Eiffel Over

Author: Oliver Broadbent

  • Creative thinking tools for projects: the Eiffel Over guide

    Creative thinking tools for projects: the Eiffel Over guide

    We need creative thinking tools in our project toolkit to get the most out the opportunities that a new project offers. Projects provide a setting in which people can come together. They provide a focus point for joint attention. They can lead to outcomes that are probably far greater than what we could achieve on our own. In organisations we rightly focus effort on achieving project goals within project constraints – this is project management. But what I think gets neglected is investing in the creative thinking will help define those goals and help reach them in new ways.

    The need for creative thinking in setting goals and figuring out how to achieve them is greater than ever before. The climate and ecological emergencies show us that the usual ways of thinking have failed us. We need new thinking. We need creative thinking.

    I have spent much of the last five years researching, developing and teaching practical creative thinking tools. People use these tools to help develop their personal and team-level creativity in projects. Based on feedback from workshops with hundreds of engineers and other professionals, I have developed a shortlist of tools and techniques that have the most impact: either in terms of how they help people understand creativity; or how they empower people to be creative with more confidence.

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  • Global zoom confession

    Global zoom confession

    I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when online meetings are getting really dull, I gaze at the globe on my desk and search for islands. My eye lazily drifts across the curving expanses of ocean and every so often something spikes my attention. Usually it is no more than spec, and when I lean in I see, in microscopic print, the name of an islands or an archipelago. Before long I’m on the good ship Wikipedia (I’m a supporter – are you?) setting imaginary sail for these distant lands. Recent places I have made landfall include:

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  • Weekend engineering works – near Weston-Super-Mare

    Weekend engineering works – near Weston-Super-Mare

    Today engineers completed work on a major new irrigation channel to bring drinking water to a major new coastal development on Sand Bay, near Weston-Super-Mare. The 60-metre-long new canal brings water that rises from the coarse sand at the back of the beach across the inter-tidal zone to the new fortified town, which looks north-westwards across the Bristol Channel towards Cardiff.

    In a bold vision, the water supply has two functions: potable water supply for the imaginary people living in the turret in the middle of the island; and also to ensure the defensive moat is always full. Anglo-French design and build contractors Eiffelover and Co. have a long track record in delivering civil and environmental projects in coastal settings.

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  • Farewell Beethoven

    Farewell Beethoven

    Off-topic, but I feel we rarely capture and talk about moments of grief. Between facilitation sessions today I listened to the final episode of Radio 3’s year-long Composer of the Week series on Beethoven, the episode in which he dies. And now I am streaming tears: because it is a sad story, yes; because he wrote music that can make you cry, also yes. But more so because I really, really miss the all-encompassing world of live music. To hear that full orchestral sound now would be such a joy. I miss going to see my Dad play in an orchestra. I miss the joy of giving shared attention to creative spectacles, be they small or large. I can stream whatever music I want, but I want to see human beings playing, making the noise. That’s all.

  • Filling the Kalideascope – inputs from colleagues

    Together, the people around you know so much more than you do. In my last post for now on Filling the Kalideacope – gathering inputs for the creative process – I am suggesting that you tap into the vast resource of information and insight that is the people around you. Ask them about the context, the setting of the brief. Ask them if they have done anything similar themselves. Ask them what ideas the brief inspires in them. How does the project make them feel?

    And then they speak, listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t pitch in with your idea. See where the train of thought takes them and go along with them on the ride.

  • Filling the Kalideascope – previous projects

    Filling the Kalideascope – previous projects

    Humans tend be to attracted to novelty – Oo, the shiny new thing – but sometimes what we need is in what we know already. This post is another in a my series on ‘Filling the Kalideascope‘ – gathering inputs to the creative process. Today’s input is your previous project work.

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  • Creative inspiration from December

    Creative inspiration from December

    A new month, new good intentions. Just like when I started a new exercise book at school, when I would commit to being extra neat (and then forgetting about it a few days later). It’s good time at least to think about how the advent of December can influence your creative work.

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  • Filling the Kalideascope – go to site

    This post is another in my series about inputs to the creative process, what I call ‘Filling the Kalideascope‘. Today’s input is visiting the site, and it cuts the heart of what it means to be a human designer.

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  • Creating contours in the flat landscape of lockdown

    Creating contours in the flat landscape of lockdown

    In the midst of lockdown we have created a new household tradition that brings a highlight to the week. On Saturday nights we dress for dinner, enjoy our meal, watch Strictly on our new TV, and then push back the furniture and dance. 

    With the household locked down, one day could easily look like the rest. To use Matthew Crawford‘s  language, the ‘affordances’ of one day look exactly like the rest: there are a fewer physical contours that shape how different parts of the week feel now that we are always at home. So you have to create that structure for yourself.

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  • Proust, constructivism and listening to clients

    This week I underlined this sentence from Proust’s Finding Time Again. 

    “Even at the moments when we are the most disinterested onlookers of nature, of society, of love, or art itself, since every impression comes in two parts, half of it contained within the object, and the other half, which we alone will understand, extending into us, we are quick to disregard this latter half, which ought to be the sole object of our attention, and take notice only of the first, which being external and therefore impossible to study in any depth, will not impose any strain on us: we find it too demanding a task to try to perceive the little furrow that the sight of a hawthorn or a church has made on us.”

    Proust, M. (1927). Le Temps Retrouvé (Finding Time Again) (C. Prendergast (ed.); Ian Patterson tranlation). Penguin Classics.

    This sentence comes in the middle of Proust’s revelation about what his work as a writer should be: to translate his inner world to the outside. He finds much greater richness in understanding the impression that the world makes on individuals than understanding the surface, objective qualities of what is being observed.

    Things I take away:

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  • Why I write (this blog)

    When I teach I realise I am drawing on ideas that I have gathered and processed over many years, but little of which exists outside my head. If I compare a mental list of the main concepts and ideas that have preoccupied my thinking for the last few years, I find it bears little correlation with what I have written over that period.

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  • New adventures with a television – part 2.

    New adventures with a television – part 2.

    I wrote earlier this week about getting a TV for the first time in 13 years. It reminds me of when I took my first flight in seven years. Things have changed but there isn’t an instruction manual for the uninitiated.

    When you are in a system it is hard to see it change, but when you step out and return, the changes are much more obvious. Television watching now:

    • Involves many more controllers
    • Is much more expensive with the subscription services
    • Involves a bewildering amount of choice.
    • Is now on demand meaning you can watch anything at any time.

    Nobody we asked seemed to know if we could just have a TV with a few channels. If you type into a search engine how do I watch BBC1 on a television, the top result is how to watch BBC1 via the iPlayer on your television.

    But I am happy to say we have, as far as I can see, the simplest set-up possible in the modern world: a TV plugged into an aerial that shows the free view terrestrial channels, and that’s it. No internet streaming subscriptions, no catch-up (no VHS!).

    It means that if we want to watch something, we have to watch it at the time that it is on. A rediscovered pleasure is looking at the listing in the newspaper. If there is a clash, we have to negotiate. It’s the return of appointment TV, and I’m loving it.

    Of course, Disney Plus is very popular these days but we’ve been experimenting with just getting Disney DVDs from the library. I call it Disney Minus, and it’s much cheaper. Actually we do have a subscription service – it’s called the BBC, and as far as I am concerned is the best value-for-money service out there.

    Right, got to run, there is a 75 year anniversary screening of Brief Encounter starting in a few minutes.

  • Choose the productivity tool for the job you want not the one you have

    Choose the productivity tool for the job you want not the one you have

    The tools you use define your work. They lock in choices about what you turn your attention to, what you can do and what you can’t. Before you choose a new productivity tool, define what they work is that you do and don’t want to do, then find the tool for the job.

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  • What’s the least effective thing I can do to tackle the climate crisis?

    What’s the least effective thing I can do to tackle the climate crisis?

    I am grateful to the participant in this morning’s climate coaching call who reminded me of the power of asking the opposite question to the one you are trying to answer. Instead of asking what’s the most effective thing he could to tackle the climate crisis, he asked what’s the least he could do. Sometimes it is much easier to define what we shouldn’t be doing than what we should. But from this point of opposition we can get some clues about what we should in fact be doing.

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  • Asking someone instead of Googling

    Asking someone instead of Googling

    What if you couldn’t look stuff up online? This is a question I keep returning to. One answer is that other people might become a more important source of information. You’d need to pay more attention. You’d probably look forward to the opportunity to speak to them more. And you’d remember more about what they said.

    The premise makes me think of books set in a time before tv and radio (let alone internet) when the arrival of a new visitor in the house represented the chance to mine a new seam of experience. 

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  • New adventures with a television – part 1.

    New adventures with a television – part 1.

    Television, television television. Say it a few times in a row and it sounds a bit futuristic, of science fiction even. The ability to capture moving images and transmit them over space is incredible. Having not had a TV in the house for thirteen years I have been enjoying rediscovering this most twentieth century of media formats, and discovering, rather than futuristic, how out-of-date my expectations of the format are.

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  • Too many inputs

    Too many inputs

    All this week I have been writing about organising inputs to the creative process, but at the end of the week I’m feeling overwhelmed from too many inputs. I need to switch off and reflect, but before I do here are the themes that are swirling round my head. I capture them so that they might be useful for another time.

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  • Brief explosion – starting a creative project

    Brief explosion – starting a creative project

    My starting point for gathering inputs to a creative project is the working brief. The technique that I use with participants in my workshops is what I call the ‘brief explosion’, the first stage in the process of ‘Filling the Kalideacope’. It’s an explosion because from just a few brief words you can generate so many inputs.

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  • Filling the Kalideascope – creative inputs over time

    Filling the Kalideascope – creative inputs over time

    Yesterday I wrote about the inputs you might gather at the start of a creative project. These are what I call inputs in the moment. But there is a different sort input that is only available to you if you put in the work to gather them. I call these creative inputs over time.

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  • Filling the Kalideascope – creative inputs in the moment

    Filling the Kalideascope – creative inputs in the moment

    In my last post I described the Kalideascope as a tool for having ideas. You fill it with inputs and then turn it to create new the connections between those inputs which constitute new ideas. In this post I will give an overview of the different kinds of inputs to the creative process you might look for.

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  • Build a Kalideascope for creative thinking

    Build a Kalideascope for creative thinking

    In my last post I cited James Webb Young’s definition of an idea as being a new arrangement of existing elements. He goes on to suggest having an idea is like using a kaleidoscope. As I explain in this second video on creative thinking, in my teaching I encourage participants to create their own kaleidoscope dedicate to generating ideas – a Kalideacope.

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  • What is an idea?

    What is an idea?

    This week I have begun creating a series of videos to share my teaching on how to have ideas. The videos start with what simple question, what is an idea. The definition I use, provided by James Webb Young in his 1965 book ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ is pragmatic – it gives us tangible ways to work on improving our creative thinking.

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  • Good enough for now: the philosophy of Lego sorting

    Good enough for now: the philosophy of Lego sorting

    With our household suddenly in self-isolation pending results of a Covid test, my daughter and I are back playing lego together and I’m revisiting that recurring question: how best to sort our Lego? But this time I think I have landed on a method that is standing the test of time, and one which has wider philosophical benefits.

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  • The magic moment when learning and teaching come alive

    The magic moment when learning and teaching come alive

    It is the moment I look for on my training courses. It is when participants switch from general interest in the topic or material to a moment of clarity about where they are now, what they want to be able to do and what stands in their way. For me this is when teaching and learning come alive because we have clarity of purpose, a goal which provides both motivation and a clear end point and a challenge that we can sink our teeth into.

    When we reach these conditions we can enter into a space of joint experimentation (as my colleague Søren Willert would call it) where neither of us necessarily know what is going to happen but we have confidence that our efforts will be worthwhile.

  • Approaching professional development as a professional

    Approaching professional development as a professional

    How do you make sure you get the most out of the investment you are making in your professional development? First you have to commit to doing the hand work, which, in fact, comes in two parts. And then you need to create the conditions for your success. All is revealed in this video.

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  • No one else is going to tell you what to do

    No one else is going to tell you what to do

    I am speaking to more and more people who are disillusioned with their work. Often what is in the balance is a purpose-led career versus job security and status. These conversations have led me to revisit the Happy Grid post I wrote in 2016. It is when I realised that no-one else is going to tell you what to do with you career.

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  • The power is in leaving a gap

    The power is in leaving a gap

    So many things that I am working on at the moment lead me to the conclusion that there is power in the gaps. But I feel like for my much of my professional development I have been taught to fill in the gaps.

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  • Eggsclamation – notes from Clowns in Crisis

    Eggsclamation – notes from Clowns in Crisis

    Last night I attended the panel discussion of the excellent Clowns in Crisis conference, hosted by the Online Clown Academy, hosted by. Here are some things I took away from it.

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  • Culture of climate emergency

    Culture of climate emergency

    If you are interested in understanding how your organisation should perform in the climate emergency then you should be interested in organisational culture. An emergency is a state in which we require people to behave differently to normal and take urgent action.

    We can understand organisational culture as the way a group of people get things done. If we want people to behave differently in the climate emergency then we need to change our organisational culture to one that is more appropriate to the urgency of the situation.

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  • Training with audio in the age of Zoom.

    Training with audio in the age of Zoom.

    In March 2020 we were all sent home and we discovered we could meet using video conferencing instead. Suddenly our wide-angled world was sliced to a quarter of its width. Our body language receptors had to cope with just head and shoulders rendered in a tiny square. And our brains had to work much harder to make sense of this reduced world view.

    Just because we have lost something doesn’t mean we have to replace it anew. Just because we can substitute IRL for Zoom doesn’t mean we always should.

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