Imagining Viennetta

You know! The delicious multi-layered dessert ice cream. But where did the idea come from?

According to court reports from the 1990s, the Viennetta product was conceived in 1979 by a product development manager, Kevin Hillman, at Wall’s (Unilever) factory in Gloucester, England. He was looking through a cook book he had given his wife for Christmas, when he noticed an illustration of a traditional French cake, mille-feuille – a thousand leaves.

Suddenly he saw not a thousand layers of puff pastry, cream and jam, but “a cake consisting of layers of ice cream alternated with strata of chocolate.”

It was to become one of Unilever’s best-selling ice cream brands around the world, proof that good new ideas come from connection-making from the past, in this case from something that had existed for decades, maybe centuries.

Learning to be more creative

I haven’t yet read Jonah Lehrer’s new best-selling book on creativity, Imagine: How Creativity Works, but I have read his extended article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, and I’m not impressed.

He starts from the proposition that “there’s no such thing as a creative type” and that “anyone can be learn to be creative”. It is not an encouraging thesis.

Basically it’s an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours insight. And while it’s true that everyone can improve their connection-making skill (this being at the heart of all creativity), nevertheless it’s quite observable that some amongst us have creative skills of a quite different order.

Think Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein, Edison, Turing… To be frank, even with a million hours of skill-building, I’m unlikely to achieve their level of, well, genius. And to deny this strikes me as, well, blind.

I have been training people in creative thinking over several decades now, and I notice consistently that the students who have lost their creativity (or suppressed it or never seemed to have had much anyway) can indeed up their game substantially. However they never catch up with the ones who have real self-confidence in their connection-making capabilities.

The latter make massive progress in a structured training session, because they are enabled to hone skills that already exist, taking them up to a whole new level. Whether the basis for their special talent is nature or nurture seems to me to be of secondary importance.

Only connect

I received this from an actor-writer friend, Philip Bird. I think it’s very interesting, full of intriguing and important ideas. What do you make of it?

“I couldn't sleep and for some reason wrote this down.

“The human brain is a wonderful thing, predisposed to look for and find connections between things, often linking different areas of perception in unexpected ways - which is why, for a computer to do what a brain does, it would have to be the size of my house. How each of us makes those connections is an individual mystery, affected by our genes and our exposure to patterns of thought in others - parents, friends, people we admire, some of whom give us permission to think the unthinkable and open doors we didn't even know were there to open.

“To make these connections, to allow our brains to do what they want to do naturally, and in fact can't help doing if released to do it, is the essence of creativity. There is no one creativity, we each have our own. How can we be encouraged to make these connections? To be in an atmosphere of mutual trust and support where egos are left at the door.

“People think 'but if I don't display my ego I will be nothing, just some wishy-washy yes-person bowing to someone else's forceful personality'. But we ask everyone to lose that ego, so that no-one is forcing anyone else. The ego is, after all, only a part of one's personality, the assertive driving look-at-me part. We need to let the brain do its thing, unlimited, unconfined, unfettered, unashamed. People think that only certain people are creative, that some are and some aren't, and they can feel pressured when asked to 'be creative'. That very request may imply that there is a definite end in the view of the questioner, it may put pressure on just by being asked. Somehow the suggestion must be put without pressure; whatever happens must be allowed to happen, with no fixed end in view. Connections will be made, be they wild, funny, synaesthetic, intuitive, if unforced by any agenda, unlimited by preconception. We all have the potential to be creative in our own way, but many of us need the confidence to let it happen.

“There is no-one to please. No-one to impress. I find to be creative I need to carve out some still time first - to look out of the window, deliberately not take anything to do on the train journey, go for a walk, anything which lets the brain work its magic. And it does, in its own individual way, if you wait.”

Philip Bird appears regularly on our stages and film and TV screens. At an “Ideas into Action” Masterclass that I ran at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Philip was Thomas Edison, going on that same evening to be Dr Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor on stage there.