Eiffel Over

Tag: CreativeThinking

  • Not leaving good ideas to chance

    If we are trying to make the world better, then we need a creative strategy. Design involves two modes of thought: divergent and convergent. The divergent part helps us figure out what might be possible. The convergent part turns that possibility into a plan for action.

    A bad idea well executed is still a bad idea. We need creative thinking in the divergent mode to generate new possibilities, so we can choose the best available idea in the circumstances. 

    Some ideas do come about by accident, but leaving the groundbreaking thinking to chance is not a plan for success. 

    If we don’t have a creative strategy for solving a client’s design brief, then we might lose a client. But if the problem we are trying to solve is much bigger, like how do we bend the construction industry into being an ecological force for good, then we have much more to lose if we don’t have a creative strategy. 

    Yesterday’s riff on beer brewing gives us some clues about what that strategy might involve: 

    • We need to understand the existing system.
      We need to connect to patterns of the past. Ways of doing things that have worked before. 
    • We need to connect to patterns of the future. As the expression goes, the future is not evenly distributed. If we look, we can find examples of the future already in the present.
    • We need to learn from patterns that work – for example, understanding how living systems thrive within their ecosystem limits. 

    Above all, we need to give structure to this creative work. Because if we don’t design our creative process, then we leave change to chance. 

  • Pattern mixing lessons from Bristol’s brewers

    Bristol’s craft brewers are constantly experimenting – mixing patterns to create something new. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to facilitate workshops for teams from local breweries, which has given me some insight into their creative work.

    This flair for invention shines through in the descriptions of their attention-grabbing brews: espresso martini stout; gluten-free pale ale; or even key lime pie IPA. Each of these is a fusion of existing patterns to create something that sounds fresh. 

    But there are other versions of this creative process at play beyond mixing unusual flavour combinations.

    Forwards to the past

    Another mode of creation is to bring back something from the past and make it fashionable again. 

    A recent trend is for craft brewers to resurrect from obscurity the ‘mild’, a largely forgotten-about old-man beer. Here the mix is to take a pattern from the past and put it into the pattern of the modern-day tap room.

    Continuous remixing

    Sometimes, the creative mode is to continuously evolve and update an existing product. 

    When I arrived in Bristol 6 years ago brewers Wiper and True ran a beer called Quintet, which was intended to be a continuously evolving blend of five hops chosen on the basis of seasonal availability. With each creative step, the existing blend of hops is one pattern, the new hop is the other pattern and the new mix is the new pattern.

    Creatively staying the same

    Finally, there is a mode of creation that aims to keep things the same. 

    Many microbreweries strive to have a core beer that they can sell to the supermarkets. The large orders that the supermarkets make  give these small businesses a reliable revenue stream that enables them to grow. But one thing these large retailers don’t want is for the product to change. 

    So if a brewery wants to introduce new processes for reducing the carbon footprint of their core beer, they have to do so in a way that doesn’t change the product. In this case, they might have to change their pattern of ingredients and pattern of brewing with the aim of creating something that was the same as before.

    In these examples we have seen four creative modes:

    • Mixing previously unconnected patterns. 
    • Mixing patterns of past and present. 
    • Continuously remixing to update the present. 
    • Or creating new mixtures that keep things the same.

    Whether we are fermenting or cementing, the key to creativity is pattern mixing.

  • Cooking with what’s in the cupboard

    My thanks to Jen Ford of Factory X for this analogy. Regular design is like thinking to yourself, “what do I want for dinner?” then going to buy the ingredients from the supermarket. Circular design is more like seeing what’s in the cupboard and thinking creatively about what you can make.

    This shift in approach represents a different relationship with our cooking supply chain. The goals might still be the same: to eat something; to care for someone through providing them with food; maybe to eat healthily; possibly to spend time with family or friends around a meal. But the starting point is different: not what do I want but what do I have to work with.

    I was writing earlier this week about how an improv clown in a theatre works with the audience. They have to work with what is there – they can’t decide in advance how they want the world to be. But they can work with the audience dynamics to create something entertaining with the emotions the clown is able to generate.

    More generally, when we work with what is already present in the system, we have the potential to create a much lower energy solution. If we are working with a material that the system already produces: eg an existing waste stream or renewable resource, then we can create much tighter feedback loops that balance our choices against what’s available.

    But perhaps most excitingly, for the cook, for the clown and the engineer, working with what’s in the cupboard is a much more engaging creative challenge. Walking around the world, we start to see ingredients we can use – the world starts to reveal itself in new ways.

    So, what will you cook for dinner this evening?

  • When the joke isn’t funny anymore

    I’ve been writing this week about when is and isn’t a good time to optimise. And also about the way a street theatre clown uses feedback to keep them close to their goal of making the audience laugh. 

    Well, the clown has another trick up their sleeve, which I learnt from clowning teacher Holly Stoppit, which is called the Drop. 

    Usually a clown can whip up an audience into a frenzy of laughter by doing silly, unexpected things on stage. They will find a gesture or a game that gets the laughs rolling. But then usually, at some point, the joke will stop being funny. The tide turns quickly, and the audience isn’t laughing anymore. 

    This is when the clown should use the Drop. They simply forget all about what they were doing and invent something new. The surprise keeps the audience engaged. It reanimates the clown, giving them a new creative opportunity. It reconnects the clown and their congregation. And the game of improvised laughter-making starts again.

    The reason the clown can do this is they have no resistance to changing the plan. Few deeply held plans about how the session is going to go. Few carefully created props that wouldn’t get used if they took the show in a different direction. And critically, no ego.

    With none of this baggage, the clown is freed of sunk-cost fallacy. Sunk-cost fallacy is the often-held belief that we must continue doing the same things as before because we have invested so much in our existing ways of doing things, even if in the long run changing plans would lead to better overall outcomes. 

    One of the reasons we continue to do the same thing as before rather than change approach is because we feel we have so much invested in the status quo. It could be investment in physical infrastructure or personnel. It could be more personal than that and be an issue of reputation. Or a fear of challenging the powers that be.

    But if the approach we usually take is no longer working for the system, we need to have the confidence to drop and explore something new. Because when the audience stops laughing, the joke isn’t funny anymore. 

  • Convergent poem

    Zero in

    Figure out

    Tidy up

    Manage down

    Validate

    Mitigate

    Prioritise

    Optimise

    Strip it back

    Keep it clear

    Make the risks 

    All disappear.

    These all sound like good things to do on a project, and are what engineers (and other humans) spend a lot of time being trained to do. And it makes sense – we manage projects that come with big risks and sometimes big budgets. 

    All of these processes are forms of convergent thinking: ways of working that take a situation with many possibilities, inefficiencies and uncertainties and reduce it to something more refined, more singular, more known.

    This approach is fine if what you are starting with contains the elements of the right answer. You can take some approximately right answers and iteratively improve them to make them better and better. 

    But if the starting point isn’t the right approach, optimising it won’t make it better. You just make the wrong answer more efficient.

    So we need to balance convergent thinking with divergent thinking that opens up the problem, that sees what else might be possible. But first, let’s go for a walk…[to be continued tomorrow].

  • The signal and the coincidence

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    Yesterday at a workshop I am attending (more on this soon), I was given a slip of paper with a question to reflect on. It said:

    How do we make decision, and what factors truly influence the choices we think are our own?

    I almost laughed out loud because yesterday’s post was a long riff on decision making. I really hesitated before publishing that post because I wasn’t entirely sure of its relevance to this series of posts. But having received this slip of paper, I feel entirely vindicated in my choice of post!

    Now, of course, that’s just a coincidence. I could have written a post on any subject yesterday and found something written down somewhere the next day that related to the same topic. 

    But it’s also a signal. The signal is that my brain is looking to make connections to, and draw significance to, the topic of decision-making.

    As engineers (and other humans) we are bombarded with inputs in our daily lives. There are far too many inputs to process. But quietly, in the background, our subconscious is processing and pattern spotting. 

    And there is also resonance with last week’s posts about looking for patterns in chaos. 

    As we navigate the world as designers, creators, leaders and enablers. And as we do this in times of overwhelming inputs, our pattern-spotting brains can help us make sense of the possibilities. 

    The patterns that our brain is getting us to follow might not make sense at first. That often seems to be the way of the subconscious. But maybe it is worth trusting to this instinct and seeing what emerges. Follow that lead. Go out on a limb. It may turn out that our subconscious has locked on to something useful.