Two men & a bear
I want you to imagine standing inside a room that is a perfect cube. You’re dressed in white, the walls are white, the lighting is white and there is perfect silence.
Now I want you imagine being dropped into a souk or crowded marketplace, filled with colour, noise, aromas and hawkers shouting at you from every direction.
Conditions for creativity are very important. For some of us when we feel we’re underachieving in creativity it’s the white room conundrum. We stand in perfect silence with no stimulus and no matters of interest trying to will our brains to kick in a gear and find the creative spark. Like writers block staring at the blank page willing words to appear.
Or our space is crazy and filled with so much sensory overload that there’s almost no ounce of our senses left unassaulted that we can find the peace and calm our brains need to make sense of it all.
And often as leaders when faced with a knowing need to be more creative we can often feel paralysed in one of these two places.
Twyla Tharp, award winning dancer and choreographer who has carved out a career high on expectations of artistic genius but regularly having faced into blank walls or carving out uniqueness amongst creative chaos. Imagine being commissioned for a new broadway show, the exhilaration and excitement of the possibility and the daunting realisation that in a few months’ time an audience and your critics will be arriving in a theatre to see something amazing, and that amazing is all down to you. This is one giant white cube if you allow it to be so.
I want you to imagine being a script writer charged with coming up with a new story line for an adventure movie. Your base point is a north western pacific coast setting and two men in the wilderness. Somehow the story doesn’t work. They can wander around a bit, get lost for a bit but somehow there’s not enough combinations to create a story. We have an A and Z but nothing in between. Often this is us on a creative path – our start point, end point and a huge gulf called “expectations” that lie between us that is daunting to cross on our own.
Now if we introduce just one more variable then suddenly the range of possibilities increases dramatically.
Join dots from A to B and you have a small range of possibilities. Introduce C and suddenly you have A, B, C in a linear journey. Or maybe A & B were together and then C came along. Maybe they were all in the scene together and then what happened when C steps out?
Introduce C and suddenly we you have A, B and C in a linear sequence. Or maybe A & B were together and then C came along. Maybe they were all together and C steps out of the picture.
Two men on their own doesn’t cut it, we need another actor to be able to create more possibilities. We need a bear. It can be a big bear or an abandoned bear cub. It could be an angry bear or a friendly yogi bear. Spin the dial and we are sparking whole new possibilities in the story.
Suddenly what happened when they met the bear? Did they meet the bear alone? Maybe one met the bear and it befriended him and what was the reaction when the bear met the other guy? Maybe the bear introduced them to a cave system, what wonders could lie within the cave. What happened if the bear left, how would the friendship still be?
We can introduce new perspectives. Whilst some people may focus a narrative on the two men with the bear as the outsider, other may see the bear as the central character and here the creative process sparks more and more ideas. Three elements make all the difference. Suddenly we have lots of possibilities to weave new stories and imagined possibilities. We just needed the bear to get there.
Tharp calls this process, scratching. Often with creativity we’re in myth mode waiting for the gods to decide to send down a thunderbolt of inspiration. It rarely if ever happens this way. Scratching is what you do when you can’t afford to wait for the thunderbolt of inspiration to strike. And really it doesn’t strike that often for many of us.
Even the most favoured stories out there where we imagine a thunderbolt striking someone with inspiration turns out never to have been that simple. Newton did not discover gravity simply by daydreaming under a tree until a apple fell on his head and Bell “discovered” the telephone sometime after Antonio Meucci filed a caveat for exploring a talking telegraph but due to hardship was unable to afford the cost of a patent.
Whilst we tend to think of innovation as being about the big idea, often you’ll get there faster by working incrementally from the smallest idea upwards. By forming compounds of different elements, adding different emphasis to one element over another to create variations of compounds.
It’s also possible to have too many elements to be able to make sense of things. Two elements is not enough, twenty is overwhelming.
When struggling for the big idea, often you’ll get there faster by working incrementally, starting with the small idea. Robert Pirsig in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance describes semi autobiographically an English student who is trying to turn in a piece of work on the history of the United States but is struggling to get started. Pirsig instead asks the girl to narrow her focus to the town of Bozeman, Montana where she lives but again she’s stuck for ideas and nothing progresses. Frustrated Pirsig tells the girl to focus on a single street, a single building – the opera house and the upper most brick in the building. A few days later, after sitting in a hamburger stand across from the opera house for a while, she finds herself unable to stop writing and turns in a great piece of work, filled with ideas. Here’s the passage for you to appreciate its power:
He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.
She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”
On a slightly different take to Tharp’s scratching concept, Pirsig shows us another way we can break our creative block we need to start with the simplest elements and build our way upwards. For leaders this can be a great way of practicing your creative chops. Starting with the big idea or changing your whole company and working your way down can be completely overwhelming - there are so many possibilities we become paralysed and make no progress.
But you can start with one small element, one small team and start your observation process, noticing differences, behaviours, imagining what if we changed the variables, introduced a bear to the story.
And so it is for leadership and creativity. By considering a metaphorical telephoto lens we can flex to zoom in on detail and significance and zoom out to see the connected picture and stop anywhere in between that makes sense to us. In Bozeman it’s easy to see how the bricks create the opera house, the opera house sparked creative careers, it held communities together, it’s where couples went on first dates, it was the inspiration for people to dream and imagine life outside the town, it brought people together to meet and have families of their own. All from one brick.
Sometimes when we’re seeking to be creative leaders we feel a responsibility to make everything we do strategic. We either step so far back at a distance that we’re now in a vacant white room lacking any of the stimulants we need to start scratching. Or we throw ourselves into a frenzy of visits to the factory floor absorbing so much insight in the noisy souk that we become overwhelmed and unable to get a meaningful foothold on the problem and start the scratching process.
You can scratch from a conversation, scratch from nature, scratch from anywhere. If I leave you with any lasting doubt that you can’t do this consider that the Beatles hit Eight Days a Week allegedly came from a conversation Lennon and McCartney had with a taxi driver who’d asked vaguely are you busy at the moment to which they replied it’s like eight days a week.
The good news is that we can all learn to scratch and we can all teach our teams to scratch, we just need to start with two or three elements and start building our creative story. Introduce the bear and you can start bearly scratching.
