Chipping Away the Marble from a Masterpiece
I was reading one of my favorite blogs OwnYourBrand and read an excellent post by Mike that describes a funny story:
“Mark Dziersk knows how to chip away at the “I’m a lone genius” fallacy. Standing at a whiteboard in front of a class at Northwestern University’s Engineering Design Center, Dziersk sketches a cartoon-like head of a cat, followed by a rectangle with handles to represent a refrigerator. “Take out some paper. You have 30 seconds to write down 15 ways in which a cat is like a refrigerator.”
Panic flashes across the faces of these electrical engineers, software developers, mechanical engineers, IT pros, and chemical engineering PhD candidates. All are there to earn a Master of Product Development degree.
Design guru Dziersk piles it on, “I’m coming around, and if you don’t get 15, I just might flunk you.” He lets the threat hang in the air long enough for “blank paper paralysis” to set in. Then he laughs. “Okay - sort yourselves into teams of three, and we’ll try this again.”
This time, the ideas effortlessly start to fly, “They both hate water.” “They can be either black or white.” “They purr.” “They smell.” “They’re hard to get rid of.” So this class of “lone genius-like” students learn the value of approaching creativity as a team sport.”
I posted a reply to this message and after reading it - thought I would share it with you all.
It was a brilliant post. I feel a little embarrassed that many have all heard this story before and that it was a new one for me. But after I read the challenge, I stopped reading the post and started to create a mental list. Most of my examples were lame (they both have handles - neither like being slammed - both leak water) but the rest of the article made me laugh.
I laughed because our creative team started to have a problem coming up with fresh ideas. I told them all that the next person who used the headline “Spring Has Sprung” for a seasonal campaign would have their desk moved into a closet. Everyone was going back to past notes from previous campaigns for inspiration. We had a company wide dry spell.
Then, by accident, during a creative meeting I blurted out an idea in hopes of getting a brainstorming ball rolling. The idea was horrible. But what happened next was magical. I laughed at how lame the idea was, then others started to laugh. We spent 15 minutes making fun of the idea and during the course of it - lame ideas poured forth like water into a tub. Ultimately the perfect idea for the project sprung forth. Everyone was energetic and passionate. It was the best creative meeting we have had in a while.
So now, I try to get a list of incredibly bad ideas to get the ball rolling. Sometimes I sneak a look at the team’s personal notes and make a statement like “We will not be doing any XYZ type campaigns” - referring to an idea that a team member came up with. Sometimes I will list their ideas as my own freaking them out and forcing them to come up with new ideas (yeah yeah, sure it was YOUR idea). It has been pretty successful. We spend 10 to 15 minutes getting all the horrible ideas out of the way and we are left with a few winners.
Michelangelo believed that each of his sculptures were simply imprisoned in the marble, and that he released his masterpieces by simply removing the excess marble. We have started to take this approach to creating marketing campaigns. We remove the excess (bad) ideas and are left with some pretty creative stuff.
I have to say, not every credit union wants CREATIVE ideas. They sometimes want creative ideas. They dont want to be too far out there where they are riding the cutting edge. So some of our best work (what I think is our best work) get shelved because it is pretty wild. I have a few clients that like wild and crazy - but they can only run so many nutty campaigns a year. Until then we will laugh in private at what we come up with.
Laughter is, after all, the best medicine. It is the only cure for creative headaches.
By the way, I love my team - they are the best team in the business! But, I am a bit biased. I like people who laugh at fart jokes. 
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Oh, by the way - Kristen wanted me to let all the readers know that stealing Clayton’s concept ideas and pretending they were my own was originally her idea. I did it because she was too much of a chicken to do it herself.