We were lucky to be invited to work with BBC journalist Stephen Smith on the recent broadcast of ‘A Little Lateral Thinking’ to mark 50 years of Dr Edward de Bono’s ground-breaking creativity tool Lateral Thinking.
In the programme, neuroscientist Professor Mark Beeman, told Stephen that it’s the neurons in the brain’s right hemisphere which appear to do the bulk of the work seeking out information, stretching further than the left hemisphere neurons, looking for new, and hopefully good stuff. Perhaps it seems greedy to always want more. But in the pursuit of creativity, too much is never enough. During a Lateral Thinking session with Holst client, advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, trainer Peter Lewis explains,“The currency of creativity really is ideas … Quantity leads to quality. Get comfortable with that and within that you will find something you can take towards a quality outcome. So, one of the rules is, let’s not shoot people’s ideas down.”
Of course, this was music to the ears of Creative Strategy Director Tara Austin’s team of behavioural psychologists at Ogilvy Change. All of who enthusiastically entered into the spirit of Lateral Thinking. Tara is a keen advocate of creativity training,“I actually got the Lateral Thinking training through a Holst competition. I specifically asked for this training because creativity, in our industry, is tied up with a lot of very masculine codes. The semiotics of creativity are kind of kick the doors in, big ideas from big thinkers who are silverback-gorilla types.”
It’s a challenging view. Possibly not a comfortable one to express in the mad world of advertising and change. But Tara is right. Great ideas don’t have to come from big thinkers. Lateral Thinking teaches us that anyone can have ideas. The trick is to let them evolve and incubate before you evaluate. Stephen went on to make an interesting analogy – think of Wallace and Gromit. Wallace may have big ideas, but which of the two actually has the greater intuitive insight?
