business come our way. But from then on, I wanted to get to the bottom of what made Big Ideas and to study creativity.
Many people seem to think that creativity is producing the Big Idea – an idea from nowhere so clever and so profound that it defines creativity. In public relations work it may be the new campaign idea that no one else has thought of, which will achieve significant publicity, or the photocall gimmick that shows the product in a new light and generates extensive media coverage.
One of the key lessons of this book, and a clear message to the prospective client who rejected my proposals, is this: the instant Big Idea does not exist.
Creativity, and its task of generating ideas, is essentially incre-mental. Ideas come through a series of small steps or moves. They build up each other to produce the final idea. Look back on any idea you have come up with; think back to precisely how the idea grew, and trace its lineage. The blinding flash of inspiration will, if you are honest enough, be linked to an earlier idea or element that you may have been dealing with. Rather than the creative idea being an instant revelation, it will more likely be characterized by a haphazard series of moves, steps and linkages.
This incremental nature of creativity is confirmed by the UK’s Patent Office, which reports that 95 per cent of new patents are merely adaptations of existing ones. (A study of the remaining 5 per cent of patents would, I suspect, reveal that they are the products of incremental thought.) Any truly great idea (possessing significant added value) will generally have emerged as a result of a series of incremental small steps in generating it, with much of its inherent added value gained in the subsequent implementation, or in how it was sold.
Examine any field of activity where creative ideas are generated and used, whether it is the world of management, the arts, or tele-vision comedy. Their ideas are created through a number of mini-steps, not via an instant, earth-shattering moment of inspiration.
Indeed, the management guru Tom Peters describes in his book A Passion for Excellence (Peters, 1996) several case studies where orga-nizations made decisions to pursue a Big Idea: ‘In all of history it seems, from French fry seasoning at McDonald’s to IBM’s System/360 computer, the first and second prototypes don’t work.’ Often the key people in a project were simply intent on
‘making it work’; through trial and error they eventually succeeded. No Big Idea brought an instant solution.
Creativity: some myths debunked
Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented sliced bread in 1912. The machine was a complete failure. It wasn’t until 20 years later when a new brand called Wonder started marketing sliced bread that the invention caught on. It wasn’t the ‘Big idea’ or the sheer convenience and innovation of pre-slicing bread, but the packaging and adver-tising, ‘builds strong bodies twelve ways’.
Seth Godin (2005), Purple Cow, Penguin, London Contemporaries of Mozart described him at work as ‘taking dicta-tion from God’ in the way he seemed to translate a concept in his mind on to paper. Research has, however, showed him to be very meticulous, making changes and additions to his work. Music from a more recent era provides contemporary examples of this incremental process in practice. The Beatles anthology albums offer a fascinating insight into how their ideas developed. The original versions of their songs often bore little resemblance to the final product, then hailed as ‘creative masterpieces’. The reality of producing a creative work of art, whether it is in music, painting or writing, is of artists constantly making changes and adding incre-mental new ideas to their work.
They may appear to the outside world as being able to come up with ideas effortlessly; as creative. In reality however, they are
‘unconsciously competent’.
It is not just in the world of art that the incremental process is present. Look at any popular, long-running television show and you will see the evolution of creative ideas at work. The BBC television show Only Fools and Horses had a lead character (Del Boy) who is characterized by having outrageously pretentious drinks in the pub. Yet in the early episodes he is seen merely ordering a more mundane half-pint of lager. The writer of the series, John Sullivan, appears to have developed the comic char-acter of Del Boy and his outrageous drinks after he had created the original character – clear evidence of an incremental process at work.
So how has the notion of the Big Idea come about? One explana-tion may be that, in order for us to be comfortable with the world we inhabit, we like to package things in a neat and orderly way.
This includes our understanding of how creative ideas are arrived at. It is much more convenient to believe great creative people somehow intuitively and instantly arrive at Big Ideas rather than recognize that creativity can be a messy, unglamorous and protracted process.
Creativity in public relations
The individual egos of creative people, coupled with the need for journalists and historians to write a story with a clear begin-ning, middle and end, contribute to perpetuating the myth of the Big Idea. Commenting on this phenomenon, Professor John Jewkes, in his study of famous inventors, 1970, wrote:
Successful inventors contribute to the romantic aura… It is much more agreeable for them to think of their achievements as the outcome of a flawless chain of brilliant decisions and deliberate plan-ning than as the result of desperate groping and frequent back-tracking… Subsequent writers, possessing more complete records of the lucky strokes than of the numerous failures, and searching for a tidy story rather than a muddled one, carry on the building up of the legends.
A detailed examination of the world’s greatest inventions high-lights the perpetuation of the myth about the instant Big Idea, masking the reality of the incremental process at work. Ask who invented the steam engine and you will most likely get the answer of James Watt, with the image of the young James sitting in his mother’s kitchen being inspired by watching a kettle boil. Yet the reality was of Watt cleverly adapting wider applications for the steam pump, which had been invented earlier by Newcombe;
Watt’s inspiration came from extending the use of a machine used for pumping water out of coal-mines, not from the vision supplied by a steaming kettle.
Moreover, the actuality of invention reveals that great discov-eries were often achieved more by chance than from being the result of someone’s Big Idea. Coca-Cola was originally a hangover cure. Dr Marten’s boots were originally conceived as orthopaedic shoes for elderly German maidens.
Inventions are perfected by step-by-step improvements, and each step is itself an invention. Paying tribute to this incremental process, Sir Isaac Newton observed: ‘If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.’ Newton was aware of how he could have made his major discoveries only by incremen-tally advancing ideas developed by others. Thomas Edison provided valuable guidance for any would-be creative when he recommended: ‘Make it a point to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are currently working on.’
Creativity: some myths debunked
Some practitioners, keen to uphold the concept of the instant Big Idea, use examples from their own careers as evidence of its exis-tence. Usually what emerges is that they have subconsciously used a technique described in Chapter 5 – the SCAMPER checklist, which encourages you to use a series of ‘change’ words or phrases.
One of these, such as ‘to make bigger’ or ‘to make smaller’, is placed against the situation, and the individual then thinks through the consequences of applying this to the task at hand.
Invariably, the proponent of the Big Idea has actually employed a technique in response to the question: ‘What can I do to make this the biggest idea/event/theme ever?’, and comes up with some-thing that is usually big in scale rather than necessarily large in added value – which would be the true criterion of any genuinely Big Idea.
People also confuse Big Ideas with what can instead be called a
‘Big Provocation’, which challenges the assumptions of an orthodox way of thinking or doing. The writer Tom Peters, for example, is a good example of someone who passionately believes in Big Ideas, yet in reality his writing is describing a process for challenging a mindset, or what is described in Chapter 4 as a ‘para-digm of a situation’.
To pose a question that can attack or undermine an assumption is not a creative idea itself. A Big Provocation may set in place a train of thought that can lead to a major added-value idea – this process is essentially incremental rather than being the instant creation of a Big Idea.
Sometimes a ‘Big Vision’ (see Chapter 13) is confused with a Big Idea. An individual may possess a vision of where in the future they would like to be, or may have a major goal to achieve, such as
‘I want to find a cure for cancer’. This may be a Big Vision, as it provides a vivid visual reference point of a desired position, but it is not a Big Idea, as it lacks an added-value combination in a new context to provide a solution to a goal.
Remembering our definition of creativity from Chapter 1, in which a creative idea is defined as a product created from a combi-nation of elements in a new context, it is clear that neither Big Provocation nor Big Vision can be called Big Ideas.
Another cause for confusion is the ideas that come to us seem-ingly out of the blue. These are often confused with Big Ideas. In reality, they are merely ‘illuminations’ – the third stage of the creative process described in Chapter 4.
Creativity in public relations
The instant Big Idea – created as an initial illumination, isolated from the task in hand – does not exist, except perhaps in consul-tancy pitch documents and picture-postcard-sized studies of history. The myth of the instant Big Idea is a fundamental point for public relations practitioners to consider about creativity, for two reasons. First, practitioners work in an environment where their clients or management may at times demand an instant Big Idea for the task in hand. Yet, no idea lives in a vacuum: practitioners will need to educate their peers if they want them to fully under-stand – and manage – the creative dimension in their work.
Second, this book will examine a number of tools and techniques for practical use by public relations practitioners. All of these harness the incremental nature of creativity. If you give yourself the task of thinking up the instant Big Idea, invariably it leads to what I call ‘constipated thinking’ – the desire for an outcome is there, but little else materializes.
The trick to creativity and creating new ideas is not how you think up the instant Big Idea, but rather what you can do to generate little ideas, which can later be combined in some way to be presented as a Big Idea. The message for anyone seeking an idea is to think small rather than tall.
Think for a moment about episodes in your career where you may have been asked to come up with a Big Idea. In the light of your new knowledge about the myth of the instant Big Idea, consider how you might have approached the task differently.