This lack the Big Idea.
……………………………. Words of a prospective client, which changed my life
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Understanding the so-called ‘Big Ideas”, the different types of thinking processed used, and the context of lateral thinking, are crucial to being creative.
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THE MYTH OF THE INSTANT ‘BIG IDEA’
My inspiration to study the subject of creativity came after submitting what I thought was the perfect pitch document for a prospective client. I felt that it offered the definitive solution to the client’s needs, that it was full of good creative ideas relevant to this situation. I was genuinely taken a back by the client’s response. He said: ‘This lack the Big Idea’.
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Driven by a need to prove the client wrong, I racked my brains for a Big Idea. Nothing came to mind, and neither did the client’s…..
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Contemporaries of Mozart described him at work as ‘taking dictation 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 artist constantly making changes and adding incremental new ideas to their work.
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So how has the notion of the Big Idea come about? One explanation 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 some how intuitively and instantly arrive at Big Ideas rather than recognize the creativity can be a messy, unglamorous and protracted process.
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The individual egos of creative people, coupled with the need for journalists and historians to write a story with a clear beginning, 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 … its much more agreeable for them to think of their achievements as the outcome of a flawless chain of brilliant decisions an deliberate planning 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 highlight 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.
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Moreover, the actuality of invention reveals that great discoveries 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.
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Inventions are perfected by step-by-step improvements, and each step itself an invention. Paying tribute to this incremental process, Sir Isaac Newton observed: ‘If I have seen far, it is because how he could only have made his major discoveries by incrementally 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 the others have used successfully. Your Idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are currently working on.’
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Some practitioners, keen to uphold the concept of the instant Big Idea, use examples from their own careers as evidence of its existence. Usually what emerges is that they have subconsciously used a technique described – 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 something that is usually big in scale rather than necessarily large in added value – which would be the true criterion of any genuinely Big Idea.
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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 …. as a’ paradigm of a situation’.
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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.
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Sometimes a ‘Big Vision’ 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.
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Remembering our definition of creativity from Chapter 1, which a creative idea is defined as a product created from a combination of elements in a new context, it is clear that neither Big Provocation nor Big Vision can be called Big Ideas.
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Another cause for confusion is the ideas that come to us seemingly out of the blue. These are often confused with Big Ideas. In reality, they are merely ‘illuminations’.
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The instant Big Idea – created as an initial illumination, isolated from the task in hand – does not exist, except perhaps in consultancy 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 reason. First, practitioners work in a environment where their client or management may at times demand an instant Big Idea for the task in hand. …… page 23.
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Convergent thinking, the so-called left-sided thinking, is the intellectual ability lo logically evaluate, criticize and choose the best idea from a selection of ideas. Divergent thinking, the apparent right-sided thinking, is the ability of the intellect to think of many original, diverse and elaborate ideas. These contrasting thinking approaches are embodied in the two lead characters in the science fiction television classic, Star Trek. Mr. Spock was the cool, analytical character, where everything was rationally observed an logically thought through; Captain Kirk, in contrast, was seen to employ more emotional, intuitive thinking, and being inspirational in his tackling of problems.
(by Andy Green)
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