The secret to being a better problem solver. Bagels.

Boil down the problem to be more original in your thinking.

Our brains are wired to help us solve problems quickly.

From an evolutionary perspective, when you’re about to be attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger, you don’t want your brain to be mulling over which way you should go, you just need to…run!

But that’s not always the best solution.

In 1949 at Mann Gulch in Montana, a group of firefighters were parachuted in to fight a forest fire. They were led by the experienced Wagner Dodge. With the wind constantly changing direction, so was the fire.

When Dodge saw that the fire suddenly crossed a gulch about 200 yards ahead and started moving toward them, he yelled at the crew to run from the fire. They all began running up a steep hill towards a bare ridge of rock.

If they could get to the ridge they would all be safe. The trouble was the fire was moving at a speed of 660 feet per minute. With his experience, Dodge realized they wouldn’t be able to outrun the fire. He had to come up with a different solution.

He lit the ground in front of him and once a small patch had been burnt he laid down in it. He called to his team to do the same but they all thought he was crazy and carried on running for the ridge. The fire passed around Dodge, but as he had predicted due to its speed and ferocity it caught up with the other firefighters before they could reach the ridge.

So while for most of us, finding a creative solution to a problem isn’t a matter of life or death, this example shows that the obvious answer isn’t always the best solution.

To come up with more creative solutions to the problems you face, you need to be passionate and curious.

Passionate, because if you really want to find the best solution to a problem, you will keep striving to find it.

And curious so you will be able to create a wider range of associations in your mind that you can connect or relate to the problem.

So here’s a quick test to see how associative your brain is. Let’s say for instance, you own some apple orchards and you want to sell your apples. So you need a logo. Now it’s got to be apple-related, so what do you associate with ‘apple’. Forget about all the recipes you can make with apples. What objects, images, stories or brands do you associate with an apple.

Before you carry on scrolling and see what I came up with, have a think for yourself and make your list of associations.

So have you made your list?

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Here’s my list

1. Rene Magritte painting — The Son Of Man

2. William Tell

3. Adam and Eve

4. An apple a day keeps the doctor away

5. Isaac Newton

6. New York — The big apple

7. Beatles logo

8. Bobbing for apples

9. Apple computers

10. Apple for the teacher

11. Snow White

So how did you get on?

I made this initial list for a talk I was going to give on creativity. But two of the associations in the picture I didn’t think of initially. Amazingly, on the first trawl through my brain banks I didn’t think of ‘Adam and Eve’. It’s such an iconic association with an apple but for whatever reason, I didn’t think it. The other one I added later was the Rene Magritte picture of the bowler-hatted man with an apple in front of his face. This is not as obvious and only came to me when my son was doing some homework on the surrealists. This could be a great logo as it is, or it could be subverted by substituting the bowler hat for a farmer’s cloth cap.

Being passionate about finding a solution to a problem is vital to keep the problem in your head. Your conscious mind wants nothing more than to have it ticked off and so it can move on to the next thing it has to do. But by keeping it on the back burner, you will jump at any new associations that you previously missed, as I did with Adam and Eve and the Magritte painting.

If you got all the apple associations I listed, that’s great. And by the way, if you’ve got any different ones, do list them in the comments section.

But if there are certain ones you didn’t think of, look at the picture again and try to think why you didn’t make the association with them.

Part of the problem is a cognitive bias that I call ‘tramlines’. Buses and trams both drive on the same roads, but trams can’t leave their tracks. To come up with solutions to problems quicker, our conscious mind forces us onto tramlines when we think about a problem. For example, If you were faced with a problem that is similar to the one you faced in the past, your mind will automatically be drawn to the solution you came up with in the past.

Now I’m sure by now you may be wondering where bagels fit in. Well, I want to use them as part of a thought experiment on you. Of course, you may get the solution straight away, which will just prove I’m a bit thick. But if you don’t, it should act as a good example of tramline thinking. And as with all tramline thinking, you’ll kick yourself because the solution is so obvious when you hear it.

So I had this little moment of bagel epiphany when I was putting my bagel in the toaster and was about to reseal the bag.

Now, if you’re not a bagel aficionado, they usually come sealed with either a white piece of sticky tape or clip like this.

Neither are very good for resealing. The sticky tape is fiddly when trying to open and also starts to lose its stickiness. The clip is a bit fiddly to take off but is also very fiddly to put back on and it’s hard to get all the neck of the bag into it.

So how else can you keep the bagels fresh?

Rubber band? Can be too loose or if you double them up too tight and hard to take off.

Kitchen plastic clips? The twisted bagel bag is often too thick to get them to close properly.

How about just tying the end of the bag in a knot? It’s good because you don’t need anything else, but if you tie it too tight, it can be fiddly to open.

So what else could you do?

Any thoughts?

Have a think for a minute.

It’s all to do with the shape of the bagel. It’s got a hole in it. So all have to do is poke the neck of the bag and then poke it into the top bagel.

It’s such an obvious solution, but I’d never thought of it before. And the reason for this is tramlines.

We have a problem: “This implement isn’t very good at sealing the packet, what else could we use to seal the packet?”

So we’re immediately thinking about implements to seal the pack, ruling out sealing it without an implement. We have an cognitive bias towards using an implement to solve the problem. Even when we move away from other implements and think of tying a knot in the bag it’s still about sealing the bag.

So how do we help ourselves to stop thinking along these tramlines when we are faced with a problem?

Well, the language you use is very important. If you say, “What’s the best way to seal this bag of bagels?” the word ‘seal’ immediately makes us start thinking about items that can be used to seal the bag. So that’s why, if you scroll back, you’ll see that I framed the question in it’s simplest form “What’s the best way of keeping the bagels fresh.”

Take this classic puzzle. It’s called the ‘9 Dot Puzzle’ and the challenge is to join all the dots using four straight lines. If you don’t know the answer spend a minute trying it.

Give up yet?

The solution will seem obvious once you see it.

Here it is:

It was popularized by management consultants in the 1970s and is reportedly where the phrase ‘think outside the box’ comes from.

There are a couple of cognitive biases going on here. Visually we see the dots making the shape of the square, so our minds push us towards finding the solution within the square. The other bias is the language used. I talked about ‘joining’ the dots, which naturally leads us towards making a line from one dot to another. If I used the word ‘connect’ or ‘link’, I think it would create the same issue. If I’d used a word like ‘dissect’ for instance, it would be a lot easier to solve.

So whether you’re trying to solve a problem yourself or setting a brief for someone else to solve, the language you use is very important. Try to boil the problem down to it’s most basic and try to use language that creates a minimal amount of bias.

With any problem or project, everyone wants to rush off and solve it. But time spent finding the best way to frame the problem will mean you or your team are much more likely to come up with interesting solutions.

How to Get Five Great Ideas For Blogs In Ten Minutes

Go from blog zero to blog hero in your coffee break

Do you find it hard finding subjects to write about?

Well don’t worry, you’re not alone. It’s no surprise that the most often asked question to authors at book festivals is, “Where do you get your ideas from?”

So I’m going to share with you a very simple technique for generating ideas. It only takes ten minutes and requires no thinking or preparation beforehand.

But first I want to give you a bit of background about why it’s hard to come up with ideas and why this is such a good technique.

The first problem is, when you sit down and feel like you can’t think of anything, you are actually thinking of something. You’re thinking, “what would people be interested in?” or “What would be a good subject for a blog?” By doing this, your putting pressure on yourself. So this is the first rule of having good ideas. Don’t try to have good ideas.

Also, you only know if an idea is any good if you’ve got something to compare it to. As Linus Pauling the Nobel Prize winning chemist said, “the best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas and then throw away the bad ones.”

And don’t feel you have to be a great writer either. You don’t have to write beautifully, you just have to have a good idea that people are interested in finding out more about.  Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has been criticised for being really badly written but it’s sold 80 million copies. Why? Because people want to find out what happens. They don’t care about the quality of the writing.

It’s the same with a blog. If you’ve got an interesting story about your product or service people will want to read it. The hard part is getting these ideas out of your head and onto paper.

The trick is to bypass your critical, conscious mind and write without thinking. And to do this, you need to focus on quantity over quality. Your job is just to churn out ideas and not worry about whether they are good or not. The irony is, the less you worry about quality, the better the ideas will be.

I have run workshops where people have worked on a problem and written all their ideas on a wall until they couldn’t think of anything else. I then said they had five minutes and had to think of five more ideas. It didn’t matter how stupid they were, they just had to be five relevant ideas.

By taking away the pressure of trying to think of ‘good’ ideas, they all managed to come up with another five ideas. And you know what, the best ideas on the wall were from all those last five minutes.

You know your subject matter inside-out, all you need to do is bypass your inner critic to tap into that knowledge.

So, get ten post-it notes, a pen and give yourself ten minutes to come up with ten ideas. Why not try setting your timer for five minutes, so you know when you’re half way through. The more pressure and so the less time you have to think, the better.

When you’ve finished, it’s time to be critical and judge the ideas. And I guarantee you, there will be at least five ideas there that will make good blogs.

On your marks, get set…go!

Mould Juice and the secrets to branding and choosing the right brand name.

What’s important is not necessarily having a good brand name, it’s just not having a bad one.

Mould Juice. Not the most appealing name for a product, but that was what Alexander Fleming was initially going to call Penicillin.

If he’d stuck with the name Mould Juice it wouldn’t have saved any fewer lives, but the fact is, we are affected by names of things. So if you are launching a new company or product it’s important to choose the right one. Actually, let me re-phrase that, it’s important not to choose the wrong one.

Think of all the stores and brands named after their founders: John Lewis, Sainsbury’s, Levi’s, Kelloggs. They’re not very interesting, but if the product or service is good, it doesn’t matter.

Take Carphone Warehouse. Carphones had their heyday in the 1980s and they haven’t sold carphones for years, but the brand sensibly stuck with the name. It had become synonymous good value phones available on a choice of networks. People had forgotten the meaning of the name and just it as a brand.

Of course, there is always the unfortunate situation when your brand name takes on a new meaning in people’s heads. No surprise that Ayds slimming chocolates didn’t last.

CADABRA AND SIXTH DIMENSION — TWO OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS BRANDS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU KNEW.

Now as you struggle to think of a name for your new brand or service, you can feel reassured that two of the world’s biggest brands also struggled with the same issue.

Cadabra and Sixth Dimension are not as you might think, pop groups from the 1980s. They were in fact, the provisional names for Amazon and Nike respectively.

Cadabra was Jeff Bezos first choice. It was intended as a reference to the word ‘abracadabra’ (as in, magic), implying you can have whatever you wished for you could have. However, someone pointed out that if people misheard it, they might think it was cadaver. And so in a puff of smoke, Cadabra vanished.

In those days website listings were alphabetised, so Bezos decided he wanted a name that started with ‘A’. As he went through the dictionary and stopped on Amazon. The largest river on earth; the perfect name for what they planned to be the largest bookshop on earth.

Like Amazon, Nike wasn’t the first name they came up with for the brand.

Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, liked ‘Dimension Six’, but no one else in the team was particularly keen on this. The other ideas on the table were ‘Peregine’ after the falcon and ‘Bengal’ after the tiger, obviously both influenced by the ‘Puma’ sports brand.

With their first shipment of shoes going out the next day they needed a decision — fast!

Jeff Johnson who ran the company’s East Coast Factory suggested ‘Nike’. He’d read in an in-flight magazine that lots of great brand names had no more than two syllables and at least one ‘exotic’ letter or sound in them with a Z, X, or K, such as Kleenex and Xerox.

So when he saw the word Nike and then also found out it was the Greek for ‘winged goddess of victory’ he was convinced he’d found the name they were looking for.

However, Knight wasn’t so keen.

“I guess we’ll go with the Nike thing for a while,” Knight said. “I don’t like any of them, but I guess that’s the best of the bunch.”

They already had the famous Nike Swoosh, designed by graphic design student Carolyn Davidson for just $35 (although she did get paid in Nike shares later on!).

Knight wasn’t particularly enamoured with that either: “Well, I don’t love it, but maybe it will grow on me.”

The question is, would it still have been successful as a brand if he’d chosen another name? Maybe not if they’d plumped for ‘Dimension Six’, but if he’d been a little less imaginative and a little more egotistical and named the brand ‘Knight, I think they would still have been just as successful.

How many people are aware that Nike means winged goddess of victory. Not many. Knight follows the same brand rules that Jeff Johnson read about, but what’s important is, it’s not trying too hard to be cool, unlike ‘Dimension Six’. Dimension Six might have been a good name in the 1980s, but it would have felt dated very quickly.

Although your brand name doesn’t have to be exciting, it does have to be distinctive. This is something many current startups don’t seem to have taken into account when thinking of names for their brands. They all seem to use the same formula. Think of the category of your brand and then one of the following suffixes: ‘ify’, ‘io’ or ‘ly’. Instead of Nike, we would have, Sportify, Sportio or Sportly.

At the end of the day, a brand is more than just a name. It’s about a customers gut feeling about your product, service or company.

Just don’t choose a name that could change a customers gut feeling like…mould juice. Definitely enough to change the feeling in anyone’s gut.

I was recently talking to a business owner about his blogs and suggested one of them, with the title ‘The Secrets Of Selling’  could maybe have a more interesting title.

“I can’t change that,” he told me, “it needs to be that for SEO purposes.”

And for me, that’s a problem. Being held hostage by search engine optimisation means that articles get blander and more uniform. And you know what that means…people don’t want to read them.

Isn’t it better to have a hundred people see your blog and actually read it, than a thousand see it, but don’t read it?

So this blog is just about writing something informative and engaging that people want to read. Most things online, whether they’re videos, pictures or articles that go viral do so through people liking and sharing them. I’m not saying I’m going to be able to make you an overnight internet sensation, but I am a strong believer in WOM over SEO. WOM or ‘word of mouth’ and that’s all liking and sharing is really. So…write it and they will come.

“Enough about SEO already, what about ‘twiddling’?” I hear you shout. Well, I will get to that I promise, but first I want to tell you about why I put it in the headline. Now the tech-savvy among you probably know what it is, but hopefully, the majority of you, don’t know what it means. I didn’t before I read about it.

So here comes the first lesson/tip. You’ve got to write a headline that grabs people. And unfortunately, most blogs don’t. In fact, only 20% of the people who read the headline will then go on to read the article. And then 55% of people who actually read the blog only read it for 15 seconds.

So if a hundred people saw this blog, you’d be only one of 11 that got this far. Pretty scary really. By the end of this article, I’ll just be talking to one person – Dave in Witchita.

But don’t despair, it doesn’t have to be this way.

People only have a limited amount of time and that’s why so many people don’t read a whole article, or at the very least skim over it.

So you need to offer them something new, which is hard when you’re writing something like ‘How to write a blog’. There are thousands of articles out there on this subject, so you need to stand out. By talking about twiddling I’m drawing you in with the invitation to learning something new.

People’s rational brain will be engaged because they’re going to learn how to write blogs that people will read, but their emotional brain will also be engaged with ‘twiddling’, something new and intriguing.

The other technique you can use with blogs and articles is the headline and subhead.

Books use this a lot. You get a title that is interesting and intriguing and then the subhead is more informative, letting you know what the book is about and what you’re going to get from it.

For instance, a few years ago, I wrote a book called ‘Brainhack’. It obviously is something about hacking your brain, but it could be medical, it could be drug-induced or more self-help. But with the subhead ‘Tips and tricks to unleash your brain’s full potential’, you know what you’re getting.

But  personally, I think with the way people’s attention span is going, it’s better if you can get both information and intrigue into the headline.

If you just have information in the headline, there’s no way to differentiate your article from all the others out there on the same subject and if it’s all intrigue people will lose interest very quickly if they feel there not going to get anything concrete out of reading the  article.

So on to the article itself. The general consensus is about 750 words is a good length. But at the end of the day, whether it’s 200 words or 1,000, if it’s interesting, people will read it. This for instance is over 1,000 words.

Now for the content. I always think it’s good to start with a story, an anecdote or a personal experience that brings to life the subject or how you came to write it.

The readers rational brain will be happy because it knows later in the article it will get what it came for. So it’s time for you to emotionally engage the reader.

Once you’ve got your reader emotionally engaged it’s always good to drop in an interesting statistic. If you can add in a link to the source, so much the better. An example would be the one I used about how few people who read the headline of a blog, go on to read the article itself. It gives the reader something that they will share with a friend.

Although they personally may use the tips in your blog, they’re less likely to talk about them. However they might say “I read today that…”. Don’t expect them to reference your blog, but if you’ve given them one juicy factoid to impress their friends, chances are they’ll come back for more.

Now you can give the reader the information they’ve come for. Make this as clear as possible. A numbered list is always good. This means if people are really short of time, they can go straight from the headline to the meat of the article.

And then of course you’ve got to fully explain what you were talking about in the headline, in this case, “twiddling”. To be truthful, you don’t have to wait until the end of the article to do this, just find a place where it fits and is relevant.

And so now you’re at the end of your article as I am with this. If you can, it’s nice to tie it back to the start of the article or the headline. Often blogs just seem to just peter out, so do spend a little time trying to round everything off nicely.

People remember great endings. Just as a good film can be ruined by a bad ending, so can a blog. You also want to cement in people’s minds the one thought you’re trying to communicate.

And mine is: to write something that people will want to read and stop obsessing with SEO. And this is where twiddling comes in.

Google has its own blacklisting system called “Twiddler” that manipulates website rankings and search results. I like to think of it as some little room deep in the heart of the Googleplex that has people called Twiddlers deciding which website is good or not, but it’s probably just some algorithm. Its aim is to censor offensive material, so unless you are writing an article about why Hitler was so great, I think you’re fairly safe. But my point is, Google is in charge of the game. It’s their ball and they decide the rules.

However much you pay some tech guru, they are never going to be able to keep up with Google. Just concentrate on writing something well structured and interesting and people will really want to read it.

Feel fulfilled and give your life purpose in just twenty minutes a day

The concept of ‘me time’, is usually thought of as having time to yourself when you can sit with your feet up in a quiet relaxing place with a cup of tea (or your beverage of choice). But I want to re-invent it. I want you to think of it as spending time doing something your passionate about.

A lot of self help books are about changing your life. The idea behind mine is about keeping your life exactly as it is, but giving it purpose.

And you give it purpose by doing something that you really care about, if only for a short amount of time.

But we don’t do it do we. So we have that frustration eating away at us throughout the day. Long commutes become more frustrating, boring meetings become more annoying.

And the most common reason we don’t do the thing we want to do more than anything else? Because ‘life’ gets in the way.

The trouble with ‘life’, it will fill our days if you let it.

I spoke to a retired man recently who had been looking forward to retiring because he could spend time playing the guitar. But now he was retired, was he happily strumming away? No.

A friend told me that they had a idea for a book and they were going to spend an hour on Saturday and an hour on Sunday writing it. I spoke to them a couple of months later and asked them how the book was going. They hadn’t even started it.

‘Life’ will fill your life if you let it.

But I believe if you can spend a small amount of time (yes, twenty minutes. How did you guess!) every day doing something you love, you will feel more alive and those dreary parts of your day will become more bearable.

Nietzsche said, ‘He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how’. Of course, it’s easy to have a ‘why’, what’s hard is spending some time doing your ‘why’.

And that’s the reason I have chosen twenty minutes as a time slot. Fifteen minutes is too short and half-an-hour, can feel to much of a effort. The trouble is we want to do our ‘thing’, but our inner procrastinator, keeps trying to stop us starting. But the beauty of twenty minutes is, you set the time on your phone and your inner procrastinator feels happy because there’s only twenty minutes before you can get back to the important job of checking up on social media, sharpening pencils, tidying up your desk etc.

What is interesting is, after doing your twenty minutes you’ll have got your brain engaged and you’ll just want to carry on. But whether you carry on after twenty minutes or not, the important thing is to stick to twenty minutes every day (including the weekend).

We spend too much time focusing on the goal — “I want to write a book”, when really we should be focusing on the path — “I want to be writing a book”. If we focus on the goal it can often be off putting and we never start. The idea of running a marathon can be a daunting prospect for most people, but thinking “I really enjoy running, I’m going to run every day.” feels much more achievable.

I believe that to make you feel happy and fulfilled the journey is actually more important than the destination.

Of course if you start writing a book, you want to finish it and it’s important to have that goal, but it’s the day to day writing that will give you true satisfaction.

I’ve always wanted to write a book. I finally got round to it and wrote ‘How To Be Creative’, but it didn’t quench that thirst. I told myself as it was self-published it wasn’t a proper book. I felt if I could see my book on a bookshelf in bookshop, I would feel like I was a proper writer and I would be happy. 
But when I did see it in a bookshop, it was great, but I still didn’t feel satisfied. Now this thought came into my head, that I wasn’t a real writer because it was non-fiction, what I needed to do to be happy was to write a successful novel.

I realised I would never feel fully satisfied. If I wrote a bestseller novel, the voice in my head would say it didn’t have critical acclaim. If I won the Booker prize, the voice in my head would say, its not the Nobel prize for literature. If I won the Nobel prize for literature, the voice would say, well, it’s not the Peace Prize, is it.

So if you want to take the first step on your journey to fulfilling your purpose, here are some guidelines (the polite name for rules):

Guidelines
1. On the first page write down how you feel about your passion project and why it is important to you.

2. At the top of the next page write the date and ‘1’ signifying the first day of the challenge.

3. This thirty day challenge will help create a habit, but if you can complete it at the same time every day this will also help.

4. Use a timer on your phone, so an alarm goes off when you have achieved your twenty minute goal. This will stop you checking the time and let you focus completely on your project.

5. After each day, write down if you completed your twenty minutes and any thoughts you had about it. Was it hard, was it easy? Did you carry on for longer than the twenty minutes? How did it make you feel for the rest of the day?

6. Even if you don’t manage to complete your twenty minutes one day. Write an entry for that day on what stopped you completing it.

7. If you find it hard work, still put the timer on and try to spend twenty minutes thinking about your passion project or looking through books and reference material relating to it.

8. If you are finding you are coping successfully with the challenge, it may be tempting to extend the time you spend. Don’t. Even if you routinely carry on for longer than twenty minutes, what is important that you do at least twenty minutes every day. Extending it, even to half an hour, may make you miss a day.

9. Try to keep to the challenge every day, including weekends.

10. At the end of the thirty days, please email me to let me know how you found the experience and if you have any questions throughout the challenge, please feel free to email me as well.

How VR Will Transform Narrative Storytelling.

Everyone is sure that VR will have a huge impact on the games industry, but how will it impact on cinema and narrative storytelling.

Steven Spielberg certainly didn’t seem to think it was a good thing, when he talked to The Guardian newspaper last year:

“I think we’re moving into a dangerous medium with virtual reality. The only reason I say it is dangerous is because it gives the viewer a lot of latitude not to take direction from the storytellers but make their own choices of where to look.” he said. “I just hope it doesn’t forget the story when it starts enveloping us in a world that we can see all around us and make our own choices on what to look at.”

But although he may be wary of it, he is aware its immersive power. This is probably why he’s now working on a “family-oriented” project for The Virtual Reality Company, which has raised $23 million in funding for its VR studio.

The word that is usually used in relation to VR experience is ‘presence’ and the most obvious way this manifests itself is with the 360-degree view.

While the novelty of turning your head in every direction soon wears off, the fact that you can’t see the edge of the screen really does have the effect of making you feel like you’re there. Now I haven’t got the best head for heights, so when I viewed New York from the top of the New World Trade Centre, I felt genuine vertigo.

But for me what is most powerful about VR is not the feeling of presence, but that of control.

I usually hate it when the camera keeps cutting to members of the audience laughing in a televised performance of a comedian. I understand it’s used as an editing device, but I feel like I’m being told “all these people find this joke really funny, you should be laughing as well.”

So when I watched Saturday Night Live’s 40 year celebration hosted by Jerry Seinfeld and with a star studded celebrity audience in VR, I had an epiphany. The VR footage came from a 360 degree feed from on top of the show’s camera number one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HS9h4xFRww

Watching it in VR I could decide whether I looked at Jerry or the audience’s reaction. I decided which stars in the audience I would watch in the crowd and for how long. I could just watch Jerry, I could watch who he was talking to in the audience or I could just stay on one person and see how he or she reacted to what Jerry was saying.

You may say, that’s all very well for a studio based TV special, but to Spielberg’s concern, what about when you trying to tell a story. Well, isn’t that just what theatre is?

As the audience member, you are in control of which character you look at on stage. Narrative VR will join the control of theatre to the realism of film. It’s the best of both worlds.

And don’t worry Steven; it’s not going to put film directors out of business. The actors will still need directing, it’s just that the director will no longer be in control of where the viewer looks. Narrative VR works best, when a scene is played out with no cuts. When the scene is finished, fade out to the next scene. Good news for directors, great news for actors, but not such great news for editors.

Take the famous scene in Heat where cop, Al Pacino chats in a diner with his nemesis, Robert De Niro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZtgQ6QBEyc

Michael Mann, the director is deciding who we look at in that scene. In VR, the scene would be different for everybody watching; as you decide which actor you watch. It still holds exactly the same drama and story; it’s just that it feels more engrossing and real as you’re in control of what you look at and when. Just because you don’t have cuts, doesn’t make the story any less powerful.

I think Spielberg’s concern that with VR you can’t control the narrative will be an issue. True you can turn your head 360 degrees and watch the chef flipping burgers, but if you chose to watch that instead of this powerful interaction between two of the world’s greatest actors, then it’s your loss.

Of course, another argument is you might miss out on some of the important action in a film because you’re not looking in the right direction. I think this is where the filmmaker can use various techniques to encourage you to look in a certain direction.

When you hear a sound or a voice and you can’t see where it is coming from, you will naturally look to find its source. Even just a character turning his or her head to look at something off screen will make the viewer look in that same direction.

Of course some people will see things quicker than others, but that’s what makes it so engaging and so like real life.

There’s a VR film called New Wave, where a couple is on the beach in the early evening. She is in the water and he is sitting on a boat on the beach. Each of them shares their very different thoughts on the relationship in an internal monologue. http://superprimefilms.com/407/samir-mallals-new-wave-virtual-reality-film/

But what makes it so great in VR is that when you turn you head to look at one of them the other’s thoughts fade out. In a traditional film you would cut between the two of them and the director would decide what you heard, but it wouldn’t feel real.

Again it’s that control and the fact that you could be missing something that makes it so exciting and engaging.

Imagine an Agatha Christie whodunit, with a room full of people at a dinner party in an English stately home. You have to decide who the murderer is by listening to all the different conversations. You may miss things, you may have to watch the whole scene again, but that control really makes you feel like you’re there at the dinner party.

Another example where it could have a big effect is in documentaries. The Guardian made a short film about what it’s like to be in solitary confinement and instead of prisoners just talking about what it’s like, you are actually experiencing what it is like to be in a 6x9 ft cell.

You still get the thoughts of the prisoners, but you get them as voice over instead. Rather than telling you about the experience, they are guiding you through it, as you experience it for yourself. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2016/apr/27/6x9-a-virtual-experience-of-solitary-confinement

A normal film tells you a story and when you’re told something it’s second hand. With VR you experience a story first hand; you live it. And you can’t get much more powerful than that.

Generating the conditions for creativity to happen

By Neil Pavitt and Menno Van Dijk (Thnk school of creative leadership)

Not knowing when you are going to get that breakthrough idea is what makes creativity equally magical and frustrating. Bringing yourself closer to creating something innovative and useful requires the cooperation between two contrasting states: controlled and uncontrolled thinking.
 
To create this synergy, you need to begin by being like a sponge and soaking up as much relevant information as possible. The more information you have, the more interesting and original connections you’re likely to make later on.
 
Once you feel like you’ve got all the information you need, you can start coming up with ideas. The Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling once said, “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” If you find yourself worrying that it is hard to tell between the bad ones and the good ones, don’t worry: you are still warming up and your best ideas have yet to come. Don’t be too judgemental about the first batch.
 
BOXBREAKING
Maybe you’ll feel that your ideas are all too incremental and too “in the box.” In that case, there are several techniques you can use to push your thinking – we call them Boxbreakers.
 
As your mind works hard to find that big innovative idea, you will reach a point where you feel you’ve hit a brick wall and you can’t think of anything else. This is when self-doubt and defeat can often creep in. You feel that your ideas will never crystallize. What’s really happening is you’re entering what’s commonly known as the incubation stage.
 
THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
During this entire process of gathering information and thinking of ideas, you have also been feeding your unconscious. If your unconscious mind sees that the conscious mind is determined and passionate about finding a creative breakthrough, it will deem it worthy of putting its processing power behind it. It’s important to remember that your unconscious will assume the subject is not worth it if the hard conscious work has not been put in.
 
There’s one good reason why you want your unconscious involved. It processes data 500,000 times faster than your conscious mind.
 
As John Cleese rationalized, “This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: if you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.”
 
What’s important at this stage is not to get too stressed. You’re entering the uncontrolled part of the process and this is where you have to be patient. Of course, you shouldn’t totally zone out doing something mindless, such as watching TV or checking up on Facebook. It’s like a pot left to simmer: you don’t need to stand over watching it, but at the same time you can’t go out and leave it unattended.
 
The writer Hilary Mantel advised to remain patient: “If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, and exercise. Whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party- if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space.”
 
The feeling is similar to being stuck on a crossword puzzle clue. You’re sure you know the answer and it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t think of what it is. Frustrated, you give up and go and make a cup of coffee. Just as you’re stirring the coffee, the answer comes to you as if from nowhere. It really doesn’t feel like you’ve thought it at all. It’s a gift from your unconscious.
 
The moment of insight to your problem will often come when you are doing a mundane and repetitive activity. How often have you heard people say, “I get my best ideas when I’m walking or driving home from work/ having a shower/ doing the dishes”? There’s a reason for this: while you’re doing these simple activities, your controlled thinking takes its foot off the gas, making room for your uncontrolled thinking and allowing your mind to wander.
 
FINDING YOUR DEFAULT MODE
We have two modes of thinking: the first is the cognitive control network, which creates focused, controlled thinking. At the heart of this is the prefrontal cortex, the home of most of our conscious thoughts. The second is the default mode network. This is linked with mind wandering, (day) dreaming, free association, and linking to messages from the unconscious.
 
The default mode network (uncontrolled thought) is triggered when the prefrontal cortex shuts down or relaxes. The most obvious example of this is dreams. When we are asleep, so is our prefrontal cortex.
 
Dreams have helped people find solutions to problems in the arts, science, and business. A dream gave Mary Shelley the idea for Frankenstein, Paul McCartney the music for “Yesterday”, August Kekule the shape of the Benzene molecule, Elias Howe how a sewing machine would work, and Larry Page dreamt of downloading the entire Web. Not satisfied with this achievement, Page also had the idea for the Google PageRank by dreaming of the links between the pages.
 
Unfortunately, we risk not capturing the ideas when we come up with creative solutions in our dreams. Being half-asleep relaxes the control of the prefrontal cortex, allowing us access to the uncontrolled power of the default mode network while still being aware enough to capture what emerges.
 
Hypnagogia is the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. Both states –which occur in the early morning stages of not being fully awake yet and the last moment at night when you are about to drop off to sleep– are both strong times for interesting ideas to arise. Edison famously tried to tap into this “Twilight Zone” with metal balls: he would sit upright in a chair and take a nap while holding a large metal ball in each hand. Once asleep, the balls would drop out of his hands and startle him awake, and he would immediately write down what was in his mind at the time.
 
ACTIVITIES FOR THE INACTIVE
Research has shown that a tired mind is often a more creative mind. It may sound counter-intuitive, but early birds should try solving problems late at night, while night owls should attempt to come up with solutions early in the morning.
 
Activities that help the prefrontal cortex to relax can also have a very beneficial effect. This is why mundane activities are so good for triggering moments of creative insight, for instance while doing the dishes, walking, taking a shower, and driving home from work. Einstein would work hard on a problem for a couple of hours and then stop to play the violin. Playing a piece he knew well would require little conscious effort allowing his mind to wander and ideas to arise. By his account, “The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition.”
 
Another powerful way to nurture creative thinking is by walking. Many of history’s great creatives knew this, including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Lucian Freud, John Milton, and Charles Dickens and Darwin. Steve Jobs was famous for holding meetings while he was walking and Mark Zuckerberg is now following in his footsteps.
 
Dr. Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, professors at Stanford University, have compared the levels of creativity in people while walking and sitting. Their research showed that their creative output increased by 60% when were walking.
 
GIVE PATIENCE A CHANCE
People are just as creative whether they walked inside on a treadmill or outside in the fresh air, so it’s not about the inspiring surroundings. The secret lies in the mundane physical activity that lets the prefrontal cortex take a back seat, letting mind wander.
 
It’s important to remember that these moments of insight won’t come if you haven’t previously put in the conscious effort into the subject. But if you have and you’re patient, you’ll be rewarded with a gift from your unconscious.
 
As the painter Joan Miró said, “I work better when I am not working than when I am.”

The Done List

The trouble with to-lists we don’t always complete them.  We do half the list and then the rest gets transferred to the next day’s list. 

A long to-do list means we’ve got a lot to do it doesn’t mean we do a lot.

At the end of each day, why not think about what you’ve achieved that day rather than what you’ve got to do tomorrow.

That’s why you need a ‘Done’ list.

The to-do list is about goals, Done Lists are about achievements.

Here’s my idea: buy a new diary, and at the end of every day write in it what you’ve achieved.

The important thing to remember is, this is just for you. You make the rules on what is worthy of going on your Done List. It could be business or personal, or it could be both. It could be winning a major piece of business, it could be spending an hour’s quality time with your child or it could just be finding some time to read a book.

What matters is; taking time at the end of every day to think about what has brought you satisfaction, then make a note of it.

At the end of the week or month or year, you can look back at your Done List diary and see what you’ve achieved.

They say ‘history will be the judge’. Now your history will be there for you to judge.

Crowd Curation

Here's an idea to tie in with Museum week. 

Usually only about 10 to 20% of a museum/gallery's work is on display at any one time. But imagine if a museum put pictures of all the work it has online. Then allow the public to vote on what should be put on display.

An exhibition for the public curated by the public.

It's far more likely to create discussion about art when the people viewing the exhibition have been part of putting it together.

You can't unleash creativity

Imagine you’re in your own brain and you suddenly find a hidden door. You open that door and it leads to a dark, dusty corridor. You brush away the cobwebs and come to a rickety staircase leading to a little attic room. As you make your way slowly up the creaking staircase you can see golden light coming from underneath the attic door. You hear a child’s laughter coming from the room. You get to the top step and excitedly turn the door handle and……

So many books, blogs and articles talk about ‘finding your inner child’ or ‘unleashing you creativity’, as if there’s some secret ‘creative’ compartment in your brain waiting to be discovered.

It’s both wrong and dangerous. When people go looking for this source of creativity and can’t find it, they think they weren’t blessed with the gift of being creative.

A creative mind is made by being open and curious as well as being prepared to put in the hard work to find an answer to whatever problem you’re trying to solve.

Of course, there is a secret compartment that makes us creative, but it’s an area none of us can access: our unconscious mind.  All we can do is feed it and wait for it to offer us its gems of wisdom.

You don’t unleash your creativity you create the conditions for creativity to happen.

There is no 'I' in team, but there is in brainstorm.

The brainstorm hasn’t really changed since it was first introduced in the 1950s. A group of people get together to find a solution to a problem. They say whatever they want, however silly it may seem and any analytical judgement is reserved for later.

But recently there has been growing criticism of the brainstorm as a method for coming up with fresh and innovative ideas.

The problem is with the way brainstorms are used. They should only ever be part of the creative process. People spouting off the first thing that comes into their head, can reveal how imaginative they are, but it doesn’t show creativity.

All really great creative ideas require the involvement of the unconscious and a group can’t think unconsciously. This is where the ‘I’ in brainstorm comes in.

The brainstorm needs an individual element. One way of getting this is to have fewer people involved and longer brainstorms.

A perfect example is the writing/creative team. Television scriptwriters often work in teams of two, so do advertising creatives.

They’ll sit together all day trying to think of a great idea.  Of course, they won’t be coming up with ideas all the time. But that’s what many people don’t realise; it’s those parts of the day when they get stuck and start to chat about rubbish or make endless cups of tea, that are important parts of the creative process. That’s when your unconscious is getting to work on the problem.

I would split the creative process into five stages:

1.     Information

2.     Imagination

3.     Incubation

4.     Illumination

5.     Implementation

Stages 3 and 4 are the unconscious stages of the creative process and can only ever come out of one person’s head. But brainstorms can be of great value for the other stages.

Here’s how they can be used to great effect:

1.     Information: To get great ideas don’t think about the solution, think about the problem. Everyone can bring as much information as they can regarding the problem. Pooling this information will make everyone’s ideas stronger. Give people time to think about the problem individually before getting back together as a group.

2.     Imagination: Let people come up with as many ideas as they can without judging them. Now, this is how the majority of brainstorms are used now. But the whole point of this stage is to feed the various individuals’ unconscious minds. Those crazy ideas should never be expected to be the solution. They’re just fodder for your unconscious to do its stuff.

5.     Implementation: This is the final stage, when someone’s had a great idea, but it needs knocking into shape. This is when a supportive group can nurture the idea and make it as strong as it can be.

For better ideas, always make sure there's an ‘I’ in your brainstorm.