My daughter recently reached a phase in her development that I've been looking forward to immensely: the why phase. It's as if she read a book on campaign planning and now wants to quiz us to get to a core insight or strategic truth.
In reality, she likes Julia Donaldson books over “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy”.
"Why is the Highway Rat standing on his horse?"
(The Highway Rat is an excellent book; highly recommend it).
Because he wants to make sure the person in the cave can hear him.
"But why?"
Because he thinks she's got chocolate and cake.
"Why does he want chocolate and cake?"
Because chocolate and cake are tasty. You like chocolate, don't you? (My attempt to steer the conversation onto a different topic).
"But why does he like chocolate?"
Because it's delicious - everyone likes chocolate. Except for Grandma.
[pause]
"Does Rolly the dog [Grandma's dog] like chocolate?"
[Conversation moves onto an anecdote about one of our old dogs eating all the Easter Eggs and getting very sick].
Adopting a child's mindset is often given as advice when you're looking to freshen up your approach to strategy and creative.
Children are open books, sponges for information. Even though sometimes you may not be able to tell, they're taking everything they see and hear in. Ivy often surprises us by bringing up one particular aspect of a recent event weeks after it happened ("Uncle Stuart didn't like the ride, mummy" - a memory from a holiday a month ago).
Children don't have the same ingrained neural pathways and shortcuts as adults. They are curious about how everything works and our motivations for doing what we do. Adults don't have the time or mental capacity. We know just enough about how everything works to get by.
But clearly, if I were working on a brief for Mars or Mondelez, harnessing Ivy's childlike wonder into why people like chocolate would be hugely beneficial to my strategic and creative processes. It's one of those threads that demands picking and that you instinctively feel could lead you down interesting pathways and rabbit holes.
And while we can't intentionally reset any switches in our brain to clear our memory cache, we can actively cultivate our innate curiosity. We can easily be more open about our surface-level knowledge about almost everything.
We can ask more questions - especially ones that we might frame as "stupid"- that deliberately come from a place of ignorance. Those questions can yield particularly fruitful answers, as they can cut through a web of assumed knowledge blocking proper understanding (a bit like one of Julia Donaldson's other stories, Monkey Puzzle).
Many people also see openness and curiosity as not just helpful for planning, but also the act of creating itself (we'll leave aside any debates about whether strategy and planning are creative acts). My wife bought me Rick Rubin's book on creativity for Xmas; Rick is a massive believer in the idea that inspiration is all around us. According to Rick, our challenge is that we're not attuned to that inspiration.
Rick's advice is to try meditation. If you're familiar with meditating, you'll know one of its core premises is to empty your mind of the constant low-level thrum of thoughts you have going on. Instead, you focus on your breath, clearing your mind - and whenever you feel your mind begin to wander, you slowly nudge it back to the breath.
Upon completing your meditation, you should be ready to let more inspiration in and have more natural curiosity because your mind is less preoccupied with the low-level clutter that generally resides there.
(As an aside, I tried out Rick's 'meditate, then create' method during a songwriting session and found writing lyrics, in particular, much easier).
It's all about seeing your world and your environment with greater clarity, having more of a child's eye view of the challenge you're facing.
Letting your brain be even more of a sponge for information as you browse the internet.
Having more mental capacity to make the kind of unusual combinations that are often the seed of great ideas and fresh thinking.
Freeing up your mental resources doesn't just have to come from meditation. Nick Hearne, former colleague and creative maestro, advocated going for a walk down an unfamiliar route or to a new destination to achieve similar results. Being somewhere new forces your brain to take notice and focus instead of being on autopilot and filling up with the other things you have on your mind.
During lockdown, I found playing my guitar and making music provided much-needed mental refreshment. Having a stretch, doing some yoga, playing with your kids - anything that demands your attention but doesn't mentally tax you should do the trick.
It's about being present in the moment and focusing on the job at hand. Creating something, be it writing, drawing, music, ideas, isn’t about sitting around idly waiting for a muse to strike. Most successful creative people dedicate themselves to the craft. . They work hard on being, to quote
, "ready to receive" ideas.In his excellent 2019 piece, "It's not inside you trying to get out, it's outside you trying to get in", Austin quotes Nick Cave and Tom Waits, who echo Rick Rubin's assertion that ideas are out there, waiting to be uncovered.
Nick Cave says, "Songs are attracted to an open, playful and motivated mind" (Nick writes one of the best email newsletters out there, BTW).
Tom Waits advocates a relaxed approach to creating: "If a song really wants to be written down, it'll stick in my head. If it wasn't interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else's song."
Ideas and smart strategies tend to come from the same places, and the best ideas tend to be naturally sticky. If you can't easily remember or explain an idea or an approach the day after you came up with it, it probably wasn't that great in the first place. The best ideas have that nagging, nursery rhyme-like quality where they just stick in your head, whether you like it or not.
But the critical factor is readiness—being in the position, in the right headspace, to let the ideas and permutations form in your mind. Letting your mind wander into questioning some of the fundamentals we take for granted. "Why do people like chocolate anyway?" "How does our electricity grid work anyway?" "But why can't we just stop pumping sewage into our waterways?"
One of the things that everyone tells you when you become a parent is to enjoy each and every moment, because the days fall through you so quickly, and before you know it you're parenting a teenager.
So, even if I struggle to find the answers to simple sounding questions during the 'why' phase, I'm determined to enjoy it as long as it lasts - and apply Ivy's way of thinking to my creative process whenever I can.