Listening and Creativity

At the start of innovation workshops, I ask the participants to come up with some groundrules for working together productively and creatively.

Usually second on the emerging shortlist is LISTENING.

Prompted, the person proposing it will often say how important it is to pay attention to what others are saying, both during any presentations and in the course of discussion.

It’s often comes as something of a shock when I add to this item that it’s important to listen to oneself. In fact, in sessions where the point is to tap into our creative selves, it’s more important, much more important, than listening to others.

In this situation, what others say is valuable primarily not as information, but as stimulus – to help us to trigger new thoughts, new perspectives, new ideas. Never more so than during a long, fact-filled presentation.

As usual, Mark Twain (above) caught this brilliantly: “Life does not consist mainly – or even largely – of facts and happenings,” he wrote. “It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.”

The challenge, of course is not only to listen closely to that storm of thoughts, but also to catch plenty of them on the wing. For me, that means making brief notes as they flash by. And then reviewing them consistently for further consideration and development.

Richard Branson once told me that he does this every day( see blogpost 03/11/2009). And so do I!

Best language for brainstorming?

I have found over the years that brainstorming is best done in local language.

Quite simply, the freshest ideas seem to come into our heads most readily in whatever vernacular we learn in childhood. And they are most easily expressed verbally in that language too.

This is not so easy when, as is usually the case in workshops with multinational companies, the common tongue is second-language English.

My Lintas colleague, Eleanor Modesto, discovered this vividly when she went from Manila to be managing director of the agency in Indonesia. She quickly discovered that the language of business in Jakarta is Bahasa Indonesia, so she got down to learning it, becoming expert enough in the language to pass as a local.

Yet it remained clear to her that being able to speak a language is one thing, whereas thinking in it, having ideas in it, is another thing altogether.

“Sometimes, it’s better to think conceptually in Tagalog [the major Filipino language],” Eleanor has said. “I would ask them ‘Do you have an idiom like this?’” And instead of generating ideas from “Man of Steel,” she would throw Filipino idioms like “tibay ng loob” [loosely translated as strength of character] into the mix, enriching the whole process.

Of course, I’ve discovered over the years that the facilitation of workshops in local language(s) brings greater complexity and requires special skills…

To explore this and much more, come to my Brand Renovation Masterclass in Manila, 8 November:

http://www.yeheydigitalgroup.com/repo/adobomasterclass/masterclass_edm.html