Fortunately, what Polly lacks in insight into her own workings, she more than makes up for in research skills so she shut herself away for the best part of a week doing lots of reading (real books and the interweb) and came out of it looking rather pleased with herself, mostly because it turns out she's been Doing It Right all along (what a relief).
Courvoisier are in the process of making a lovely video of the whole thing, but in the meantime, Polly's talk and slides are below. We think they're well worth having a read through. Furthermore, Polly would like to point out that she is available to give inspirational speeches at bar mitzvahs and weddings within the M25 and that her talk owes a lot to one particular book: Where Good Ideas Come From: the Seven Patterns of Innovation, by Steven Johnson, which everyone should read when they get a moment.
Hello
everyone, thank you for coming along.
My name
is Polly Betton, and my company is called Teatime Production.
It can
be quite difficult to explain exactly what we do, because our list of past
projects is very varied. To give you some recent examples – in the last year
we’ve created pancake landscapes
for Lyle’s Golden Syrup, a ten course immersive sensory tasting
experience for 150 guests for Carte Noire, two installments of an ongoing
Edible Cinema
project for Soho House Group and an indoor meadow
filled with spring lambs for guests to bottle feed as part of a
private event, among other things.
We’re
given the briefs that people don’t know where to start with. We do a lot of
food work, because that’s the way the market has gone recently, but as a
company, we’re production rather catering.
Essentially
someone gives us a brief – often a very brief one – and we come up with a
series of solutions that are carefully angled to deliver the results that the
client wants. Once we’ve agreed a direction we then bring a specialist or two
on board – for example an experimental chef – and mediate the development and
delivery of the project to ensure that the final result is neither compromised
into mediocrity by the client, nor turned into an expensive exercise in
self-indulgence by the specialist.
So we
occupy quite an unusual creative space: there’s a real tension between the
detail oriented production side and the ideas side where we need to come up
with strong concepts and be able to ensure we don’t lose that strength as the
project progresses. But I think you can probably tell by this point that ideas
are the thing that the whole business hangs off: without a regular supply of
good ideas we’d be dead in the water.
Which is
why the subject tonight is the Evolution of Ideas. I offered to talk on this
subject because I thought it would be one of the few things that my working
life would have in common with everyone else’s: we all need to solve problems
with good ideas.
Then I
had a bit of a think about it, and I realised that like a lot of people in the
creative industries, I’d never really considered the process I go through when
I’m trying to work up ideas. It’s almost like we think that if we pin it down
it’ll disappear forever, we’re a bit superstitious about it. So I felt I may
have dropped myself in a bit of a hole.
Fortunately
for all of us, instead of vaguely noodling on about my own process I did some
research and ended up feeling very validated by what I found out, because it
turned out that a lot of our inherited wisdom about creativity (which I’ve
often felt completely at odds with) is completely wrong. But I’ll get onto that
bit shortly. I’d like to begin with this.
When I
was at art school, that was our favourite phrase. Less because we thought it
was useful and more because it was very satisfying to deliver something that
both answered the brief completely and gave the person who set it something
they neither expected nor wanted.
I’m not
advising you to deliberately piss off your client or boss, but it can sometimes
be useful to try to take an outside view on a brief because the best answers
are often unexpected ones. And being quite happy to put the cat among the
pigeons to see what happens doesn’t hurt either.
This is
a great example of exactly that approach:
We tend
to have quite fixed ideas about how inspiration works. We think:
-
That there is a flash of inspiration from
nowhere
-
That this great idea is transcendent: it
happens in spite of all the old ideas and traditions that the rest of us are
still hanging onto
-
That there is a tidy narrative to the innovation:
An apple fell on my head, I discovered gravity
-
That the great idea is a single, isolated
thought
I think
we’ll all be doing ourselves a massive favour if we concede the reality of the
situation right now:
-
Combination of good source material, the right
chaos/order balance, luck/error and environment
-
Great ideas are built up from bits and pieces
of existing ideas and traditions: the content isn’t new, the arrangement is.
Without the old stuff there would be no new stuff
-
There’s usually a messy, convoluted route to
inspiration that can take years
-
An idea is a slowly building swarm of thoughts
It’s
really important to recognise this, because it completely changes the
environment we think we need to be creative, and gives us a much better chance
of achieving something useful.
With
that in mind let’s run through some of the factors that make for great ideas:
You’re
only as good as your raw material: part of coming up with a good idea is making
sure that you’re not endlessly recycling the same ingredients.
So:
messing around on the internet is officially good. Limiting yourself to
Facebook, Twitter and porn is never going to be healthy, but keeping an ongoing
collection of snippets of information that have interested you via your
bookmarks bar or site like Pinterest is very useful.
Collecting
interesting bits and bobs is something people have done for hundreds of years:
during the Enlightenment, European scholars made ‘commonplace books’, notepads
into which they transcribed interesting or inspirational passages, to read back
later on for self improvement. So you’re joining a noble tradition. Try to
watch fewer cat videos and read more about interesting advances in technology
and you’ll be all set.
Of
course it’s never as simple as all that: it’s not just about the information,
it’s also about how you digest it.
It’s
more useful to absorb lots of small pieces of disparate information in a short
period of time than it is to read a book over the course of six months. It’s
because you remember enough about what you’ve read to make useful connections
between the different bits of information.
Bill Gates
takes annual reading holidays, I block off the occasional day for research. The
trick is to sanction it as a useful part of your work process. Thinking of it
as a source of guilt because it doesn’t have a specific outcome is really
unhelpful: you don’t have better things to do, because without ideas you’re
stuffed.
The
subject of information collection brings me to exaption, the source of some of
the best ideas.
Exaption
is when you take existing ideas or technology and use them for a completely
different purpose. An historical example is the Gutenberg press: the source of
modern mass produced print. The Chinese had already come up with metal type,
but because they hand printed it, it wasn’t really any faster. Gutenberg was
trained as a goldsmith and made some important changes to the type itself, but
the real turning point was when he re-purposed the grape presses used for
winemaking in the Rhineland to apply the inked type to paper. He took the
existing material – the grape press – and saw it in a way that no-one else had
imagined before.
We see
examples of this type of innovation every day, from laser cut pasta to wind up
radios, lots of great ideas come through taking a new perspective on existing
knowledge or technology. Which, of course, you can’t do if you don’t know about
it.
I know
that sounds like quite a lot of effort, so you’ll be pleased to hear that
you’re already doing something right: you live in London. The interesting fact
is that as cities get bigger they innovate faster, out of all proportion to the
growth of the population.
You
would expect that a bigger city would be more innovative because it’s got more
people. But the effect is actually greater than that: in a larger population,
the per capita innovation is higher – each individual produces more. The
average resident of a city of 5 million is almost three times as creative as
the average resident of a town of 100,000.
Why do
cities make us more creative? They’re noisy, dirty and cramped: the exact
opposite of what any sensible person would think of as productive. It turns out
that being uncomfortable is useful: when the current state is completely
satisfying no-one has any reason to change it. There’s strength in numbers too:
subcultures flourish in cities, which allows small pockets of very specific
expertise to develop. These naturally cross-pollinate with other pockets, which
leads to the random multi-disciplinary connections that form the basis of great
ideas.
Our
social groups also influence our creativity: people with diverse, horizontal
social networks are three times more creative than those with uniform, vertical
networks. In social groups united by shared values and long term familiarity,
people feel a powerful need to conform and that squashes creativity.
I mentioned
earlier that some ideas take years to develop. People tend to think of a hunch
as an immediate, gut reaction. The slow hunch is a lingering sense that you’ve
just seen the start of an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t come up
yet. It sits in the back of your head until it’s jolted into action one day by
some new information, another hunch or an internal connection that completes
the thought.
So what do
you do with a hunch? Feed it. Set aside time to work on your hunches: pet
projects with no defined end point. At Google they have ‘20% time’ for their
engineers: for every four hours on a project they must spend one on personal
projects. Lots of these projects come to nothing, but over half of Google’s new
products start out during 20% time, including Ad Sense, which earned them $5
billion in 2009.
Even if
you have a hunch (or two), you might need some help to turn it into a fully
fledged idea. This is where a spot of serendipity comes in useful.
Unfortunately you can’t
pre-order serendipity (otherwise known as luck), but you can take yourself from
task-based to associative thought patterns – which help up to make more random
connections - by just talking a walk or having a long shower. Whatever gets you
to de-focus for half an hour.
If that’s not working and
everything is going wrong you can take some solace in the fact that error is
often the most important part of idea development. Not in the ‘learning from
your mistakes’ context, more in the sense that sometimes you’re trying to invent
a cure for malaria and you end up the world’s first synthetic dye.
I’ve never accidentally
invented something else, but I do quite often completely misunderstand
something and find that in the end I prefer my made up version, which then
forms the basis for a new project.
You can also learn a lot from
someone else’s mistakes. Next time you’re really hating something, try to work
out exactly why. Being able to identify why something isn’t working is a great tool
in evaluating and adjusting your own ideas to make them more successful. Gut
reactions are often right, but it’s important to be able to work out what’s
making you have that reaction. Plus of course, it’s a great distraction while
you wait to escape.
Inaccuracy is also
surprisingly useful – this is one for anyone who has ever had to deal with a
focus group. When you ask people to free-associate they are incredibly
predictable.
Show a group of people a blue
slide and 80% of them will come out with the same 10 or so words: sky, sea,
colour. Only 20% will say something that’s a bit more of a stretch, sadness,
for example. But if you tell the group that the blue slide is green,
then after
disagreeing with you, suddenly over half of the group will start coming out
with more inventive responses: being made to question, if only for a moment,
their assumption about the colour of the slide makes them more creative.
Obviously, to be effective an
idea needs to work but it’s important not to try to regulate the process of
coming up with the idea too closely: a bit of failure, and being forced to
question our assumptions helps us to come up with more creative responses
because we have to re-examine the range of options more thoroughly.
Which brings me neatly to
chaos. A touch of chaos is essential to coming up with great ideas, it’s why
people sometimes dream ideas: the brain’s random firing during REM sleep makes
connections that would never have happened in it’s usually orderly workings.
Innovative environments tend to gravitate towards the ‘edge of chaos’: the
fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy.
On the one hand, a completely
ordered environment stifles all creativity, which is why working away alone in
a private, white space trying to think big won’t do you any good. On the other
hand, open plan offices are notorious failures: working completely in public is
as bad as being shut away. The ideal working space is one that can be
reconfigured as needed. Which is fine if you have an infinite budget, but can
also be achieved in a smaller way by varying your work environment depending on
what you’re trying to achieve. Days working from home or taking your laptop to
the park for a few hours, when used to open up the routine of sitting in an
office can dramatically improve your ability to hit on good ideas.
So let’s
apply this to a scenario we all suffer with appalling regularity: meetings.
The
group environment is actually the place where most good ideas happen, because
it helps to recontextualise the problem you’ve been working away at alone,
making you think about it on a different scale or from a new perspective. This
is especially true if you can make sure that your meeting includes people from
different departments, because their specialist knowledge may unexpectedly
inform an important element of your project.
One of
the reasons Apple products are so successful is that projects aren’t passed
down from one department to another, being modified out of all recognition as
they go. At Apple all the teams work on projects in tandem, so there’s an
ongoing communication between the departments, leading to innovation to solve
problems more usually answered by resorting to tried and tested compromises.
So, talk
to everyone, especially the people that don’t seem relevant.
The
success of a meeting also relies on a degree of informality: people need to be
able to talk to each other on the same level. But above all, there’s no point
in turning up to any meeting empty handed. You’ve to bring something to the
table. Which is where your habit of collection comes in. A well ordered folder
of completely relevant research will often help you a lot less than a cup of
tea and half an hour browsing your collection of miscellany.
You’ll find that a few vague connections will turn up in the back of
your head, meaning that you can go into the meeting and – if it seems like
they’ll be relevant – introduce them as starting points to be developed between
the group.
That
might seem a bit of a relaxed approach to you, but I prefer to think of it as
confidence. The people that come up with great ideas aren’t necessarily
smarter, or working harder than you, they’re going out of their way to be exposed
to a wider range of influences. Understanding that can help you to work
smarter, and more productively. If you’ve put in the time over the long term,
you won’t need to look at what your contemporaries are doing to come up with
ideas that fit with the zeitgeist, because you’ll already be part of it.
So, as
time is running on let’s quickly re-cap the key points:
-
Go for a walk
-
Feed your hunches
-
Be a collector
-
Be comfortable with a little chaos
-
Embrace serendipity
-
Don’t dismiss the product of mistakes
-
Talk to people who know about things you don’t
-
Borrow, recycle and re-invent
Now,
because this is a networking event, I’m going to make you talk to each other.
Because it’s about ideas, and we’ve established that a little chaos is useful
I’m not going to overly regulate the process.
When you
arrived, you were each given a badge with your field of work on it. I want you
to find at least two people that you haven’t met before, who work in a
different field to you, and tell them about a project you’re working on. Listen
to them explain one of their projects in return. When you’re listening, try to
come up with some useful input, even if it’s a small thing or you think they’ve
probably already considered it.
Make a
note of any interesting information, or references that might come in useful,
exchange ideas.
Thank
you.
