Vincent Nolan RIP

I first met Vincent Nolan some forty years ago. He came to teach Synectics to a group of us at Garland-Compton (shortly before it morphed into Saatchi and Saatchi). I was in my late twenties and had risen quickly in the advertising business, but learning from Vincent undoubtedly transformed my life.

It dawned on me that one of my main skills up to that point was in identifying weaknesses in other people’s thinking and wielding the scalpel, and that this approach, while it had helped me to be successful, was of very limited value in promoting real creativity and innovation (the lifeblood of marketing communications). Vincent taught us that a better approach was first to articulate the value in emerging ideas, then going on to identify the key issues and problem-solve them.

This may seem simple, even obvious, but it required some complete personal rewiring in myself, changes that have lived at the heart of my life and work ever since.

Following that early encounter, I brought Vincent into each successive new role I found myself in – training my new teams in the whole Synectics bag of tricks. Perhaps most powerfully this was achieved at Lintas in Sydney, where, in a succession of visits from him, most colleagues in the agency were given the treatment. This was a major factor in enabling us to work together more effectively and creatively – and as a consequence we were able to rise from eighth in the local league table to second in just five years, quadrupling profits in the process.

Eventually I joined Synectics myself, as Vincent gradually wound down his life's work, concentrating more on his cello and his golf.  

At 85, Vincent Nolan died last Sunday, 17 August.

British joke, right, Rog?

Humour, wit, seems to be both time and place bound. So much so that what we Brits found deeply amusing on the tellie in the past can seem lame to us nowadays. The recent flood of reruns on British TV from the Musée d’Eric ’n’ Ern only reinforces that feeling for me.

I myself have been known to make little witticisms, occasionally involving irony.

At the company I used to work with, Synectics, based in Cambridge Massachusetts, I would do that in meetings there, face properly straightened.

There would be a pause and then one of my American colleagues would carefully check back: "British joke, right, Rog?"

The Detail versus the Big Picture

So many seem to have been credited with the notion that the Devil (or is it God?) is in the detail – Goethe, Flaubert, Mies van der Rohe and Aby Warburg among them, not to mention Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

But is it really the detail that matters most?

I remember, at an international meeting of Synectics people in Washington DC, my esteemed colleague Vincent Nolan enjoined us all to attend to the detail. And immediately he was flatly contradicted by Sandy Dunlop.

“If anywhere,” said Sandy, “he is in the Big Picture.”

Brainstorming: does it really work?

Brainstorming has had a bad press recently. It seems that many have had poor experience of it.

My own belief is that this is mainly because people dive in with very limited skills, not understanding that training and experience enhance the value and effectiveness of the process greatly. I would say that untrained groups led by poor quality creative facilitation are almost invariably doomed to fail.

The term was first popularised in the 1940s by an American advertising executive, Alex Osborn, in his book, Applied Imagination. The four core principles involved in Osborn’s method are as valid today as they were then:

Focus on quantity: get a wide range of possibilities as start-ideas.
Withhold criticism: instead of identifying flaws in ideas offered, switch to “What does that make me think of?” and offer a new idea.
Welcome unusual ideas: not just the obvious ones.
Combine and improve ideas: take the most interesting parts of several start-ideas to create new ones.

Osborn’s method was extended and enhanced by George Prince and WJJ Gordon, who each wrote seminal books and together started the innovation and creativity consultancy, Synectics, whose method I still use.

On reflection, it seems to me that unless you are prepared to get a proper skill-base on board, it’s probably best to leave it alone.

I have PMS and a handgun

When I was collecting additional innovation and creativity stories and quotes for the IMAGINE book, I wandered around offices looking at what was pinned up as constant reminders.

In the Synectics office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among all those rather cheesy self-help quotes, I found this one.

“I have PMS and a handgun. Any questions?”

So much more helpful.

Aristotle and the Power of Metaphor

“To be a master of metaphor is the greatest thing by far,” said Aristotle. “It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. And it is also a sign of genius.”

I believe that facility with metaphor is at the very heart of creativity. Yet when I introduce the subject in training workshops, there usually descends a look of apprehension, even fear, shortly followed by an apparently semi-hypnotic state, as though the mere mention of the term has induced a measure of psychic paralysis.

I wonder why this is so? In my own school days we were taught the meaning of metaphor alongside simile and analogy, as though defining them would in some mysterious way set free our ability to use them freely. Not so. It’s practice that counts.

In my old company, Synectics, we sidestepped the whole issue by talking about “excursions”, which seemed to me to be in practice a practical way of getting into metaphor without using the mesmerising term itself.

(Have you noticed how many suggestive metaphors exist in this brief piece alone?)

Imagining Imagine

When I joined Synectics to head up their business around the world outside of America, in the first board meeting I criticised the company’s promotional materials. “Boring,” was the word I used, as I recall.

This was a mistake. The other board members totally agreed with my assessment and, before I knew it, I was commissioned to create a new corporate brochure.

This was particularly a problem for me because, far from being unusually boring, Synectics’s existing brochure was the usual kind of self-serving corporate-speak.

The question was: what could be done about it? How could we produce something different, better and special that would reflect our company more accurately and at the same time add value to people’s lives in terms of creativity and innovation?

Several months passed. Then, desperate to get going, I had a beer with the freelance writer, Andrew Bailey. I described the situation to him.

“What have you got?” he asked.

“Well, nothing really,” I replied. “Except… I have a file of interesting quotes and stories that I’ve been collecting for the past twenty years.”

“Let’s start there,” said Andrew briskly. “We’ll do Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book of Innovation.”

So that was the start-idea for what became Imagine. It was so successful that we printed, circulated and sold some 50,000 copies over the following years – and it’s still in print now.

Asked in an interview to name the most important business book ever, Unilever’s Roger Kirman unhesitatingly nominated Imagine.

Gratifying!

Individuals or teams for breakthrough creativity?

For years I believed that the best ideas emerged collaboratively. As international managing partner of Synectics for many years, a leading proponent of team creativity, that’s what you’d expect.

I’m not so sure any more.

It’s gradually become clearer to me that real ground-breaking ideas are more often hatched in the brains of highly creative individuals. Think Galileo, Harrison, Einstein, Edison.

Certainly Edison’s biggest breakthrough ideas were conceived in solitude – but he was also superb in organising his innovation project teams to work systematically towards implementation once he’d made that initial imaginative leap.

In my experience team creativity is generally better for more day-to-day creativity, for problem-solving, for the creation of strategy and for getting the team fully on board.

Remembering Rich Gabriel: 9/11

Rich Gabriel was one of the smartest of my colleagues at Synectics.

He had an intense honesty and clarity of thinking, allied to a sharp, downbeat wit. In many ways he always seemed rather semi-detached at the firm, almost as though he’d joined by mistake.

He had been an officer in the US Marines in the Vietnam War, where he had lost a leg, and was awarded the Purple Heart.

I thought he might make a major contribution if we brought him on to the small management team, so I approached him. He thought about it, dealt with me with great courtesy, and said thanks but no.

Soon after, he left with his friend Ned Preble, and together they set up their own firm.

On 11 September 2001, Rich was flying from Washington DC to Australia on business aboard American Airlines Flight 77. Terrorists took over and flew it into the Pentagon.

RIP.

Discovering new oceans

It’s sad, when something profound has been written, to find it consistently attributed to the wrong person, or even to Anon.

What’s more, I’ve done this myself. When I put together the Imagine book for Synectics, I had no idea where the following quote came from. I just knew it was important. So I attributed it to the aforesaid Mr Anon. Here it is:

“One cannot discover new oceans without consenting, for a long time, to lose sight of the shore.”

I certainly was not alone. And even in the age of the World Wide Web, it’s still said to be by that prolific unknown author, or, sometimes, extraordinarily, by Christopher Columbus.

Well, in fact it’s from Les faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters], a novel by the French writer and Nobel Prizewinner, André Gide, published in 1925.

And what a vivid metaphor it is. Fundamental to success in the creative process.

(The portrait of Gide, above, is a detail from “The reading by Emile Verhaeren” by Théo van Rysselberghe.)

The Dark Night of the Innovator

A really useful insight into the pathology of innovation is the fact that at some stage or another, even with projects that are being built with boundless enthusiasm, whistles and bells, nearly all of them run into difficulties surrounded by mounting disillusion.

This is “The Dark Night of the Innovator”. We have all been there, I guess.

So far as I can tell, the concept was first formulated by two colleagues at Synectics in the 1980s – John Philipp and Sandy Dunlop. I included it in a small book, Imagine, which I did for Synectics a few years later.

Even with the most perfect project plan (if there is such a thing), it’s important to remember that things will not always run smooth and that particular care and attention, skill and energy is needed in negotiating one’s way out of the Dark Night.

As the great twentieth century poet, TS Eliot, put it in his “The Hollow Men”:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.

In Memoriam Bill Boggs: Managing Mavericks

All my working life, I’ve worked with and managed mavericks – highly creative individuals who don’t fit well into the corporate mould.

For many years this was in ad agencies. They rarely produce outstanding work if they don’t have some mavericks on staff. And they won’t join unless there are signals that it’s OK to be different. It’s the same for all organisations that are committed to creating breakthrough of one kind or another.

When I joined the innovation consultancy, Synectics, one of my American colleagues, another recent joiner, was Dr Bill Boggs. And it didn’t take long to discover two things.

One was that most of my colleagues did not appreciate Bill’s ways. He was difficult, self-obsessed, driven, irreverent and disruptive. There’s no doubt that he thought that corporate rules, even ones he personally participated in shaping, applied to others, not to Bill.

The other thing that I discovered was that Bill was uniquely brilliant, creating completely new ways of working and producing far, far more business for our firm in the USA than anyone else – in effect bringing the revenue that paid many colleagues’ salaries. And he was on his day the finest facilitator of creativity I ever saw.

All this seemed to make no difference to colleagues’ attitudes to him and many thought he should be fired – and said so frequently.

Somehow or other we held on to him for several years, but in the end he went. What he discovered then was that in reality he needed the relatively secure home that we provided. He was nowhere near so effective without us.

But then we were so much less without him.

Put bluntly, the issue for organisations is: how to recruit and retain the mavericks who can and will drive their future – and have colleagues appreciate their value. It’s not easy, but it may be vitally important.

Meetings, bloody meetings

Research we did at Synectics before the social media revolution showed that managers in America spent some three quarters of their time in meetings of one sort or another. It does not seem to have been a happy experience for them.

Among managers in “star” innovation companies, only 25% thought that they regularly had productive or creative outcomes, whereas for those in “spectator” innovation companies, the figure dropped to a pitiful 2%.

But here is an interesting sub-finding: my meetings are more productive and creative in outcome than yours. The research showed that, irrespective of who I am, or in which function, I think that my meetings are pretty good – but yours are not!

I wonder whether things are improving? Or are meetings just as dire as they have ever been (as in those John Cleese videos)?

One problem that persists, it seems to me, is that the ability to chair a meeting productively is not a skill widely embraced (or well taught). The co-founder of Synectics, George Prince, concluded that it was better to split the role of the chair into two – a “problem owner” (who would lead content), and a “facilitator” (who would lead process). Both would need to model and promote positive climate in the meeting.

Is this happening much? I rather doubt it.

Me and My Shadow

Even today, with the benefit of psychological profiling tools like Myers-Briggs, I notice that so often managers hire people in their own image. This can be comfortable, but it’s unlikely to be very potent in terms of innovation or leadership.

In my own case, I noticed quite early on that the partnership I had with Jennifer Laing at Saatchi and Saatchi was extraordinarily effective. Yet in personality type we were quite different. Somehow or other her strengths mirrored my weaknesses and vice-versa. Everything we touched turned to business.

And I’ve been lucky enough to have had a number of these symbiotic relationships later in my “career” – with Max Gosling at Lintas, with David Walker at Synectics, and now with Alison Duffy at Per Diem. In each case these partnerships have been associated with periods of major innovation and of sustained business success.

Of course, there is a great elephant trap involved in this. As polarised personalities it’s quite likely that you’ll not appreciate each other, maybe even disliking each other. So unless there is genuine mutual admiration, a real appreciation of the value of the other, and a shared sense of direction, success is unlikely to follow.

Knowing which is me and which is shadow in any given situation can be tricky. Flexibility as to who leads and who follows can be a moment by moment thing.

Do you have a terrific shadow?

Birth of the facilitator

It’s not given to many of us to change the world in any significant way, but George Prince and Bill Gordon did. The founders of Synectics, they were running an innovation consultancy in the 1960s, providing clients with new ideas to brief, when they realised that clients often rejected George and Bill’s ideas, whereas they went forward with rather similar ideas they had had themselves.

Eureka! Synectics was born out of the belief that if George and Bill helped, facilitated, their clients to get better ideas, they would have a much higher strike rate.

It’s an unfortunate fact that they fell out quite soon after and Bill set up separately, but the seed was sown, and by now there are thousands of innovators and organisations successfully using Synectics-derived methodologies around the world.

I once asked George where the word “facilitator” had come from. “Well,” he smiled, “we just didn’t seem to have a word for it.”

What’s your experience of facilitators and facilitation? Helps or hinders?