Eiffel Over

Category: Blog (the archive of everything)

  • Parenting x inspecting hydraulic structures in the Frome Valley

    [Written in May, posted today] Saturday was the chance for my one of my favourite kinds of parenting: the kind where I can go on a journey with my daughter at her pace, stop and look at various bits of engineering infrastructure along the way, and then move on when we are ready.

    This weekend’s excursion was along the Frome Valley in East Bristol. Near where we live the river cuts a steep gorge through the limestone landscape that forms a lush green necklace that weaves its way through our neighbourhood. It is an excellent off-road route for cycling.

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  • Notes from leaving my phone at home

    I’ve started experimenting with leaving the house without my phone. On purpose. Here are some things I’ve noticed.

    I need to get a watch. Without a watch, however, I have to seek out the time, usually on the clocks above buildings, on church towers, behind the counter in cafes. My favourite is when you can’t see the time but you can hear it. Two nights ago I slept out under the starts without a phone or watch – my clock was the peel of bells in the nearby village; my alarm the dawn.

    Failing architectural time pieces, I have become adept at spotting the time on the screens of people adjacent to me. Sometimes I have to crane my neck.

    I look at the map before I leave the house, and try to identify landmarks that will help guide me on my way. I make use of maps I find in the street, and I find I am more conscious of where to find these. Sometimes I ask the way. Usually I figure it out. Before long my own mental map starts to form.

    I see things that make me think of friends and family and times together. I notice how often I want to reach for my phone and share that thought there and then with the subject concerned. I try instead to sit and savour the warm feeling of the association – and just live it without taking any action. I sometimes write a note about the moment in my diary and tell myself to save it for when I next see the person concerned.

    A notebook is the friend of the phone-free flaneur. Use it to:

    • Do a quick sketch map to help you find your way.
    • Write down your itinerary, including confirmation numbers and train times.
    • Note any things you would like to tell your friends about next time you see them.
    • Tear out pages and use them to send a message to someone you are thinking of.
    • Draw a sketch of the view from the top of a mountain (you may be rubbish at drawing, but photos taken from mountaintops are always disappointing, so what have you got to lose?)
    • Slide a debit card in the back cover of your notebook and its like you’ve got Apple Pay.

    Without distractions, I can hold onto and let ideas mature more fully in my mind. Once they have taken shape I can write those down in the diary too. But with my phone in my pocket, a message can arrive out-of-the-blue and my clarity of thought is gone.

    All it takes is for me to receive a message about something or other for my emotional state to change in a flash. I wish my brain could stay more firmly attached to the hear-and-now but it quickly focuses its attention on the new stimulus, and my emotions are hijacked. Of course, I want to be helpful and see to whatever matter is arising, but there may be a better time for it than when I am walking down the street – and I might respond better when I am in a more appropriate place. Without my phone, I feel I keep on a much more even emotional keel.

    And, I’m reading more.

    So, give it a go. Leave your phone at home, and see what happens. Let me know how you get on (tell me when you get home).

  • Climate breakdown – uncivil engineering questions

    Climate breakdown – uncivil engineering questions

    At the start of the summer I felt that the best contribution I could make to tackling the climate emergency was to offer my skills as a trainer and a facilitator to Extinction Rebellion (XR). In June, I joined the team that run induction sessions for new members of XR Bristol. The following words I’ve adapted from the script we use as the basis for the induction sessions.

    ‘The Government has an obligation to provide protection for the citizens it represents. This is the basis of the social contract upon which the citizens give the government the power to rule.

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  • Appreciating concrete in Marseille

    One of the thing things that I like about Marseille is the quality of the concrete tower block design. I’ve been riding in taxis back and forth across the city with my father who is undergoing cancer treatment in various branches of the city’s healthcare system and appreciating the architectural tour I’m getting.

    In the centre of town these blocks remind me of bookcases: two monolithic, slick sides between which span the concrete shelves, on which sit the apartments like colourful books. It’s fascinating to see the different ways that windows, balconies and staircases are articulated in these concrete buildings. I point out towering souring fin walls, beautifully articulated fire escapes, and how paint is used to express the different elements of the concrete structures.

    The rocky hills that rise up behind Marseille keep the city hemmed in by the sea. Standing on the high ground platform of Notre Dame de la Gard in the middle of town, you can see clusters of distant tower blocks that seem to bravely climb the distant slopes of the edge of the city, like pilgrims. I’m used to seeing tower blocks standing imposingly against the flat, grey London sky, but here these structures are rendered tiny by the massive hills behind them.

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  • Transformative infrastructure goes both ways

    Marseille

    In my previous post I was talking about the experience of distance, and how, when understood as an experience, distance is no longer a fixed entity.

    That post was triggered by some lines from Proust in which the narrator is talking about how his perception of local distances alters when he switches from rail transport to motorcar. Some further thoughts on this topic.

    I recall how the distances between various destinations, and therefore the shape of the city itself, appeared to change when the London Overground, an orbital railway in the inner suburbs, opened. All of a sudden areas of the city that seemed far away felt much closer: South-East London, previously impossibly far, was now a nearby neighbourhood to where I lived in the North-East.

    Such a step-change in the experience of city living demonstrates the transformative power of civil engineering infrastructure. Linking, drawing together, connecting – this is what engineers have been doing for centuries.

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  • The experience of distance

    Marseille
    A morning walk up the steep hill to the Basilica of Notre Dame de la Gard granted me panoramic views of the city of Marseille and the sea. I love the peaceful hum that can be extracted from high up of a limbering up for a day of activity.

    I underlined these words yesterday in ‘In Search of Lost Time’. The narrator is talking about how his perception of distance was changed when, instead of travelling by rail, he starts to go by car.

    ‘We express the difficulty we have in getting to a place in a system of leagues and kilometres, which becomes false the moment that difficulty decreases. The art of distance, too, is modified, since a village that had seemed to be in a different world from some other village, becomes its neighbour in a landscape whose dimensions have altered.’

    Proust, M. (1921). In Search of Lost Time, Vol 4. Sodom and Gomorrah. (C. Prendergast, Ed.) (Penguin Cl). Penguin Books.
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  • Microadventure #1: Garden Sleeping

    Microadventure #1: Garden Sleeping

    For my birthday this week my partner Mary gave me Alistair Humphreys’s inspirational book  ‘Microadventures’. According to Humphreys, a microadventure is an adventure that is short, simple, local, cheap – yet still fun, exciting, challenging, refreshing and rewarding. Last night I undertook my first mission – to go and sleep under the stars in the garden. As adventures go this reads as really not very challenging at all, but I was surprised by how unorthodox it felt. 

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  • Superpowers for Creative Design – University of Bath

    Superpowers for Creative Design – University of Bath

    I’m on the road again, this time to the University of Bath where I have the pleasure of running a workshop with first-year students on creative thinking in support of their structural design projects. I’m using the Superpowers for Creative design resource I shared earlier this month – now updated, thanks to the help of my colleague Alexie Sommer, to be in the form of a fold-out zine. The image above is a teaser for what to expect!

    I’ll posting a downloadable version of this resource soon.

    Lesson notes to follow.

  • Superpowers for Creative Design

    Superpowers for Creative Design

    Superpowers for Creative Design is the name I gave to a one-page summary of my undergraduate creativity teaching at Imperial College. This is my first draft. I like the idea of creativity being a superpower. I am sure that people who can channel their creative thinking will have a great advantage in the future.

    The diagram brings together material from other posts on this site. I describe the Kalideascope concept in ‘How to have ideas – guidance for engineers and other humans‘. And I wrote about the concept of a creative system in ‘9 Ways to Build Creativity in your Organisation‘.

    Drawing this diagram I found a nice interrelationship between all this material. To have ideas we need to draw upon information. That information comes from the things we see, the books we read, the website we look at. But critically it also comes from talking to others. How we interact with one another has a big impact on the quality of thought exchange. With the right interaction, ideas can sparked off of one-another and can be transmitted to others, and form the basis of their ideas.

    Underlying it all is behaviours, and within that self-discipline. Mastering that self-discpline is a great strength – a superpower!

  • Building creative culture in engineering companies

    Building creative culture in engineering companies

    I am starting to shift my attention away from creative tools for engineers. Tools are still important. But I’ve realised that you need a creative culture for individual creativity to thrive.

    Recently, I rediscovered in Laloux’s ‘Reinventing Organisations‘ the Wilbur four-quadrant model. The model describes how culture, systems and worldviews interact. We can use this model to understand a phenomena in an organisations from four different perspectives:

    • How the phenomenon can be measured from the outside
    • How the phenomenon feels from the inside – intuiting how it feels
    • How the phenomenon appears to the individual
    • How the phenomenon appears to a group of people.

    Like all engineer-friendly models, Wilbur’s is a two-by-two grid. The columns divide the grid into interior perspecitve and exterior perspective. The rows divide the grid into individual and collective perspective. According to Laloux

    Wilbur’s insight, applied to organisations, means we should look at: 1) people’s mindsets and beliefs [individual interior perspective]; 2) people’s behaviour [indvidiual exterior perspective]; 3) organisational culture [collective interior perspective]; and, 4) organisational systems (structures, processes and practices) [collective exterior perspective]”

    From Reinventing Organisations, Laloux (2016)

    Applying the four quadrant model to organisational creativity

    I’ve assembled some quick thoughts on how the four quadrant model might apply to understanding creativity in an organisation. I have written the statements for a fictional, ideal case. This difference between this ideal case and reality can give us some suggestions for what we might need to do to build a more creative organisation. 

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  • Coventry Cathederal

    Coventry Cathederal

    After a recent seminar in Coventry I had an hour to spare and so headed over to the famous cathederal. This sketch doesn’t come close to catching the finesse of the columns on this bold modern design but it serves to remind me of the textiures and feel of the place.

  • Notes from IStructE Academics’ Conference 2018

    There was great energy at today’s IStructE Academics’ Conference, the theme of which was Creativity and Conceptual Design.
    If you are visiting this site for the first time, it may have been thanks to Chris Wise’s kind recommendation in his keynote presentation – thanks so much Chris.
    I presented a session on how to have ideas. Usually when I’m billed with this title, I run a workshop on idea generation, but I thought for once, I would stand up and say what I think about the subject. I’m glad I did because it seemed warmly received. It was also a chance to talk through themes that will be included in the chapter I am writing in a book on scheme design – more details to follow.

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  • Secretly teaching design – notes from our curriculum planning day at Imperial

    Secretly teaching design – notes from our curriculum planning day at Imperial

    I am just back from taking part in a Design Thread workshop at Imperial College, the aim of which was to co-ordinate activity between the various design-relevant courses on the undergraduate civil engineering course at Imperial. Here are some reflective notes as I whiz home, during the writing of which I came up with the notion of ‘secretly teaching design‘. (more…)

  • Aristotle, Seneca and Emotional Intelligence – conceptual design training notes

    Aristotle, Seneca and Emotional Intelligence – conceptual design training notes

    This post is intended as a reminder for the people participants in last week’s conceptual design workshop. It may also pique the interest of anyone else interested in learning or teaching creativity for engineers.

    The workshop was the fifth of five workshops for this cohort of engineers. At the start I asked attendees to list any challenges they face in doing conceptual design that they would like to focus on in the final session. I asked attendees to name the challenge and what kind of progress they would realistically like to make today towards overcoming that challenge. I summarised the challenges everyone shared, and asked participants to prioritise the topics for discussion. The following topics and talking points follow from that prioritised list. (more…)

  • Notes from ISEE 2018, UCL London

    Notes from ISEE 2018, UCL London

    A very interesting couple of days at the 7th International Symposium of Engineering Education down at UCL. Here’s something I found interesting which I am sharing with colleagues and collaborators.

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  • We are engineers, what are we doing?

    We are engineers, what are we doing?

    Irrigation reservoirs/ocean plastic cleanup robot/fingerprint recognition keyfinder/light-up bicycle/anti-drinkdrive steering/air-conditioned tie/plant-based academic gradebooster… a maelstrom technology, ideas and solutions proposed by school children who made the final of the Primary Engineerand Secondary Engineer Leaders Award.

    In this competition, children interview a practising engineer to find out about problem-finding, problem-solving and creativity in engineering. They then go home, find a problem of their own to solve, and create solutions, answering the question, if you were an engineer, what would you do?’ An astonishing 37,000 pupils entered the competition, from as young as recetpion-age. (more…)

  • The perils of false modesty

    The perils of false modesty

    I just read this great paragraph on the debilitating impact of false modesty on judgement.

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  • My neighbours don’t like bees

    My neighbours don’t like bees

    https://youtu.be/ofLmUmiK1Nc

    We planted a hedge of lavender on our estate to revitalise a barren patch of soil near our front door. This sunny morning, the enthusastic lavender stems were bobbing up and down laden with bees. There must have been between 20 and 30. I went to count, as part of the Great British Bee Count. And so it was that I had conversations with several of my neighbours about bees, and I was depressed by what I heard.

    • One complemented me on the lavender, but said the only problem with lavender is that it attracts bees.
    • A second reported hatred for bees, having been repeatedly stung by that very flower bed, before conceding they had been wasps.
    • The third, having been complementary about the flowers, reported a bee had dive bombed from twenty metres above delibrately to sting him and concluded they must be evil.
  • Embodied perception and the Bristol Swing Festival

    Embodied perception and the Bristol Swing Festival

    Bristol Swing Festival is unique among swing dancing festivals because it offers the chance to learn circus skills alongside learning to dance. One of the things that I love about coming to Bristol for the swing festival every year is the way it makes me feel grounded in myself and the connection it gives me to other people and the world around me. In the past, I haven’t had a philosophical framework to help me interpret these experiences. But this year I think I found it in Matthew Crawford’s book The World Beyond Your Head. Reading the second chapter, ‘Embodied Perception’, I recognise many of the phenomena that he describes in my experiences here at the festival.
    The key idea Crawford introduces is that we think through our bodies: our bodies are an integral part of our thinking process and thinking doesn’t occur just within the confines of our skulls. Before I think about the consequences of this idea I want to first relate the pieces of evidence that he puts forward for this notion of embodied perception to the experiences I have here at the festival. Before we go on I should just say a little more about what goes on at this festival. As the name suggests people coming to this festival to learn to swing dance but what what makes it unusual is that you also learn circus skills alongside those dance skills. On a typical day you’ll spend the morning and early afternoon learning dance steps and then the rest of the afternoon trying out different circus techniques such as tumbling, handstands, tight rope walking, juggling and clowning. It is therefore a very physical environment and one in which you make a lots of physical and mental contact with other people.
    The first piece of evidence that Crawford sites in support of embodied perception is what happens when we use a stick held in the hand to explore a space we can’t see. When we use the stick to rummage around in the unseen space, we are aware of the stick jostling around in our hand as the other end moves over the contours of the hidden space; however, after a while we stop noticing the stick’s pressure against our hands changing and focus instead on what is happening at the tip of the stick. As he describes, it is as if we see through the stick right to the tip. Our awareness has shifted from our hands and is focused instead on what is happening at the tip of the stick. To use his words the probe itself has become transparent – it disappears. He goes on that the crucial fact that makes this integration of the prosthetic possible is it there is a closed loop between action and perception: “what you perceive is determined by what do you, just as when we make use of our own hands.
    You can see this happening as people start to develop dancing and circus skills. The stiltwalkers are initially very aware of the contraptions they have strapped to their legs but as they gain confidence and familiarity with the sensations they receive through these prosthetics about their relationship to the physical world on the ground it is as if the stilts disappear from view. They have become incorporated into the body from an attentional perspective and what the stiltwalker senses is the ground at the at the bottom of the stilts and not the stilts themselves. I think the same can be said of the sensations that two people feel when they learn to dance with one another. When they begin they are very aware of all the places where their two bodies touch: the connection between their arms, between the sides of their bodies. To beginners this connection with the other dancer is something that they think about a lot. But as the familiarity with this dance hold increases it is if the notion that there are two separate bodies holding onto each other disappears and they experience the dance as one conjoined unit. To re-emphasise Crawford’s words this integration of the stilt or the other dancer into our own bodies is only possible because there is a feedback loop between action and perception. The sensory information we receive when we are dancing with someone is that associated with a four-legged organism with a centre of gravity that exists at some imaginary point between the two dancers’ ribcages and so based on this sensory information we no longer perceive ourselves to be two separate beings but rather one entity.
    So that was the first piece of evidence in support of extended perception:tThe way we integrate tools and prosthetics and even other people into our bodies. The second set of evidence relates to how we interpret the world around us based on sensory information. He explains that the traditional model of perception has it that our eyes supply our brains with a two dimensional representations of the world. When I look at the beer can in front of me what I see is a 2-D representation. But from memory I have images of the can from other perspectives. What my brain does is a sort of three-dimensional rendering in order to create a 3-D model of the can in front of me. This model seems to imply a great deal of processing happens in the head whenever we wish to perceive a 3-D object.  That model however, as Crawford explains is being challenged by and alternative approach. That approach takes as its starting point the fact that our eyes are located in eye sockets in which they can swivel. Those eye sockets are located in a head seated up on a neck that can look from left to right up and down. Those eyes, head and neck are attached to a body that is connected to legs that can propel the body forwards, backwards, left and right and up-and-down. To repeat the quote that Crawford uses, vision is not the purely mental processing of sensory inputs but rather the way in which we use our body to extract invariants from the stimulus flux. In other words, we explore and understand the world around us by moving through it and seeing things from different perspectives and critically this allows us to identify things that remain the same from different perspectives. Movement through the world is therefore critical to understanding it.
    Here at the festival we learn lots about movement and moving in different ways, so it is possible that this altered locomotion offers us new perspectives on the world. In the handstand classes we spent time moving around on all fours and connecting our hands to the ground. In solo jazz we learn to slide, hop and skip through a space, filling it in new ways. In tumbling classes we run, we jump and we fall (gracefully). All of these activities reveal the world to us from new perspectives, and remind us how narrowly we perceive the environments that we commonly inhabit.
    When I look out of the window from the cafe at which I am writing this post at the streams of people walking to work, walking the same direction as each other, walking the same way as each other, to go and sit in office environments that are probably very similar to one another. If we move through (or rather remain sedentary) in very similar ways, what does that say about diversity of thought?
    Crawford concludes this part of the chapter with a reflection on how toddlers learn to walk. When they are learning they are experimenting to see what movements of their bodies produce what effects. Initially this takes lots of concentration, but eventually the commands can be carried out with thinking about them. The child’s attention shifts away from the body toward the world that can now be explored through movement. Through mastering a new skill, their world has grown, and their attention and perception reaches out beyond the body. Invoking Nietzsche, Crawford says that joy is the sense of one’s power increasing. As we master a new physical skill, frustration gives way – their attention shifts from their body to the world beyond – and they feel a sense of joy.
    So what do I take from all of this? Why does going to the Swing Festival feel so good. I think that there are four things at play here:
    The first is that for many, myself included, our primary stimuli during the day are visual and audio – all from the head and little from the body. At the festival, the stimuli are much more physical. This gives our brains a break, and perhaps puts us back into a sensory environment to which are perhaps better evolutionarily suited.
    The second is that many of the skills we learn at the festival allow us to move through the world in new ways, giving us new ways of perceiving it and understanding it. Turning upside down may seem a trivial thing to do, but when we do so much of our thinking the right way round, flipping things provides a refreshing change.
    A third thing I’ve noticed is that spending a few hours a day doing bodily-focused classes seems to make people more physically playful outside those classes. It’s as if we are given permission to rediscover our world through physical play, to rediscover that intrinsic joy that children find when they run around, swing from branches, balance on walls, wrestle with one another or just give each other hugs.
    And finally, the festival gives us a tiny taste of the power we could feel if we could master a circus skill: when we might one day stop looking at our hands and watch the juggling balls dancing in front of us; when we might one day feel the lightness that comes with the perfect handstand.
    To conclude with one of Crawford’s phrases, ‘we think through our bodies’. Bristol Swing Festival gives me new ways to think through my body, and that’s why I enjoy being there so much.

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  • 9 Ways to Build Creativity in your Organisation

    9 Ways to Build Creativity in your Organisation

    Creativity doesn’t happen on its own, it happens in a social context. So if we want to build creativity in organisations, we need to focus not only on the individual but also on the overall system within which creativity takes place. So argues leading creative thinking psychologist Mihally Csiskzentmihalyi in his article ‘The Implications of a Systems Perspective for the Study of Creativity’, which appears in Robert Sternberg’s Handbook of Creativity. I’ve been working on a longer post in which I extend his systems model to explore design as a whole. That post is becoming a bit theoretical, and so I offer up this post as a series of practical suggestions that can be applied by anyone who would like their organisations to benefit from more creative thinking.

    The systems model of creativity contains three elements: the creative individual; the domain, which is the pool of existing ideas; and the field, which is the people who decide whether or not an idea is a good one. Using this model, the individual creates new things by adapting ideas that have gone before (things in the domain). These novel outcomes are then judged to be acceptable or not by a third party (the field), say colleagues, a client, a design jury etc. If the idea is judged to be good then it enters the domain – that is, it becomes recorded somehow and can then become the seed of another idea.

    This model is useful from an organisational development perspective because it offers three areas to focus on for stimulating more creative outputs. I have seen that in practise, certainly in engineering, Csikszentmihalyi’s terms ‘domain’ and ‘field’ can be confusing, so I propose ‘database’ and ‘audience’, respectively.

    The following is a series of practical suggestions for how to develop each of these components of the creative system in organisations.

    Building the creative database

    1) Seek out innovation

    If you want to your organisation to be at the creative forefront of a particular domain, then make sure your people have ready access to the latest thinking in that domain. Contact with the existing thinking on a topic can promote thinking about the next iteration.

    I recently vistied a school where the principal wanted to encourage his staff to start thinking creatively about how to furnish their classrooms. To seed their thinking, he ordered in some innovative new chairs designed to improve the way children study in classrooms. He just put them out in his office. When members of staff asked about them he said try them out. Staff members then started experimenting with these chairs in different configurations. In the end, they ended up using completely different models that they’d researched in configurations that suited their own needs. This creative thought had been stimulated by allowing them to dip their toes into the domain of chair design – which then prompted them to dive in.

    2) Become a hub for different ideas and ways of thinking

    As Csikszentmihalyi points out in his paper, cities that have been trade hubs have commonly been centres of innovation because ideas and ways of thinking from completely different domains can come together.

    Find ways to turn your organisation into a hub for different ways of thinking. Invite people in with completely different backgrounds and areas of expertise to talk about their work, what innovation is in their domain, and how they approach problems. Doing so will widen the available categories in your database from which ideas can be drawn.

    3) Record your existing ideas

    It’s hard to make a change to something which isn’t already described.

    For example, so much of what we do in organisations, particular in knowledge-based organisations, is not written down. Doing so doesn’t feel very creative. But doing so is a necessary starting point for creating new approaches to how we might work.

    Recently I was worried that I wasn’t being very imaginative about the way I spent time with my daughter. So I started by writing down all the things that we already do together that we particularly enjoy, and quickly, starting from this list, I was able to create a load of new suggestions.

    Get the existing thinking down on paper so that it can seed the next creative iteration.

    Building creative individuals

    4) Collate

    This is about the creative individual engaging with the database; about building a palette from which they can paint their ideas. Song-writers collect lyrics and interesting chord progressions. Chefs collect recipes.

    I collect facilitation techniques by always asking people I know after they’ve attended a workshop what techniques they enjoyed. I write them down in Evernote, and refer to this list when I am designing a workshop.

    The thing about the process of collation is that it requires attention, more than just a passive engagement with the content. I believe this attention makes it easier to recall useful information in the moment of creation.

    Identify the area in which you want to be creative, and build your scrapbook.

    5) Create distraction-free time

    There are times when we need to focus our attention on generating ideas. There are other times when we let our mind wander, when the subconscious chews on the problem, and then the idea spits up. Both of these thought processes can be jeopardised by distraction. But in the modern workplace, distraction is everywhere: from notifications on every screen we use, to the interruptions that ensue from open-plan offices.

    In the coaching conversations I have with people about developing design skills, the lack of distraction-free time is one of the commonest barriers to creative thinking.

    For individuals, creating this time has two components. The first is mastering the technological distractions, getting rid of the notifications that keep us flitting from one place to the next. The second component is identifying and persuing activities that let your mind wander.

    Organisations that want to create distraction-free time for their staff should consider developing work processes that don’t rely on staff being permanently plugged in. They should also allow their staff to work at the time and places in which they are most creative.

    6) Generate and communicate

    The creative process works through interaction between the creative individual and the audience. It is a dynamic relationship.

    To start with, the individual needs to be creating ideas. There are a range of techniques for stimulating this divergent thinking, which will be the subject of another blog post.

    But having the ideas alone is not enough, they need to be effectively communicated to the field. Draw ideas, write them down, pin them up where they will be seen, talk to people about what you are thinking, and you will give your ideas the chance to grow.

    Building the creative audience

    7) Produce surplus energy

    This comes straight from Csikszentmihalyi. If a group of people are spending all their energy fighting for survival then they don’t have the energy for creative activity.

    Most organisations could probably prioritise their activities in such a way as to make more energy (time, money) available for creative thinking. Creativity is a social affair: everyone has a role to play, either as the conceiver of ideas, or as the audience. Therefore it is important that everyone feels there is enough fuel in the tank to justify time spent on creative pursuits.

    8) Build a culture of listening

    It is through dialogue with the relevant audiences that the creative individual can assess the merit of their ideas.

    As Nancy Kline describes in her book ‘Time to Think‘, we often do our best thinking in conversation with others, but this requires careful attention on the part of the listener, letting them develop their thoughts without interruption.

    Talking about ideas should be a hallmark of creative organisations.

    9) Build a culture of challenge

    There is a lot of evidence for intrinsic motivation supporting creative thought (a summary of this to come in a future blog post, no doubt).

    One way to build intrinsic motivation is through identifying in conversation challenges that need addressing. If the challenge feels like their challenge then they are more likely to be intrinsically motivated towards tackling it.

    Another technique for building intrinsic motivation is to challenge individuals to reach further in their thinking, and helping them to remove hurdles which may have been holding them back.

    To conclude, creativity doesn’t happen in isolation in people’s heads, it happens in a context. To create more creative organisations, we need to work on the context as well as the individual.

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  • Sofia to Bucharest

    Thursday 2nd November – Friday 3rd November

    The platform at Sofia station from which my train was due to leave was lit only by the dingy light coming from the carriages. Onboard I was greeted by a big friendly sleeping car attendant. I had stumped up the few extra euros to pay for a bed in a three bunk compartment and to my delight it seemed I would have all three bunks to myself. My accommodation for the night was more deluxe than the previous night’s, coming with more kitsch features such as the fold out basin in the corner and a full length wardrobe. It was a real luxury to be able to hang out my clothes albeit for a few hours.

    As I ate my dinner of Serbian bread and tomato paste accompanied with Bulgarian pickles from a jar, I tried to make some sense of my day. I think that the hassle at the station in the morning had set me off on a bad foot and then nothing else that I saw or experienced really cheered me up. A few hours in a place is not enough to form any valid opinion – I would need to stay much longer there to do so. Unfortunately, my experience is unlikely to inspire me to choose to go back to Bulgaria in a hurry when there are so many other places that I want to visit.

    At around midnight the train reached the border. This time there were five different groups of officials who came into my cabin. One, quite young looking official just came in and stared at me for what seemed like an eternity before I said to him “I have nothing to declare” and then he went away apparently satisfied. I was left wondering what all these people will do when Romania and Bulgaria are both members of the E.U. and these borders become completely open.

    I woke up half an hour before the train was due to arrive at Bucharest Gara de Nord. Outside the was nothing but blackness. There was not a light to be seen in the Romanian countryside. I dozed off for a bit and awoke with a jolt at the station. I couldn’t afford to miss my stop, much as I wanted to stay onboard to the train’s final destination: Moscow!

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