Hugh Garry

Where Ideas Come From - Cornerhouse Manchester

I'm going to be running a six week course at the Cornerhouse in Manchester on Where Ideas Come From. I've been running it at Shoreditch House in London over the last year and it's been great fun to be a part of. Wonderful conversations follow and people from all sorts of creative industries attend. If your job is about coming up with ideas there will be something in it for you. 

We were never taught about ideas in school, we were just expected to have them without any guidance as to where they come from. Once I begain studying ideas I naturally got better at producing them. Seems obvious I know but schools, collleges and workplaces rarely teach you about ideas. They just drop you in a brainstorm with a few bogus rules and expect you to know how to do it. Personally, I don't think this is the best way of getting good ideas out of your teams. Give them the right tools and they'll be generating ideas 24/7. 

The feedback I get after each session is almost always the same - "Why did nobody tell me this sooner?" and all I can answer is that I think it's because of the old myth that there are people who are good at ideas and people who are bad and that the bad ones can't become good. Which is total rubbish of course. 

If you want a place on the course you can sign up here. It's for people of all ages and abilities. The lessons will be a mixture of light lectures, videos and conversations. If you can't get to the course but would like to me run a workshop for your company do get in touch. 

The Dr. Fox Effect

I'm as guilty as anyone else working in my field of using wanky words when telling it like it is might have made life easier for everyone. To be fair to myself, in general I think I'm pretty good at holding back on the Birtspeak. I may talk a lot of nonsense, but I do so in plain English. Looking around at the language being used by some of my contemporaries I can't help wonder what planet they think we're on. The language confuses me and I'm a native. Allegedly.

There's no doubt as to why they do this though. It's called the Dr Fox Effect. It's nothing to do with a terrible DJ also know for talking a lot of nonsense, but a reference to an experiment carried out in 1976 aimed at testing teacher effectiveness. 

The experimenters produced a lecture on 'Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education,' given by Dr. Myron L. Fox from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine to a collection of physchologists at a conference in Tahoe. The thing is neither Dr. Fox or the Albert Einstein School of Medicine existed. They were part of a simple hoax.

A relatively famous actor was coached to deliver a completely meaningless lecture with an excessive use of 'double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements.' He was also encourage to adopt a 'lively demeanor, convey warmth toward his audience, and intersperse his nonsensical comments with humour'. 

The result was amazing. The fifty-five psychiatrists, psychologists, educators, graduate students, and other professionals gave incredibly positive feedback. Fox’s nonverbal behaviours coupled with enough jargon to sell snow to Eskimos completely disguised what was a totally meaningless lecture. 

Comments within the feedback suggested the lecture had 'given them food for thought', that 'Fox had presented the material in a clear manner' and 'put it across in an interesting way and incorporated plenty of good illustrative examples'.

So it seems style over substance and a healthy dose of jargon does have a placebo like impact when it comes to delivering presentations and lectures. The more nonsense you talk, the jargon you deliver, the confidence in your delivery, the bigger the impact. Music to the ears of a thousand social media consultants no doubt, though I think I'll be sticking to my own limited vocabulary. 

How are you creative?

In his book ‘The Element’ Sir Ken Robinson talks about a test he does when speaking at events. He asks the audience the question ‘On a scale of 1-10, how intelligent are you?’ The result creates a bell curve response with very few putting themselves at the top or the bottom. The majority score themselves somewhere around the middle numbers. Very few people see themselves as being highly intelligent, whilst virtually no one is stupid enough to rank themselves at the bottom of the scale. He then suggests that the question he should really be asking is ‘How are you intelligent?’

With a ball at his feet Lionel Messi is one of the most intelligent men on the planet. Sadly for him hat-tricks are not included in the narrow range of subjects that count in IQ tests. We all have varying levels of intelligence but our school’s radar isn’t great at picking up the full frequency of talents each individual has. If they asked the question ‘How are you intelligent?’ teachers would be better equipped to engage their students in a meaningful education. It would also give the student a reason to question themselves as to where their intelligence lies.

The same thinking can be applied to creativity. We are all creative in different ways. If you think you are not then you can thank your education for that. We are all born creative. As children we think freely, rarely questioning our view of the world. In play we create fantasies without barriers of ‘reality’. We imagine the unimaginable. With colours in our hands we crayon or paint without concern for logic or perspective: if the dragon lives in the tree house with a marshmallow roof then who is going to Question it?

We then get a little older and pens and rulers replace the pencils and crayons. The colours turn blue and the lines must be straight. You spend less time thinking freely and are introduced to ‘algebra’, ‘logic’ and ‘reason’. We are shunted into sets of ability and in an annual report measured by the letters A to F, which is strange given there are another 20 letters going to waste. A little piece of creativity is knocked out of us with every school year passing. Maths, English and Science are prioritized as the ‘creative’ subjects are relegated or removed from the curriculum by education committees fearful of raising a nation of ballet dancers.

Maybe my vision of education is slightly tainted by the fact that I went to a secondary modern school that handed out teaching position based on who wore: Mr. Brown who was ‘flamboyant’ got art and drama, whilst Mr. Kay owned a tracksuit so he became head of PE.

What’s sad about school is that at no point is the education process reversed ensuring creativity given back to its rightful owner. Having gone through a process of un-learning creativity we are left to believe that we never had it in the first place repeating the myth that being creative is either something you are or are not. Whilst it’s widely recognized that right brain thinkers are naturally creative and left brain thinkers more organized and methodical, those skills are not exclusive. With a few simple pointers a Right Brainer can master time management quite easily. Similarly, a Left Brain thinker can learn how to be creative. In his brilliant book ‘Whole New Mind’ Daniel Pink argues that the future belongs to the Right Brainers because the tasks traditionally carried out by Left Brainers can be replicated by computers or easily outsourced cheaply to Asia.

So what is creativity and how do you reclaim it? Well, that’s something I plan to address in the coming months. There have been some brilliant books on creativity published since James Webb Young wrote the hugely influential ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ way back in 1961. The above mentioned ‘The Element’ by Ken Robinson focuses on finding your passion. Keith Sawyer’s ‘Group Genius’ looks at the role of collaboration in the creative process. Steven Johnson’s ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ retraces the natural history of innovation. Tom Kelly’s ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation’ breaks down the creative process used by IDEO. And Hugh McLeod’s ‘Ignore Everybody’ gives a step-by-step guide to being creative, accompanied by his own superb cartoons. All of these are brilliant and I will no doubt steal huge chunks in my writing. I’d be mad not to.

I’m also going to be getting into the brains of some of the brilliant new thinkers who have yet to commit their thoughts on creativity to paper. I’m looking for new perspective, new process and some bold attempts at producing original ideas. If you have any suggestions on who I should be talking to then leave a comment.

What Motivates Us?

This is brilliant. It's only 10 minutes long. Dan Pink's excellent RSA talk on what motivates us is given a superb visual accompaniment. Based on the few times I've seen him talk recently I'm guessing his latest book 'Drive' is going to be a worthwhile read for anyone who manages people.

Dan points to research that dismisses the value of financial incentives in many of today's roles, suggesting there are three elements of true motivation - autonomy, mastery and purpose.

After seeing his TED Talk  I went out and bought his book 'Whole New Mind' and have to say it's one of the most interesting books I've read in ages. The premise of the book is that in a age of abundance the future belongs to 'right brain' thinking. At a time when computers are able to do the 'left brain' formulaic tasks man once did, jobs a are being lost. Similarly, thanks to advances in technology and communications, these kind of roles are increasingly being outsourced to Asia. However, computer's inability to truly understand and replicate 'right brain' tasks involving context and emotion suggests creative roles become more valuable.

I think there could  be another blog post soon about how it's helping my 100 Hour Project.

Snakes and Ladders

I just found this and think it's great. Apparently this Threadless design was inspired by Conan O'Brien's last monologue on The Tonight Show. The final paragraph went something like this...

"To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen."

I'm not sure of the story behind his departure but you can see the full monologue here.

Work hard and be kind. It's such a simple but obvious bit of advice when you think about it. So why do we rarely hear it? You always hear people saying that they achieved their success by 'working hard', but rarely through 'being kind'. Personally, I think there's too much emphasis on the first bit and not enough on the second. Get the second bit right and the 'working hard' bit becomes a whole lot easier. I'm no fan of the 'nice guys come last' school of thought. That line is usually rolled out by people with a very different perspective of success than my own.

I've 'lucked' my way through a great career by creating my own opportunities for serendipity and being nice when the moment arrived. I got my job at the BBC by just saying 'Hi' to a passing stranger. Sometimes it really can be that easy. It always amazes me when I meet people whose default settings aren't locked on 'be kind'. It's quite remarkable how many of them you come across in an average working day. Count them.

Being kind allows me to achieve things I might not achieve otherwise, with the added bonus of keeping the smile on my face through to the end of the day. At the same time I watch colleagues stumble over obstacles left by people who don't know what it means to be kind. It makes the workplace look like a giant game of snakes and ladders. Be kind and good things happen. Don't be kind and you'll inevitable take a fall.

100 Hours Project

You may recall me prattling on about becoming an expert recently. Inspired by Gladwell's theory that it takes 10,000 hours to reach the top of your game and Tim Ferriss' life hacking antics I'm about to embark on a series of projects based around 100 hours of learning. I say a series, that's 'optimistic me' speaking. It could easily become a series of '1' if the first project goes horribly wrong. The idea is to choose a project, set a target, deconstruct the learning process around the subject then reassemble it to work around my personal learning needs. By doing so I hope to achieve a reasonable level of 'expertise' in the subject in just 100 hours.

The Project: Learn Spanish in 100 Hours

I was shocking at languages in school. Completely hopeless. Partly down to apathy and partly down to bad teaching, the desire just never took hold. Since failing miserably at French I've ran a mile from the idea of learning a new language. So now, starting from scratch, I'm going to try and learn Spanish. The target is to be conversational with 100 hours of learning. If I can master enough of the language to be able to hold my own in a conversation then the project will be a success. 

Based on 3 hours study a day, 5 days a week, I hope to finish mid-July. Having said all that my 30 Days of Music project is heading into it's 3rd month.

From tomorrow I'll document my learning techniques and share my progress. If you have any tips please share them in the comments.