The Brainsquall

I have always had an inherent attraction to idea generation. In just about any setting, sitting around coming up with ideas for anything is my idea of a good time. The larger and hairier the ideas, the better. Over the year, I have developed a philosophy about idea generation, but I was never able to put it into a tangible form until completing Wendy's and my last book, "Caffeine for the Creative Team." Through the research for this book, talking to team leaders and Creative Directors from some of the most successful and creative shops in the nation, I was finally able to define the process I had grown to love so much: brainsqualling.

Yesterday, we had a brainsqualling session with a few of my new agency brethren and a few super-creative add-ins that went very well. We laughed, snacked, we came up with crazy, out-there ideas then started a real discussion of what it means to be passionate about something, in the context of the client's message. It was incredibly powerful and pertinent, and the ideas we generated yesterday will lead to a series of TV spots and probably more. It was an invaluable time for me, and further proof that when given the right attention, idea generation sessions lead to great things.

The introduction to the book describes the process of brainsqualling vs brainstorming. A squall is most often described in sailing terms as a quick hit wind storm, something that occurs suddenly, is brief but powerful. I see the formalization of group idea generation in a similar light. Getting away from the 'pop quiz' style, 20 person meetings and localizing idea generation has been far more successful in my life, both in practice as well as leadership. Here is the intro to the.. well.. intro, straight from the upcoming NY Times Bestseller "Caffeine for the Creative Team":

“ … And we want to see concepts Friday.”

Friday. Like, the end of this week Friday. Four days away Friday. Just once, you say silently as your mind spins, you’d like more than half a week to generate ideas. Imagine, you think, what you and your team could come up with if you had the luxury of, oh, say, a whole week to spend. You begin asking yourself the dreaded question: How come we’re continually asked to generate these brand-altering, buzz-inducing, award-winning ideas with such improbable time constraints? You can’t even get through asking yourself the question before you offer the answer.

Because you succeed at it every single time.

You built your team around this exact recurring scenario. You spent weeks making sure the people you’ve chosen to build your business around are the right fit for your philosophy. You’ve turned away countless jaw-dropping portfolios in favor of the folks who had the talent and the disposition to work within the unique culture you’ve built. Your team is hand-selected for their ability to sit across the table from this exact client, hear these exact words and react in the same exact way.

Let’s do it.

Leading this team isn’t easy, but you trust them with everything. You trust them because they’ve proven over and over again that they are on board with your philosophy, they grasp your vision and, most important, they buy into the process you’ve developed. It’s not that difficult for them to believe, really. You value the same things, you encourage big thinking and they respond by giving it to you. You learned long ago that you aren’t in the business of design or advertising or marketing or PR, you’re in the idea business. Your clients pay you for how you think, and as such, you spend your time in the right place: idea generation. The ideas need time to be executed, no doubt, but a bad idea perfected flawlessly is, as they say, nothing more than the proverbial polished dookieturd.

You realized long ago that putting effort and time and thought into idea generation produces the type of thinking you want to be known for. You spend real time together generating ideas. These are not mindless meetings, they are intimate occasions. You don’t gather the forty people who work in your building together in the conference room, lay down the edict that they need to come up with great ideas for your client right now, and expect full participation and creative results. You take a term that has been beaten up, trashed and left for dead very seriously. It’s a term that causes convulsions among staffers and trepidation among employees, and that puts the fear of boredom and office politics into the hearts of cubicle-dwellers everywhere: brainstorming.

Brainstorming has received a bad rap over the years, and rightly so. Corporate managers have misused and devalued the process of brainstorming in lieu of oatmeal-textured results. But not you. You value idea generation so much so that you’ve developed a process that equips your team with the best possible environment and most fertile mindset to generate the ideas that make your clients famous. And because you fully believe that idea generation is a communal act, you’re willing to share your technique and offer your advice to team leaders everywhere. That’s the kind of leader you are … you’re a giver! And we thank you for that. Now get going, you have a presentation in four days and your team is waiting for the e-mail that tells them when they should rush the walls of Idealand for yet another epic battle. Your method and process you’ve left here. Good luck. We’ll see you carting in the harvest on Friday.

Face To Face

I am a slave to technology. I will be the first to admit that I quickly and easily fall into the habit of all my communication being "passive" communication: email, text, forum posts, Facebook entries, Twitter blurbs... It's just so much easier to email someone than it would be to pick up the phone, or God forbid, talk face-to-face.

But I would also be the first to admit that there is something lost when we communicate this way. The convenience comes with a price, something we don't realize until we have engaged in real conversation with someone, were able to hear the inflections in their words, see the emphasis on their face, experience the natural flow of conversational contact in person. It's really only then that we understand that no emoticon can accurately depict the immersive nature of a great face-to-face conversation.

I had a really good conversation with a colleague of mine last night. Sitting over bar pizza and a couple of pints, we talked for almost 5 hours. 5 hours! It would take me 7.45 days to type as much conversation as we had in that timeframe. We talked about every imaginable topic; sports, politics, business, our wives, kids, aspirations, dreams. We debated, worked through disagreements, joked and we laughed. It was one of those inspiring conversations that you realize you miss during the day when we spend so much time typing and texting. Human interaction, convenient or not, simply has no substitute.

As creatives, we should remember that we, of all people, can get insulated in our own bubbles, focused on the job on the screen. We can't be bothered with the time it would take to meet and talk, we turn to email and texting and forums and Facebook to communicate and we lose sight of the purpose of what we are creating: conversation. If we would take the time to meet face-to-face, have a conversation with our clients or with our peers, we might find the inspiration of experiencing communication and not just communicating reminds us of the importance of creating conversation in our work.

Loving The Pitch

I love the pitch. No, not the hurling of a baseball nor the angle of a sidewalk. I'm speaking of the personification of opportunity. In our industry, every client relationship begins with the pitch, that adrenaline-filled 60 minutes sitting in front of the client attempting to communicate who you are and why they should choose you for their upcoming campaign. I recently had a friend who understands 'the pitch' explain it as "calm and clear on the outside, paddling like hell on the inside." That's a great description of the emotions of a pitch. Sitting with prospective clients, especially prospective clients that you either really like or have a project you really want, is usually interfaced with confidence, talent and ability... all the while you're splashing violently in your head, putting together competent answers to questions and trying to keep from throwing up an animated "I REALLY WANT TO WORK ON THIS WITH YOU!" to horrified attendees.

What I love about the pitch is the same thing I loved about school projects: the most prepared usually wins, and I'm a preparation guy. The idea that I am charged with going into the room, winning the project with the passionate cocktail of relationship, competency and talent, is so intoxicating, I can't wait to prepare both the conversation points and the visual reinforcement. When you know you're ready to talk about their business, your vision and you even have developed a few 'off-the-cuff' ideas to get the thinking started, there's nothing better.

We recently had a pitch to a very large company for a very large project. We are competing against much larger agencies that are dedicated to the medium of the project, and yet, we held our own because we were prepared to convince them that we were the better choice. We spent the time in the weeks leading up to the meeting developing the language we would use, the key points and we even mocked up an example of what we were proposing. The other agencies simply gave them the same sales pitch they give everyone, spent far too much time talking about themselves and in the end, we are the frontrunner because we prepared to make this meeting as much about them as we could. We listened to what they said in the RFP, we prepare the materials that gave them our vision but more so, we gave them our vision in the context of what they asked for, not what we would want to turn them into.

Standing in a room with decision makers and doubters alike, eyes and minds focused on you to sell yourself, sounds scary but is so rewarding when you're ready. In our industry, there's little more satisfying than preparing for a meeting that you've been overlooked on as a candidate, then stealing the show from the 'big boys' who didn't care enough to find out what the real story should be. I know I am on the creative side of the business, but creativity manifests itself in many ways. Creativity can only be present when a problem is in need of solving.

Sometimes, the most creative way to solve a problem is to care about it more than the other guy.

Change: The Unwanted Thankfulness

I'm not afraid of Change, but I don't invite him over for dinner, either. Like most people, Change in my life is usually enacted without my prior knowledge or consent, and certainly on his own schedule. I've never been too afraid of Change, mostly because Change has usually brought me something better, even if it didn't seem so at the time. I've come to call Change the "unwanted thankfulness." Historically, when big Change has come in my life, I haven't asked for him to be here, he just appeared. Like Uncle Dan and Aunt Marion at Thanksgiving, I just have to learn to accept that he's here and while I may not know what dish he has brought, I know that I have tomorrow off and it will almost certainly be better than today.

Change has arrived for me once again. I didn't invite him over, but he's right here, sitting next to me and watching me type with two fingers. He's tapping his foot impatiently, like a mother waiting for a child to get upstairs and clean that messy room. Change is terribly impatient. While I want to hang on to the current, he keeps saying "Let's go, we have other fish to fry." I've heard his voice say those same words before, like it's some addictive mantra, but I know I don't really have a choice. It's just a matter of when and on who's terms. But there's one significant thing I have learned from Change over the years:

He's always been right.

That's why he's the 'unwanted thankfulness.' I can look back at every significant change in my life and say to Change "Thank you." Thank you that you moved me to Chapman University, married Niqua, started my own shop, bought a house, brought me Caitlyn, sold that house, took a partnership with good men and moved to Kansas City. None of these things did I start, Change brought them to me. And he's here again.

I'm not afraid of Change. I just never know what he has planned.

You Get What You Give

One of the joys of writing a book is the editing process. After months of writing and re-writing, creating a work that meant sacrificing play dates with your daughter and giving up nights at the movies, it's difficult to lovingly lay that in the hands of an editor for them to shred, which is, of course, their job. You want the work to be as good as it can so you need them to be critical. You naturally hope the finished product represents the best that you are but it's kind of like raising a child, then presenting them to the child editor for them to tell you everything you did wrong. Like stepping on the scale a week after you start working out, it's discouraging but you know it'll be so much better in the end.

Part of the process with the creative exercises in the book is testing them to make sure they translate well. Some of that we can do ourselves, but we know what to do already, so there's value in giving the exercises to others to see what they generate and edit accordingly. With this book, we decided to give an exercise to a number of the design firms we interviewed. This served two purposes: to test the exercise and to see the process they described so eloquently in the interview in action. Not everyone chose to participate, and that's OK, these are incredibly successful, busy agencies. But the ones that did were absolutely fantastic.

We gave an untested exercise to Justin Ahrens at Rule29 (who was an enlightening interview in the book, BTW.) They retuned the results of the exercise and they killed it. Knocked it out of the park. Really good stuff. You can see their results and the exercise they did on the Rule29 blog.

We gave another exercise to Clint! Runge at Archrival, and they, too, destroyed it with some amazingly fresh solutions. We were floored by how far they took the exercises, how they looked at it as if it was a client project and exerted the same creative energy producing creative results. It is exactly how we see the exercises being used. We have heard a number of criticisms of the first book (mostly on Amazon.com comments) that claim that some of the exercises are childish and not worth a creative's time (we especially like the comment that says "this book is not for graphic designers" followed immediately by the comment that says "this is only for graphic designers" :)

What we have learned is that, like everything in life, you get out of it what you put into it. If you treat the exercises like an athlete treats training or practice, and you commit to using that time to get better, then you'll get so much more out of the process. If you 'Allen Iverson' the purpose of the exercise ("We're talkin' about PRACTICE, man! It's just practice...") then you're sure to have honestly wasted your time. I saw this played out in the exercises we received from Rule29 and Archrival. I had done the exercise we gave to Archrival, and I remember what we created and how much effort we put into it, and they kicked our collective butts with what they came up with... because they cared more.

What a great lesson in what can be created when we look at every creative opportunity as 'project-in-training.'

How Eating Cauliflower Can Inspire

My mom used to say "You'll never know if you never try." It was usually in conjunction with eating brussel sprouts or cauliflower or some other edible plague God has chosen to rain down on mankind for the sins of the culinary deviant. The advice, however misguided the purpose, is still a valuable lesson to the creative explorer. I was reminded of this nugget of parental insight this last weekend, as I traveled to Richmond, Virginia to take part in my first Ravenchase game.

I met with Lisa Duty, the 'Chick-In-Charge' at Ravenchase Adventures HQ. Lisa is a passionate creative, doing her 'duty' (pause for audience laughter) to get better everyday. She is constantly looking at her everyday to find the extraordinary, and it's incredibly admirable. While meeting with her, I spent some time in the Ravenchase offices, while Lisa threw clue after clue at me, exposing me to ciphers and keys, everyday objects that she turned into covert code-cracking keys (say that five times fast.)

I wasn't expecting the level of creativity and thought she showed me that day. Not that I wasn't expecting to be inspired, just not to that level. It was eye-opening, and it reminded me of mom's cauliflower-laden words. Even in creative circles, if we're not willing to try something, step out of our normal surroundings and explore the unknown, we'll never know to what extent we can be inspired. A great weekend spent solving clues, laughing and being reminded of how ordinary people with extraordinary passion can make even the every day seem adventurous.

Getting It Down

I've been working on a mark for a venture I'm starting, and like every designer who has ever worked on something for themselves, I've been struggling with it. Not that I am any less passionate about the work I do for clients, but when I am the client, I'm especially indecisive about direction. I want it to be everything I believe the venture is, and like all communication design, I want it to communicate 1000 things in one stroke.

I've been deep into my own creative process but it's yielded little direction to this point. I trust the process, I love the process, I find joy in the process, so I have no problem extending the process and continuing to look for ideas and inspiration in as many unexpected things as I can.

Last night, I had the big "breakthrough," bursting through while I was lying in bed, on the cusp of falling asleep. I've often heard of designers and scientists alike claim our subconscious is most receptive to new ideas at the moment before falling asleep and the moment before waking, but I personally have never had an episode of creative breakthrough like that. Until last night.

I didn't want to forget the idea, but I was too lazy to actually get out of bed to document the idea, so I reached over and pulled a piece of paper out of the nightstand drawer within reach. I placed the paper on the nightstand as a reminder of the idea, kind of a slothful version of tying a string around my finger. This morning, I rolled out of bed, saw the paper and remembered the idea.

This entire episode reminded me of something designer/rockstar Ann Willoughby said in a great session at a design conference a few years back. Her session was on journaling, the act of recording thoughts and ideas. She quipped:

"Ideas are inconsiderate."

She said this in the context of being prepared to document ideas, because they don't wait for you to be in the presence of a piece of paper and a pencil. They pop up at the most inconvenient times, when you aren't in arms reach of a notepad and writing utensil. Her point was to be prepared to record your ideas in some form. And she's so incredibly right.

I used to carry a small notepad and a pen with me, along with a super-thin digital camera, to be able to write down ideas when they hit or snap a quick shot of something I wanted to remember for later. The iPhone changed all that for me, as I no longer need the separate digital camera and the new App Store offers a free voice recorder that I use to document quick ideas for transfer to a more formal written journal when it's convenient.

Ann is right, ideas are inconsiderate. But if we are prepared to record them when they arrive, we can capture these elusive creatures and strangle them in the morning.