (e.g. the networked web of receptors that allow bacterium to evaluate

its surroundings, collaborate with its own species and build mutually beneficial alliances with

other bacteria) lead us to reach two conclusions; (i) that multiple ideas can be proposed

simultaneously, and (ii) objective, independent evaluation enables the selection of worthy

ideas.

Because there are several ways to change a process, the solution is unlikely to be discovered

through convergent thinking. Convergent thinking is better-utilised solving problems that

require only one valid answer (e.g. 2 + 2 = 4). These problems have more than one answer

too (e.g. 2 + 2 = 3 -1, or 2 + 2 = 2 x 2, etc.), however there is little value in building a list of

potential solutions.

Although it seems counterintuitive, the best way to succeed is by increasing our failure rate.

Within the creative process, this originator of a valuable solution is likely to produce several

imperfect ideas before (and possibly after) conceiving their precious idea. This exercise can

only be achieved through divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking can be practiced either; (i) literally or (ii) laterally. Both techniques provide

the opportunity for creative thoughts to be developed and neither technique is inferior to the

other. A creative thinker should be prepared to utilise both types of divergent thinking, but

may naturally favour one type over the other.

Finally, creativity cannot be said to exist without collaboration. This last stage of the creative

process requires a meeting of minds between the originator of the idea and an audience of

objective decision makers. If the idea is accepted and becomes a part of the culture in a field,

its processes may inspire others to propose improvements of their own.

In this way, creativity evolves like all other processes.

How Does This Help?

I believe that understanding the creative process is the first step towards engaging in the

creative process. The purpose of the first ¾ of this book is to present the process in a way

that, I hope, provides understanding and empathy together with a little bit of entertainment. It

would be brilliant if you were able to close the book now and apply yourself to solving

problems creatively.

The last ¼ of this book provides some practical support that, I hope, will improve your

creative abilities. I have separated this into three categories – feel free to dip-in and dip-out as

you like.

Chapter 9 (Putting it into Practice) catalogues and describes a number of exercises and

suggestions that will generate noticeable results. These have been arranged to follow the

order of the chapters relating to the elements. Chapter 10 (Proof That You Have a Creative

Mind) includes an interests inventory based on the Holland Test, which will identify you as;

Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Investigative, Realistic or Conventional. After taking the test, I

will share with you my thoughts on why the results don’t matter – everyone has creative

potential. The final chapter, Chapter 11 (Frequently Asked Questions) is this book’s

equivalent to the bit at the back of instruction manuals for technology products. We turn to

that part of the instruction manual when the product isn’t working how it is supposed to.

Now get out there and change something.

Chapter 9: Putting it into Practice

People change their diet for all sorts of reasons; usually to lose weight, but sometimes to put

on weight too. Athletes, for example, often force themselves to bulk up with protein and

carbohydrates while training for a big race. On the other hand, desperate to fit the role of

stereotypical fairy-tale princess, some brides push themselves through totalitarian eating

regimes in the hope of shedding a few pounds. The aim of most dieting is to achieve a

temporary goal.

The UK’s largest spender of advertising, the Government’s Central Office of Information,
46
devoted a fat chunk of their 2007 budget towards educating citizens about the need to get

their cholesterol levels checked out by a doctor and to consider two remedies; more exercise

and healthier eating. In doing so, Government are attempting to motivate society to change

their behaviour to reach long-term, permanent goals.

I felt it was appropriate to treat this chapter of the book as if it was a diet; you might have a

long-term and permanent goal of increasing your creative potential or you may just be looking

for inspiration to help achieve a shorter-term objective. Creating and eating have more in

common than the last six letters; they both subscribe to the adage that ‘you get out what you

put in’.

This chapter provides a number of suggestions that will improve your creative output. Some

require a modification in your lifestyle and will have a lasting effect on ability. Although their

impact may not be immediately noticeable, your creative output will steadily improve. Other

suggestions will have an immediate effect in helping to stimulate creativity. I refer to these two

types as ‘Makeover Creative Exercises’ and ‘Binge Creative Exercises’. I recommend that

you do both and, unlike binge eating or binge drinking, no harm can come from binge creative

exercises – so indulge as much as you like.

46
Government spent over £330 million, communicating Public Health Warnings and
other information for the public’s benefit.
Makeover Creative Exercises can be identified below by the (M) before the exercise title.

Binge Creative Exercises can be identified by the (B). I have attempted to categorise the

exercises according to the chapter headings from earlier in the book.

Have fun and let me know how you get on.

SEEDS

1. (M) The Squirrel

Imagine a single piece of information as a tennis ball. Over the course of an ordinary day,
47
your brain processes many thousands of, mainly trivial, pieces of information and handles

most of this in autopilot mode (e.g. recognising the colour tie being worn by the man sitting

opposite you on the bus). We frequently fail to discriminate between this type of information

and potentially valuable information. The tennis balls comes flying towards us and we simply

trust our brain to; (i) spot them, (ii) catch them, and (iii) decide whether to keep or return

them.

In autopilot mode, our brain finds it difficult to categorize potentially valuable information. It

understands how to classify certain valuable information (e.g. how your partner likes their

coffee) but it is unsure where to file away knowledge that might be useful. In fact, it can’t even

distinguish between valuable and potentially valuable information without our intervention. As

a consequence, it can become difficult to find the tennis balls relating to potentially valuable

information in their hour of need.

The first exercise is a lifestyle behaviour change that is very easy to follow and immensely

rewarding – become a scrapbook squirrel.

47
Your mind is at the peak of its powers when you are 25 years old. It can handle
over 200 pieces of information per second.
Nearly 100% of the people in my circle that I consider to be creative religiously carry a

notebook to record their personal thoughts. My favourite brand is Moleskine because there is

a useful envelope tucked away at the back of the book where I can file away newspaper

clippings that I want to research further. Hemingway, Matisse and Van Gogh were all fans of

Moleskine and I suspect that many of its contemporary customers are attracted by the

tradition set from history’s leading creative characters.

Some people use a notebook at work to help remember information brought up in meetings

so that they can write up reports and follow through on promised actions later. This exercise

is no different in principle. Take yourself down to your bookshop or stationary supplier and

find a scrapbook that you would be comfortable carrying around 24/7. Buy three of them so

that you are motivated to continue squirreling away information and reward yourself with a

treat when the second one is half full.

How you organise your scrapbook, and what you put in it, is your own affair. Mine is a general

stream of consciousness where I jot down things that I find interesting and sketch out ideas

that have been fermenting away in my mind. I get through about six scrapbooks a year and,

to help me keep track of my burgeoning collection, I write the date on the inside front cover

whenever I start a new one. If you prefer to write down just one or two thoughts in your book

each day, then that is what you should do. It is important that you make this a daily routine

though, so commit to whatever you feel comfortable with.

2. (M) So, What?

Use this exercise independently of, and alongside, The Squirrel.

With so many tennis balls flying towards us, we instinctively bat them away without taking the

time to catch and inspect each one. Even in our fast-paced society, we can all afford to slow
things down and take the time to ask, “So, what?” The story of the hare and the tortoise

comes to mind.

As we learned in Chapter 2, it is natural not want to want to ask, “Why?” This exercise will

have an immediately noticeable effect changing this type of behaviour, inasmuch as you will

discover that there is nothing to fear from challenging received information. If someone is

telling you (or selling you) information that you are uncomfortable buying, there is nothing

wrong with asking a few questions. Moreover, the person selling you the information would

value the exchange more if they felt you had experienced understanding and empathy.

There is an old Chinese proverb: ‘Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember.

Involve me and I will understand.’ Don’t accept information at face value; instead seek to

learn what makes it relevant to the person sharing it with you and try to conceptualise how it

could be relevant to you too.

If you can’t speak to the person sharing the information with you (e.g. because it comes from

a newspaper article, television programme etc.) then make a note in your scrapbook and

research it later on Google.

The purpose of this is to habitually make the procurement of new knowledge an exercise in

developing understanding and empathy. The impact of this type of behaviour on creativity is

indisputably powerful. When you spend less of your time in the dark, it follows that you are

more likely to ‘see the light’.

3. (B) Take a Field Trip

A South African comedian friend of mine used to tell a joke about a young Afrikaans man

from a small village in the farming belt of the Free State. So the joke goes, this man was

excited to finally meet a potential partner because everyone in his tiny community knows

everyone else. After driving his new sweetheart to his family’s home in his pickup truck (with
the girl sitting at the back because the cabin was full with crates of Castle lager), the man

finally introduces his new love. “This is my mother, my auntie, my sister and my cousin,” he

says, pointing his webbed hand to the only other woman in the room.

To make beautifully formed ideas, we need to widen our pool of knowledge. We often

become stuck in a rut, harvesting only in the fields related to our work. The result of this type

of behaviour is destructive to creativity and (unless you completely love your job) it can lead

to a feeling of unfulfilment. Moreover, living-to-work inhibits the opportunity for you to discover

all the other activities that you might enjoy – and even flourish at. It would be a terrible waste

to go through life without discovering all the things that you are capable of.

As frequently as you are able to, take yourself out of your comfort zone and follow the advice

of naked chef, Jamie Oliver; “Try something new today.” There are tens of thousands of
48
short-term, evening and weekend courses up and down the country on subjects as diverse

as; auto maintenance, fine art and seamanship. There must be hundreds that would appeal to

you.

Even the most hectically busy of harvesters can find the time to explore new fields.

Next time you are planning your two weeks in the sun, you could consider heading off

somewhere exotic and off the beaten track. Break your habit and pick up a different

newspaper for a change. Listen to some music that you wouldn’t ordinarily choose. Surf

through the channels on the second and third pages of your cable television guide (especially

the documentary channels). Instead of going to the cinema, try the theatre, a poetry reading

or a lecture.

If you want help getting started, buy a copy of Time Out magazine and hold it out in front of

you with your eyes closed. Open the magazine to a page at random and then point your

48
The website www.floodlight.co.uk lists over 40,000 courses in London alone!
 49
finger at a listing of some description. The result from this type of behaviour is twofold; you

will discover more about what you do and don’t enjoy and, through exploring new fields, you

will ‘broaden your horizon’.

A PROBLEM

4. (M) Work Backwards

The concept of canned food was invented to solve a problem that was recognised by

Napoleon. The food obsessed French political and military leader famously said that ‘an army

marches on its stomach’ and so he was perfectly poised to discover that plenty of the

gourmet supplies of his troops were quickly reduce to waste. He offered a prize (worth nearly

£100,000 in today’s money) to the first person to develop a solution that would preserve his

army’s food rations. Nicholas Appert won the prize in 1809 after showing how the process of

placing food in sterilised glass containers and then sealing them would enhance the lifespan

of the frogs legs or snails or whatever it was that the Gaelic army were fed on. A year later,

this discovery lead to a Brit called Peter Durand developing a more scaleable process, in

which food was packed into tin-coated steel cans.

Unfortunately Durand’s solution involved sealing the lid of the can with a dollop of lead-based

solder. A new problem was discovered; eating canned food causes lead poisoning. There are

accounts of British fleets carrying enough supplies to last them for years, but dying out at sea

from consuming lead. This problem was solved by the simple invention of the double-folded

seal, eradicating the need for soldering in the manufacturing process.

Stuffing food into a can presented another problem. The military were able to use their

bayonets and other sharp instruments to open them up, but civilians were without any useful

49
If you accidentally land up on the Dating page and are already in a relationship, this
should not be seen as an excuse to try something different.
tools to penetrate the double-folded seal. The first useful can opener was only invented in

1870.

Everything that has value solves some problem or other. This exercise is designed to tune

you into the propensity of problems and make you alert to their existence. The purpose is to

strengthen your awareness of the relationship between problems and solutions and, in doing

so, increase the likelihood that you will notice problems that are waiting for a solution. It would

be fantastic if you could do this exercise daily, but it can also be an effective warm-up before

a session of literal or lateral thinking.

Pick a product or commercial service at random (e.g. iPod, picture frame, electric fan, candle,

movie downloads, food deliveries, baby sitting) and spend three minutes thinking about the

problems that it solves. Then spend another three minutes thinking about the problems

created. Try to remember that there will often be more than one answer and apply divergent

thinking. Try not to evaluate each answer until the three minutes are up.

This exercise could be your lottery ticket to fame and fortune. Two friends, both lawyers, built

up and sold a multimillion-pound catering business after recognising a problem with

restaurant food deliveries; they didn’t want to order from the same restaurant but wanted their

food to arrive at the same time so that they could eat together. This observation inspired them

to start-up a company called Deliverance in 1997, offering a range of cuisines prepared by a

number of international chefs under one roof. They sold their company to a private equity firm

in 2004 for a reported £6 million.

5. (B) Mapping Mental Connections

The process of creativity involves discovering relationships between pieces of information and

applying them in a novel way to solve a problem. The father of the printing press, Gutenberg,

understood how machines that pressed wine worked and he understood how coins were

minted. His famous invention, which solved the problem of books being prohibitively
expensive to produce (they were hand written, one at a time), was a hybrid of wine and coin

producing machinery.

This exercise is designed to stimulate awareness to relationships between pieces of

information. It is also a brilliant way to kick-start a brainstorming session. All you need is a

piece of paper, a pen and a divergent mind. In the middle of the piece of paper, write down a

random word and draw a ring around it. Then spend a minute or so writing down a few things

that you associate with that word (e.g. facts, trivia, feelings, images, memories, etc.) around

your first word and circle each of them. To illustrate the exercise, I have chosen the word

tomato.

Tomato
is a fruit

Gardening Throwing

Tomato
Pronunciation
differs between Changes
Americans and colour when
English Eating ripening

The next stage is to expand on those thoughts a little bit. Allow yourself three to five minutes

to scribble down a few facts, branching out from each of your previous ideas and draw a ring

around each of these new facts.

Don’t attempt to judge anything that you are writing and resist the temptation to try looking for

anything of value. Just focus on getting as many ideas down as possible. Hold your breath

and see how many thoughts you can write down before needing to draw for a new breath. Set

yourself a target to come up with more with your next breath.

 Need to eat 5
portions of fruit Has seeds
Luc doesn’t
and veg a day
like to eat his 5
portions a day Festival
in Spain
Tomato
Grows is a fruit Punishment
in a pot
Gardening Throwing
Green
to Red
Tomato
Pronunciation
differs between Changes
Americans and colour when
English Eating ripening Doesn’t
ripen in
Salad Sauces fridge
That song, ‘Let’s Soup
call the whole Even kids that hate
thing off’ tomatoes seem to
Arguments like tomato sauce

The final stage of this exercise involves stepping back and looking for connections.

Need to eat 5
portions of fruit Has seeds
Luc doesn’t
and veg a day
like to eat his 5
portions a day Festival
in Spain
Tomato
Grows is a fruit Punishment
in a pot
Gardening Throwing
Green
to Red
Tomato
Pronunciation
differs between Changes
Americans and colour when
English Eating ripening Doesn’t
ripen in
Salad Sauces fridge
That song, ‘Let’s Soup
call the whole Even kids that hate
thing off’ tomatoes seem to
Arguments like tomato sauce
There are no guarantees that this exercise will produce an ‘Eureka’ moment, but you should

always be able to find a problem and a solution within minutes, regardless of the word that

you decide to start with. My example provided a simple problem, that my son doesn’t eat

enough fruit and vegetables, and a simple answer; don’t let him have any tomato sauce with

his meal unless he eats his vegetables. My wife, an enthusiastic and brilliant cook, saw my

mental map and suggested that she could make a healthier tomato sauce that might result in

Luc enjoying fresh tomatoes.

Try this exercise with a random word a few times and then with words related to the field in

which you aspire to be creative.

DIVERGENT THINKING HARVESTER

6. (B) The Divergent Anagram Game

This is just a little exercise to warm the cockles before we move on to some of the lobsters

that are waiting for you. Its purpose is to prepare you for a sequence of problems that require

your divergent literal and lateral thinking, involving bamboo, batman and booze. These can be

solved in many different ways, perhaps an infinite number of ways.

This modest interlude only has about 170 correct answers and your target is to find at least

30 within five minutes. How many words can you make from using the letters in the word

DIVERGENT?
DIVERGENT LITERAL THINKING HARVESTER

7. (B) Become a Super Hero

In this exercise you are going to gain superhuman powers. Immediately, you may be thinking

about what sort of super hero character you might be. If an idea is forming in your mind, write

it down somewhere and try to forget about it for a moment. This is an exercise in divergent,

literal thinking and so we need to produce a list of ideas without prejudicing the process by

judging our output too early.

The intention of this exercise is to demonstrate the multiplying power that comes from

breaking a problem down into smaller parts. To prove this, take a sheet of blank paper and

write down as many original ideas as possible that represent your super hero in two minutes.

Count how many you came up with and give yourself a pat on the back if you managed to

produce more than 15 ideas. In a moment, I will give you the powers to produce thousands of

super hero ideas in the same time span.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was amongst the first to document the concept of super

heroes when, more than three hundred years BC, he wrote, “There are men so godlike, so

exceptional, that they naturally, by right of their extraordinary gifts, transcend all moral

judgment or constitutional control: There is no law which embraces men of that calibre: they

are themselves law.” The super heroes in Aristotle’s day were mythical warriors like Perseus,

who killed Medusa and claimed Andromeda, having rescued her from a sea monster.

th th
The Penny Dreadfuls that became popular during the late 19 and early 20 century were

fervent platforms to launch a new generation of super heroes including; Zorro, Tarzan and

Popeye. Then, in 1938, Jerry Siegel drew inspiration from Aristotle to conceive Superman

and, in doing so, established a number of fundamental rules that help to shape our

understanding of a super hero:

- They must have some extraordinary powers or advanced equipment. (E.g. Superman could fly, Batman

had his gadgets)

- They should follow a strong moral code in the service of good without expecting reward.

- Some special motivation compels the super hero to follow that code. (E.g. Batman’s came through the

death of his parents, Superman believed in justice and the need to save humankind from evil plots.)

- They wear a special uniform, usually to conceal their true identity.

Let’s try conceptualising a new super hero alter ego again, only, this time, I would like you to

split the two minutes up into four 30-second segments;

1. During the first 30 seconds you should write down as many ideas as possible,

representing supernatural powers or cool gadgets bestowed on your super hero,

(E.g. Can sense when a phone is about to ring, never needs sleep, has a magic

spanner that turns water into diesel, etc.)

2. Jot down a list of the services that your hero provides in the next 30 seconds, (E.g.

Makes sure that white and coloured clothes aren’t ever put in the wash together,

shreds your credit card receipts before they can fall into the hand of baddies, takes

the dogs for a walk when it’s too cold for their owner to leave the house, etc.)
 3. Next, compile a list of different things that might compel your new character to

become a hero, (E.g. Fulfilling the destiny made by a fairground fortune-teller, to

report it on his blog, to impress their grandmother, etc.)

4. Finally, consider what they might be wearing whilst going about their duty, (E.g. a

wedding gown, Sunderland Football Club’s Away Kit, a ski suit, etc.)

Count up how many ideas you produced in each of the four exercises. If you managed to

come up with seven in each, there are 2,400 different combinations of potential super heroes

staring up at you from your lists. If you managed eight ideas in each, there are nearly 5,000

combinations waiting for you.

8. (B) The Drinking Game

This is one of the first exercises that John Gillard made his students do when they started at

his school and some of the ideas that were conceived in his classroom were later developed

and commercialised by drinks manufacturers. John knew that the alcoholic drinks market is

ferociously competitive and always searching for that ‘next big thing’.

In this ten-minute exercise, we are going to invent a new drink using the same technique as in

the previous exercise. This time, I would like you to consider 9 attributes. Take a minute to

build a list for each attribute and then use the final minute to see what new products you

could be toasting your newfound powers of creativity with.

1. What form does the drink come in? (Besides liquid or jelly!!)

2. When would it be most appropriate to drink it?

3. Who would be most likely to drink it?

4. How much would they need to drink to feel the effect of a double whisky?

5. How is it served?
 6. How is it stored?

7. How much does it cost?

8. What does it taste like?

9. What is it called?

DIVERGENT LATERAL THINKING HARVESTER

The great originator of the term lateral thinking was Edward De Bono and his 1972 book

Lateral Thinking: a Textbook of Creativity is well worth hunting down and owning. If imitation

is the highest form of flattery, De Bono must be more than modestly pleased with himself for

developing a technique that acts as a powerful creative catalyst; Random Words. The

concept is so simple and so effective - so it is no wonder that it has been plagiarised by

virtually every aspiring educator of creative thinking.

It irks me that so many of the exercises written by De Bono can be found in books by some

other creative authors (almost word for word), although it is understandable because he has

written dozens of books and hundreds of exercises using the random words technique. On

starting out with the project of writing this book, I knew that I would have to share his

technique in The Creativity Formula but I promised myself that I should, at the very least,

attempt to come up with a few original exercises. If you enjoy them, consider buying How To

Have Creative Ideas: 62 Exercises To Develop The Mind. It is packed with classic random

word exercises from the master’s pen.

As is the way with almost all brilliant ideas, the thinking behind De Bono’s technique is simple

to explain and understand. If we hold the palm of our hand in front of our face and look

closely, we will notice all sorts of features (E.g. The lines on our palm, the shape of our ring,

the gaps between our fingers, etc). After a while it becomes difficult to find new things about

our hand from this point of view, but fortunately we can turn our hand around and find new

features (E.g. Length and colour of our fingernails, veins, hair, etc.). Creatively is similar

because it can sometimes be difficult to discover new solutions after staring at a problem for
 ages. ‘Random Words’ changes the point of view, illuminating potential solutions that were

either out of sight or focus.

I have compiled a list of 100 random words and arranged them in a table with ten rows and

ten columns. It is very important that you select your words randomly, so please don’t be

tempted to cheat! You can choose your random words in all sorts of random ways and, as

one last exercise in divergent literal thinking, I would like you to develop your own list of ways

to pick them randomly. To help you get started, I have provided a few suggestions;

- You could use the date of your birth. (E.g. 5/7/73 would mean taking the first random

word from Row 5, Column 7 and the second random word from Row 7, Column 3)

- You could open this book twice at random and use those pages. (E.g. Page 126

requires some mathematics 1+2+6 = 9. Page 44 also requires some mathematics

4+4 = 8. Row 9, Column 8)

- You could use the digits from your phone number.

- You could take the one two-up and one to the left from your previous choice.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

1 Golf Queen Flame Tree Pint Scanner Coal Canoe School Wallet

2 Bank Radio Mother Door Teeth Drum Cinema Balloon Chalk Knee

3 Dustbin Tomato Onion Paper Candy Uncle Puzzle Soap Furniture Suitcase

4 Feet Tube Glass Statue Laser Smile Snail Needle Envelope Museum

5 Lion Telephone Puppet Rose Jeans Crowd Wand Shoe Ghost Wine

6 Turtle Lemon Germ Rock Accountant Piano Rabbi Mirror Bandage Cards

7 Box Flag Hat Bag Tent Cream Girl Cigar Tea Night

8 Picture Marble Salt Pill Radio Monkey Towel Word Brush Pile

9 Play Memory List Ear Leaf Brick Umbrella Friend Website Bean

10 Bracelet Plug River Rat Oil Fork Glove Pillow Toaster Apple
9. (B) Make a Resolution

This exercise involves finding connections between words to solve a problem. Select two

words randomly from the table and then build a personal resolution from them.

Example: My random words are Mother and Museum. My resolution is to take my mum to the Jewish Museum in

London.

Now pick another two random words and, this time, come up with two different resolutions

from them.

Example: My random words are Picture and Towel. My resolutions are; (i) Investigate getting tea towels with a

picture of Luc made as a Christmas present for my grandmother, and (ii) wrap my camera inside my beach towel

when I pack it in my suitcase.

Pick another two random words and try to come up with three different resolutions. If you

manage to do this, keep on going with more random words and see how many resolutions

you can create.

10. (B) Sleep, Marry, Kill

This exercise involves discovering images that words can conjure up and although it sounds

a little bit sleazy, it needn’t be. Select three words at random and decide which one you

would like to sleep with, which you would like to marry and which you would like to kill.

Example: My random words are Leaf, List and Puzzle. I would like to sleep with a leaf because it would wrap me up

warm, I would marry the puzzle because it would keep me entertained and I would kill the list because I have too

many lists in my life already.

11. (B) Haiku You Forget Me!

This exercise combines the process of discovering connections between words and the

process of finding images from those words. For extra value, it involves the use of creativity to

help you remember something important. As the pun in the title suggests, we are going to

make a haiku.

th
The term haiku originated in Japan and can be traced back to a 19 century poet called

Masaoka Shiki. The Japanese tradition is to print a haiku in one vertical line, but the English

rules are a little bit different. The accepted rule of an English haiku is that there are 3 short

lines; the first with five syllables, the second has seven syllables and the third has five.

Select three words from random. The challenge in this exercise is to make a haiku using two

of your chosen words directly and the other word indirectly.

Example: My random words are Flame, Rose and Night. I decided to use Rose and Flame in my haiku directly and

refer to Night by incorporating sleep into it.

Failing to put flame

to sleep can make lovely house

not smell like roses.

DIVERGENT LITERAL & LATERAL THINKING HARVESTER

12. (B) What Did You Do With Your Bamboo?

Bamboo is a particularly special member of the grass family for two reasons; (i) it can grow by

up to 4 feet a day, and (ii) there are about 1,000 commercial uses of the plant. Inhabitants of

the Andaman Islands believe that humanity originated from the bamboo stem and, nearly a

thousand years ago, Chinese scientists were using the underground, petrified remains of a

bamboo as evidence to support their geological theory of gradual climate change.

This exercise entails literal and lateral divergent thinking and will have you warmed up for a

creative session in almost no time at all. Moreover, I am hoping that we can come together as

a community of ‘The Creativity Formula’ readers for this exercise and compile a list of 10,000

new commercial uses. I need your help with this and I know that you can do your part.

Let’s start out on this mission by thinking about some of the first applications of bamboo that

come to mind. Write down ten ideas on a sheet of paper before reading any further.

I have written down ten ideas and I will share them with you in a moment. Despite there being

nearly a thousand uses of bamboo to choose from, I am certain that there will be plenty

common ideas between your list and my list. That’s OK because we need to get these ideas

out and in the open before searching for the less obvious ideas. How many ideas from my list

did you have?

Before we try again, I should tell you a bit more about bamboo and some of the discoveries

made by adventurers who have travelled this quest before. We have already learned that

creativity is inhibited by a lack of knowledge so allow me to share the highlights of what I have

learned about the 91 genera and nearly 1,000 species of bamboo.

They are mainly found in hot, tropical regions and can be seen growing in abundance in

China, India, Argentina, Chile and the southeast parts of USA. In China the plant is known as

zhu, in Japan it’s known as take and in Indonesia it’s bambu.

It is thought that bamboo evolved from grass about thirty million years ago, long after the

dinosaur became extinct. Although dinosaurs wouldn’t have grazed on bamboo, other

herbivores have been well nourished on the plant for millions of years; one hundred grams of

bamboo seeds contains 61 grams of carbohydrates and 265 calories of energy. The first uses

for bamboo amongst humankind were also culinary; cut a shoot early enough and it can be

used to make all sorts of dishes, broths, drinks and condiments, leave a shoot to grow and it

can be used to make eating utensils such as spoons, bowls, cutting boards and measuring

sticks. Even the leaves can be used in the kitchen; in recipes such as zongzi, a steamed

dumpling that contains glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves.

Bamboo has a slick, waterproof coating and its grass is stronger and tougher than most types

of wood. This makes it an excellent material for building homes. Historically it was used to

make houses for poor Indians and Chinese (two countries with hundreds of millions of

impoverished people) because of its durability and because it grows so quickly that large

scale harvesting can be sustained to supply rampant demands. In fact Bamboo is one of the

most environmentally friendly plants on the planet for a number of reasons; (i) it is a

renewable resource, (ii) it absorbs carbon dioxide and releases 35% more oxygen into the

atmosphere than an equivalent size plot of hardwood trees, (iii) because there are so many

uses for bamboo, there is virtually no waste from harvesting the plant, (iv) no artificial

fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides are needed in the farming of bamboo and so no chemicals

need to be added to the land, (v) cultivating from forests of hardwood trees can lead to soil

erosion which can clog rivers, affecting the lives of people and animals living downstream,

whereas bamboo roots remain in place after harvesting where they prevent erosion and help

retain nutrients for the next crop.

I hope that you are charged up by the environmental good that you will be doing to the planet

by following this exercise and inventing some new uses for bamboo. To provide some final

inspiration before we get started, here are some other well-known uses as well as a few

obscure applications;
(i) In the construction of roofs, walls, floors, scaffolding, fences, bridges, roads, damns and as structural support

substitute for steel rods. (ii) The charcoal produced from bamboo is said to be three times more efficient at filtering

water than charcoal produced from hardwood, applications of bamboo charcoal can be found in the food industry,

pharmaceutical industry, chemical industry, metallurgical industry and ordnance industry. (iii) The by-product of

producing bamboo charcoal is bamboo vinegar, which is used as an organic fertilizer, as a food preservative and in

Chinese medicine. (iv) Bamboo fibre has been used to make paper and clothing and knitting needles are made from

bamboo wood. It is claimed that bamboo fabric has antibacterial properties. (v) Bamboo pipes have been used in

martial arts, for smoking and for making musical instruments including the didgeridoo. (vi) Bamboo has also

contributed to the making music by being used as a needle for record players.

To find new applications for bamboo we need to apply some serious divergent thinking. We

can do this with some divergent, literal thinking by taking some learned knowledge about

bamboo and applying it to the task. For example, we know that bamboo grows remarkably

quickly and so we could conceive a gambling game in which people stake bets on which

strand will grow the quickest. We learned that bamboo charcoal has filtering properties that

clean water and so we could conceive using it in nappies.

Or we can apply divergent, lateral thinking to the exercise as a strategy for developing an

alternative stream of answers. When I thought about the word tomato, I imagined an

instrument that scoops the core out of fruit. Then I had an image of a tool that dispenses

salad dressing when it is dipped into a jar; covering the hole with a thumb would create a

vacuum, trapping the salad dressing until the thumb is released.

Set yourself a target of finding at least ten new applications for bamboo within five minutes.

You will find it helpful to alternate between literal and lateral thinking to squeeze out a few

more ideas.

You can contribute your ideas and see other readers’ suggestions at www.sixtoes.com.
COLLABORATION

13. (M) Everyone Should Have a Guru

In Western societies, we understand the term guru to mean someone who has mastered their

area of knowledge. In Eastern societies it means much more than that, a guru is a teacher

who provides wisdom and guidance to their followers. Indian society has a class system that

puts the British to shame; there are thousands of ‘castes’, each represented by their own

vocation and their own uniform. At one extreme are the Dalits, a caste of society that were,

until recently, dubbed as “the Untouchables” because they work in unhygienic, unpleasant or

polluting jobs. Gurus occupy the other end of the social strata and are welcome in any Indian

village. To be a guru is a blessing in India and to receive wisdom from a guru is perceived as

an even greater blessing.

Every aspiring creative person needs at least one guru in their lives – and ideally two or three.

Choosing a guru is an exercise that needs to be followed very carefully because the wrong

choice can be counter-productive to creativity. There are ten commandments that shouldn’t

be broken;

1. You should consider their moral code of conduct to be impeachable.

2. They should make no claim to greatness.

3. You should not be related to them.

4. They should not benefit financially from you.

5. You should be willing to share your most private thoughts with them.

6. They should not impart wisdom on any matter where they lack the experience.

7. You should be able to challenge their advice.

8. They should welcome you to challenge their advice.

9. You should be willing to take their advice as definitive.

10. You and they should terminate the relationship if you are unable to take their advice.

There are three roles that your guru should provide: (i) they should inspire you to attain a

deeper level of understanding in their field of knowledge and, ideally, neighbouring fields, (ii)
they should encourage you to perform to your capabilities, and (iii) they should be objective

about your ideas.

14. (M) Everyone Should Have a Muse

The term muse usually conjures up images of glorious looking women standing-by in an

erotic pose whilst inspiring great creativity. If you happen to know someone who is willing to

stand next to you in half-dress while you conceptualise, would you mind asking if she has a

sister? If, like me, you are cruelly forced to innovate without a flock of sweet singing, semi-

naked nymphs then take some comfort. This exercise offers the next best thing.

It is not an accident that creativity and inspiration have been associated with the muse for

thousands of years or that the etymology of, ‘amuse’, ‘muse over’ and ‘museum’ all emanate

from the word. There is an old cliché that creativity cannot happen in a vacuum and the muse

is that the root of this.

Something ‘amusing’ has the power to keep a person entertained or occupied without noticing

the time flying past them. When someone is said to be ‘musing something over’, they are

engaged in being thoughtful and questioning. A ‘museum’ is an institution where objects of

importance are stored, studied and shown.

The challenge in this exercise is to find your personal muse or muses. A good choice of muse

will keep you entertained in a setting that provokes dreamy self-reflection, surrounded by

ideas that have already been evaluated and accepted in a field related to the one that you

aspire to innovate in.

Example: Although I would usually prefer to avoid them, I chose supermarkets as my muse while conceptualising the

mobile payments technology that I referred to in Part Two. I stood for hours watching people interact at the checkout.

I interviewed shoppers about their mobile habits. I followed them around the aisles and watched how they responded

to particular discount offers. I counted the number of brands on promotion. I tried to guess which shoppers would be

most likely to pull out coupons. When I spotted the look of disgust in a shopper caught behind a customer using
coupons, I would stop them outside and ask them why they weren’t similarly frugal with their shopping allowance.

Over a period of time, I was able to formulate my ideas and test them out on shoppers to receive their feedback.

15. (M) The Seven Day Weak

I couldn’t resist throwing one last pun into my book for the final exercise. The purpose of ‘The

Seven Day Weak’ is to resolve a type of behaviour that frequently interrupts the process of

divergent thinking and of collaboration.

The birth of a new child is greeted by a feeling of pride and optimism by its parents. The same

is true for ideas that we conceive; a part of our persona is wrapped up in the newly formed

thought and it is natural that we aspire for it to flourish. In the same way that a mother can

look at her baby and see no faults, it is common to be hazy about the true value of some of

our ideas. This is particularly true in the warm afterglow of a Eureka moment.

If a midfielder successfully passes the football to a player in his team in more than 80% of his

attempts he is lauded as a sensation. If a basketball player manages to throw the ball through

the hoop more than 50% of the time he is celebrated for his brilliance. To the best of my

knowledge, no one has researched the success rate for creativity but I suspect that it is much

lower than 1%. In other words, a creative person should expect to produce at least one

hundred ideas before they find something of value.

If I were to burden my gurus with all of the ideas that I produce, they would be so swamped

that they wouldn’t have the time to give me their valuable feedback and their considered

insights. Moreover, one session of creativity can produce so many diverse ideas that they

would be justified in asking me what problem I was attempting to solve.

The Seven Day Weak is an exercise in objectivity and value. It can seem difficult in the

beginning but it gets easier with practice. If you follow these simple instructions, you will

experience a steady output of ‘better formed’ ideas. To continue the sporting analogy, it will

improve your hit rate.

At the end of a creativity session (or after having a Eureka moment), create a list of your

ideas, make two copies and ask yourself three questions;

- What problem does this idea solve?

- How important is it to solve this idea? (Marks out of ten)

- How well does this idea solve the problem? (Marks out of ten)

Write down your answers on one copy of the list and then, on the strength of your

judgements, highlight one or two ideas that you would be happy to share with your guru.

When you have done this, lock the list away and forget about it for a week. So far as you are

able to, try to clear your mind of the ideas contained in the list.

After seven days, take the second copy and repeat the exercise. This process of delayed

reflection may provide you with a different view towards the value of some of your ideas and

is frequently a more honest assessment that the first attempt. It may help you to filter away

some of the ideas from your list or serve to focus your thoughts further in a particular area. If

the same ideas are highlighted on both lists, you should have the confidence to share them

with your guru.

Chapter 10: Proof that You Have a Creative Mind

Chapter 11: FAQs