or failure of the subsequent creative activities. Hence the analogy in this section’s opening quote of using Lego bricks: the more bricks you have, the greater the potential to create new and different things.
Fourth ‘Why’ question: ‘Why is that important to you?’
Client: ‘Because our Chairman took it rather personally about this director leaving.’
Fifth ‘Why’ question: ‘Why is that important in terms of your future public relations activities?’
Client: ‘He’s now getting on my back to ask why we haven’t got any coverage like that.’
By persisting with the ‘Why?’ questions, it is possible to get to the root cause of the brief. The client in this particular instance was not after a comprehensive public relations strategy with a coherent media relations programme at all; he was just after what I call
‘vanity ink’ to settle a personal score.
When faced with a task, always restate the problem in as many ways as you can. Change the wording, take different viewpoints, try it in graphic form. Describe the problem to laypeople and also to experts in different fields. Says Graham Lancaster of Biss Lancaster:
A good creative director of an advertising agency will expect a very full brief before putting their mind to a solution. They will want to immerse themselves in the client’s history, in its production processes, quality control procedures, in its corporate style, in the way customers look at the market – all these and more before outline creative treatments are drawn up. Once the real creative brief has been thoroughly understood, an acceptable creative solution could become obvious to anyone. The skill is arriving at that very tight brief.
The problem will dictate the solution. The most profound tool when being creative is to challenge the assumptions that you have made about a problem. A useful device is a variation on the ‘five Whys’ technique, in which you ask, ‘What am I assuming here?’, and then pose and repeat the same question to the answer, then repeat the process again and so on.
By doing this, you are essentially helping to define the paradigm you face. In the context of creativity, a paradigm can be defined as the way we see the world – the ‘frame’ we put around our ‘picture of the world’. This framing determines how our minds look at something and for the way we subsequently act. Paradigms deter-mine our initial responses and generate our first ideas. They are characterized by the usual, easy way of doing and thinking,
Creativity in public relations
guiding our decision making and providing a structure for the information and values we hold.
Whenever new situations are being faced, there is a tendency to impose invisible frameworks around the problem and to make assumptions. These false constraints can hamper our efforts in trying to come up with a creative solution.
The solution to this problem, and potentially to any task, is to think ‘outside the box’ and consider whether there are solutions you have missed because you have unconsciously imposed assumptions, constraints or rules. The map, as they say, is not necessarily the territory.
As quoted in Chapter 3, one of the best examples of an outside-the-box solution is the response given by Ringo Starr, when the Beatles were at the height of their fame in the mid-1960s and he was asked by an interviewer: ‘Are you a Mod or a Rocker?’ Ringo’s response was quite brilliant: ‘Neither, I’m a Mocker.’
Another example was a response given to the Yorkshire Evening Press during my time as a press officer for the pre-privatized Yorkshire Water Authority in the mid-1980s. The York-based news-paper was running a campaign against the Authority holding its board meetings in private. When Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, visited the region, the newspaper took the opportunity in an interview to press her on this issue. Her response was that this was entirely in order, as the Authority did not determine policy.
However, the newspaper quickly contacted an individual board member and asked if the board determined policy at its meetings, to which he replied that it did. Only then did the paper come on to the Authority and pose the question: ‘Mrs Thatcher says the Authority does not determine policy at its board meetings but your board member says you do. Which one is right?’
This at first glance appeared to be an impossible quandary.
Being a publicly funded body, it would risk a major political row if we were to say the Prime Minister of the land was wrong; equally, it could not very well say that its board member does not know what he is talking about. Our solution could have been lifted from the television programme Yes, Minister. Rather than contradict either view, we contrived a response that agreed with both of them! We said: ‘They are both right. Parliament lays down the policy within which we operate and makes executive decisions.
Within this context, the board makes policy decisions.’ On one level this was complete gobbledegook, but by not being drawn
The creative process
into the journalist’s definitions of the options available, we succeeded in avoiding a major political row – as well as not alien-ating the board member.
Paradigms can range from assumptions based on incorrect information to deeply held mindsets that provide a strict order, determining how we see, what we do and how we operate in the world.
Paradigms are powerful things. If you learn how to recognize, challenge and, if necessary, destroy them, you can create new para-digms and thereby create added value. It is worth repeating that perhaps the most creative tool at your disposal is the simple ques-tion: ‘What assumptions are we making here?’
INCUBATION
I work all the time, even in my sleep.
A sad confession Craft shops often sell an attractive gift made by Guatemalan Indians. It consists of a small box containing six miniature dolls.
Legend has it that before you go to bed at night you should tell each of the dolls a worry. When you wake up in the morning you go to the box and ask each of the dolls: ‘Have you a solution to my problem?’ Evidently, a solution to your problem then comes to mind.
One of the greatest 20th-century philosophers, Bertrand Russell, recalls how he would tackle problems:
Having by a time of very intense concentration planted the problem in my subconscious, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerges with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had happened, as if in a revelation.
The South African folk singer Manadala Kunene Zulu evocatively describes his songwriting process in a Sunday Times article: ‘I climb into bed. I lie there listening to the wind in the trees. Sometimes I hear my neighbour’s dog barking. Then my eyes close and I wait for my songs to come.’
The Guatemalan Indians, Bertrand Russell and Manadala Kunene Zulu were describing the incubation stage of the creative process. Incubation occurs when the individual sets the problem aside for a while and does something else that is unrelated to it.
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Poincaré, one of the originators of identifying this stage in the creative process, defines incubation as ‘simply the facilitation of problem-solving by the passage of time’. A more modern-day example is Alan Preece of the University of East Anglia, who reflects: ‘Sometimes, I try to solve a problem by not trying to solve it.’ This approach is not one of being indifferent to the creative task. Rather, by putting the idea on the back burner you are allowing at least three positive things to take place. First, you are putting the problem into perspective.
Second, by planting a seed in your mind you are like the bio-logical analogy, allowing it to develop within your subcon-scious. Third, when you return to consider an idea or problem, you will probably approach it with a different set of assump-tions.
Incubation is essentially harnessing your subconscious mind to help in problem solving. There is considerable evidence that some of the greatest thinkers were great relaxers: Einstein was a daydreamer (he had an undemanding job in the Swiss Patent Office) and spent much of his leisure time sailing on a lake.
Knowing when to turn away from a problem and leave it for a while, for the incubation process to work, is an essential skill. It takes confidence, good planning, and a belief in your own abilities to let ideas saunter in at their own pace.
Incubation works not only at a deep subconscious level, but also during what is commonly referred to as ‘daydreaming’.
Many great thinkers have often been described by contemporaries as ‘absent minded’ when their minds are seemingly miles away from the immediate task at hand. From experience, I would suggest that what is described in such cases is actually a creative person actively working on a task, albeit through strong mental imagery rather than a conscious form in their immediate environ-ment. A friend of mine once described this state as not absent minded, but ‘present minded, elsewhere’.
Most people fail to manage this incubation phase effectively.
How often, when presented with a report that is going to be the subject of a brainstorming session or that is requiring your input in some way, do you read it at the last minute (or even at the meeting)? Yet by recognizing the existence of the incubation phase, reading such information should be one of the first things you do, rather than the last. As a result of entering the information into your mind, it is then possible to move completely away from it and
The creative process
do something else. It allows the incubation process to digest and turn over the information in your subconscious.
As well as being a good tool for creativity, the incubation process is also useful in time management. When writing your daily list of
‘Things to Do’ (and maybe even a ‘Things Not to Do’ list), do it at the end of the day rather than first thing in the morning. By revis-iting the list in the morning, further ideas will have emerged overnight as a result of incubation, and so you can highlight new tasks or emphasize different priorities.
Another tip is to use what can be called ‘Penultimate Scheduling’. Most people tend to treat a forthcoming break, such as a weekend or a holiday, as the deadline for completing a task.
They then feel good about getting something out of the way before the break. However, the break can act as a further incubation period, known as an ‘Incubation Rest’, and during this period further ideas can occur – although, unfortunately, the work may have already been submitted and so it will be too late to capitalize on any additional thoughts. Using Penultimate Scheduling, the ideal scenario is to complete the task before any break and then timetable the deadline so that it will accommodate any extra ideas created during the Incubation Rest.
So how does the subconscious work to allow incubation?
Unfortunately, no one really knows. The inner mind is still largely unexplored. But although we may not know about the mechanics within the subconscious, by recognizing the process of inputting information and the later output of ideas, we can harness and manage the incubation stage to greater benefit, and so be more creative public relations practitioners.