Please get out of the box into some boxes

Friday I was involved in an inspiration day for Sparekassen Kronjylland and besides doing an ideation session with them at the end of the day, I had the pleasure of opening the day with a short presentation on how to work with creativity and innovation.  Earlier this year I did the same to our Aegis Media Client Board together with Morten Albæk from Danske Bank (now Vestas), and it hits me how interesting it is every time you have to sit down and reflect on this subject.

One issue I spend some time thinking about is how much it annoys me every time I hear people say “let’s do some brainstorming” or ”we really need to think out of the box here”, as these often just represent a lot of people wasting their time sitting and talking in all kind of directions with no goal besides from the “hotness” of being creative.  In the best case they waste a lot of time, in the worst case they spend this time convincing each other on the implementation of a stupid idea, which in the end will cost the company a lot of money. 

Brainstorming isn’t just something you do. It is a difficult, structured and strategic discipline. And it isn’t just done in the moment of facetime between colleagues. It has to be planned, ignited and facilitated in a useful way by people being sharp and precise on the goals of the exercise, as well as the company’s objectives for initiating this activity.

Brainstorming out of the box is often just crazy ideas, with no objective, often off brand and off strategy. So please stop calling creativity in the name of “out of the box-thinking” and start focusing on how to create frames, boxes and structures to better create true creativity. It does have to be a colored room or a green hat or so. It could just be a simple way to enhance the effect of combining skills, a structure which makes it easier to talk about this or a simple planning process that ensures that all angles and combinations in an idea or a concept can be easily explored, prototyped or evaluated up against the overall objectives. Because in the end innovation and creativity isn’t worth much if it doesn’t help fulfill the objectives set for the company.

Is digital a chapter in the book on communication or a layer on all the exiting pages?

On Wednesday I had my first visit ever at a publisher. I was excited and thrilled, but also a little overwhelmed by the great trust laid on my shoulders by my old thesis supervisor who kindly asked my to join in on the next edition of his legendary book “Tilrettelæggelse af information: Kommunikations- og kampagneplanlægning”. Even though the last book was published in 2006, the evolution in the field and especially on the digital front makes even yesterday feel old. So we have been talking for a while about re-writing it with a more digital perspective, and with a more cross-media campaign overall view.

This  lead to this meeting Wednesday and it looks like we are starting up with the project right now. But our first big issue will be handling how to integrate the whole digital perspective on a book which doesn’t really discuss media, but more ground theory on how to plan.  Where does digital fit in here?  If it is awarded a chapter it will look like an area isolated from the overall strategy, which is the main attitude I try to fight everyday working with strategy and comms planning. But if we don’t address the digital issue of planning directly, will the readers be able to understand how the theory applies to digital?

This really is a hard question and we been back and forth a couple of times, but I think the solution will be to address digital as just another channel, and use cases and exercises to highlight how the discussions and theories can be used just as well on digital media. This is the solution. I’m happy about it. But means I have to write up a whole lot of digital cases during the weekends to come.

 

 

I’m sorry….

Dear all readers. Sorry I haven’t updated for a while. Got involved in a lot of interesting projects and suddenly time ran off. 

We just launched a new division in Aegis Media Denmark being the strategic, innovation and consumer insight forefront of the company and I have got the pleasure of taking the responsibility of Creative Director, so the launch here in january took all focus. But now we are up and running. See the deep blue blog which is also our website here. 

And then we won Playstation and Nordisk Film in the Nordics which is wonderful! A great client and interesting product. We just launched the campaign for the Stieg Larsson movie Men who hates women in Denmark and it was very interesting and the movie is already after 3 weeks a blockbuster. 

In my regular blogging hours (around nine pm or sundays:)) I started up a new project, having the honour of re-writing the legendary Communications Planning book “Tilrettelæggelse af information – kommunikations- og kampagneplanlægning” together with the author Preben Sepstrup. It will take most of my sparetime the next half year – but it will be a great learning experience and great inspiration working with Preben Sepstrup. 

So the blogging will lay a bit low for a while. I will try to keep up some micro blogging and link sharing on twitter and Facebook – so please connect with me there if you want to.

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