Four weeks ago I went to Wales, to the beautiful area around Cardigan Bay, to join Russell Davies’ day on How to be Interesting.
And now I want my money back etc etc. Boom boom.
But seriously folks, seven hours on Parc y Pratt Farm (home of the Do Lectures), with one of the most fascinating thinkers of this here internet was a rare privilege and one I thoroughly enjoyed. And that’s before you count the amazing, food and hospitality of the event’s hosts. Just Brilliant.
It’s also the reason that I’ve been back writing almost weekly on this blog of late – something I haven’t done since I was a young lad back when the internet was just starting out. The theory being: if the main part of being interesting is being interested (here is the original inspiration for the day in convenient readable format), then we need to practice the habits which help us to collect experiences and think about them. And so that is what I’ve been trying to do.
I’ve also started concentrating much more closely on how other people work in groups. Partly because that’s interesting for me. But mainly because, like interesting-ness itself, the effect of people working together seems, to me, to be a kind of magic.
Faced with a problem you are trying to solve, you can often spend hours alone and find no solution. A companion and a bit of energy and you’ll have solutions in minutes. Why is this?
Smarter groups seem to produce better ideas, but willingness to take part seems almost as important as cleverness in this context.
At the heart of both things – interestingness and using groups to solve problems and create things – there seems to be a similar dynamic. A new thing (a useful solution, a creative idea, an interesting notion) will most often come from taking ideas, breaking them up, and then putting them back together. Sometimes as little as forcing together two apparently unrelated domains will generate something of interest, or of use.
Like this:
Or this
Why does that work?
Our own brains seem so set on getting reliably from A to B (and we train them to be better over the course of our lives), that even a little bit of a curve ball thrown into the process is refreshing, or surprising, or can move us away from producing the same old answers.
As a species, we’re not made – as it were -for surprises. But we can suppress our instincts, and get there any way. And the the trigger for doing just that can be the dynamic effect of multiple people working together, or – I suppose – the mind altering chemicals used by several generations of writers, or perhaps the writing processes many authors follow of free-association, and simply creating huge volumes of stuff. There’s lots of ways (see Arden and Bernbach), but often the simplest and most powerful is a struggle between 2, 3 or 4 people, each building and refining the other’s thinking. Getting out of their own minds, by letting go of their own ideas.
Part of this leaves me wondering, just how vast are the possibilities of our creative minds. And if Russell’s course taught me anything, it is that they are without limit.
How will we evolve these skills? It’s not as ifnadvertising creatives will be killed off by their inability to think laterally (even if digital media has slowed them down considerably).
Rather it will be whole societies, cultures and companies who will live or die, perish or persevere through their ability to get people out of their day to day minds and acknowledging the incredible power of hacking our synapses to produce things which are new.
Leading product 