Three Exercises for Living a Commitment to Creativity

Each year, the organizers of the Sunday “Agency Only” program of the iMedia Agency Summit bring in an expert to focus on addressing on the most important challenges facing our industry. This year’s speaker was Tamara Birdsall, Chief Creative Officer of Real Girls Media and a veteran of both the buy and sells sides of the business.

For Tamara, the most important thing that we can do to create a more creative environment – whether we are in Creative or in another Agency discipline, is to make a commitment to walk the walk of making the time and practicing the art of creativity. And then actually walking that walk.

She demonstrated her long running belief that a series of exercises can help us:

• Break out of our linear “ruts”
• Improve our own individual creative thinking
• Drive richer and more valuable group creativity

To help attendees address these three challenges, Tamara engaged the group in three critical exercises.

1. Creative description. Tamara underscored the importance of switching gears – to break out of our day to day activities and busyness with a purely creative exercise. For the purpose of the session, she asked attendees to come up with innovative descriptions for a Granny Smith Apple. Now, obviously, this exercise was not directly applicable to a business challenge. But to Birdsall, that’s the point – that breaking free of our patterns of thought and behavior is a critical first step to being more creative more regularly. And it is the sort of exercise we should be making time for in our daily work life.

2. Mind Mapping: to help us unleash our own internal creative juices, Birdsall had each member of the Agency Day develop a Mind Map for a specific marketing challenge. The nonlinear nature of this exercise proved tremendously valuable to expanding our horizons. Birdsall asked the group to consider a fictitious financial institution considering opening a bank especially for women. By asking each of us to riff individually on the idea of “women and money,” we were each asked to create our own mind maps on the topic. When it came time to review peoples’ maps, it became clear that taking the time to stretch our own thinking can help create more truly innovative concepts.

3. Brain Writing: Her third exercise focused on the technique of brain writing, which asks people to do some initial ideation on paper, and then passing their ideas to the next person for them to build upon. For many people in the room, this written method of ideation was cathartic in that it offered so many advantages over the sort of freeform “brainstorms” that are core to the way most agencies operate, and yet don’t always yield great results.

Tamara was quick to point out that these exercises are only a starting point set of examples of things we can do – that we should explore online resources that further explain these and other tactics so we can find tools that work for us.

What made the session so powerful was the tremendous number of innovative ideas the group was able to generate in only a few moments using the exercises. For those of us who have sat in a tremendous numbers of ineffective freeform brainstorms, Tamara’s suggestions and her passion for trying to find new and more disciplined techniques were a refreshing call to rethink the tactics that aren’t unlocking our full potential.

I know I speak for dozens of attendees when I extend a personal thanks to Tamara for her passion, ideas, and participation.

Special thanks to iMediaConnection for running this first.