FLEX: the modern woman’s handbook

When we learn to flex, we reinvent the rules for a new future, and it’s one in which we can all thrive.

‘Think left and think right, and think low and think high. Oh, the Thinks you can think up if only you try.’

DR SEUSS

FLEX YOUR MIND (#ulink_871d5639-5c52-5235-a31e-129aab4f3c67)

My day job is coming up with fresh thinking and new ideas for brands. I love ideas. I love the first sniff of one, the gut feeling we’re onto something. The hunt for more evidence and the inevitable period of doubt and being ‘lost in the forest’. The joy of getting it down on paper. I love all of it.

Flex is about inventing new answers to old problems and picking at the threads of handed-down wisdom to see what unravels. It means having a low boredom threshold for the ‘same old, same old’. It makes us challenge the status quo and ask difficult questions, like: is this the way we should be living and working? Are the norms we’ve all bought into making us happy? This is opposite of dogma and rigidity. It is a sort of cognitive yoga; an exercise for the mind that stretches our horizons and challenges our biases. It requires bravery, leaps of faith and empathy. And, annoyingly, it’s not easy . . .

SKILL OF THE FUTURE

The World Economic Forum predicts that creativity is one of the top three skills workers will need in the future. The other two are complex problem-solving and critical-thinking. The more we flex our creativity muscles, they say, the more we future-proof our skills.

Some days at work, my partner Adam and I are creative ninjas. Other days, we talk about last night’s telly and what we’re going to have for lunch. Creativity isn’t effortless, there’s no app for it, but it’s vital if we are to find new and exciting ways to change the things that are restricting us. In this chapter, I’ll dig into the key ingredients for creativity, so that we can unlock it in ourselves. I will look at how our environments have conspired against us to make us inflexible and I’ll show how we can foster the right conditions for creativity to thrive.

Today, whether you’re a coffee barista or a CEO, everyone hungers to be creative. The New Yorker dubs it ‘Creativity Creep’ saying: ‘Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative – how else, we think, can we become fully realized people?’

Part of this is because we have more time to spend on being creative. As Walter Pitkin observed back in 1932, thanks to medical breakthroughs and time-saving devices like washing machines, ‘Men and women alike turn from the ancient task of making a living to the strange new task of living.’ And living these days is a creative endeavour. Social media has fetishized visually beautiful lives. Even if we’re making a packed lunch for our children, it’s got to be inventive, stylish, Instagrammable.

Instagram is full of creativity quotes from smart people. ‘Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.’ ‘Creativity is intelligence having fun!’ ‘You can mimic a result. But not the creativity.’ These all sound nice and inspiring. You can imagine the fist pumps, the head nods.

But what does creative thinking actually mean?

EVOLUTION & DAD JOKES: WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

I want to start by looking at a classic case of creativity, a leap in thinking which for ever changed the conversation for humankind: the Theory of Evolution. The fascinating thing about this idea is that it occurred to two different people, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, independently. For two separate thinkers to reach the same place at the same time is a real rarity.

So what did they do in order to get to their big idea? In an essay published in 1959, American sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov looked at what their creative processes had in common to try to find the key to creativity.

Firstly, they travelled. Darwin took a five-year, round-the-world trip aboard HMS Beagle in 1831. Wallace went to the Amazon and Rio Negro river basins in 1848, and then, in 1854, to the Malay Archipelago.

Secondly, both observed unfamiliar species of plants and animals and how they varied from place to place. Darwin famously went to the Galápagos Islands to study finches, tortoises and mockingbirds. During his travels in what is modern-day Indonesia, Wallace collected more than 100,000 insect, bird and animal specimens, which he donated to British museums.

Thirdly, both read Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, which predicted that the human population would grow faster than its ability to feed itself. This proved to unlock the puzzle for both men. Reading about overpopulation in human beings sparked their ideas on evolution by natural selection. That’s how Wallace and Darwin made their creative leap: by connecting two seemingly unconnected concepts.

Cross-connection may be the key to creativity. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of creativity is ‘the use of imagination or original ideas to create something’, but this seems like quite a stretch. Is there really such a thing as pure originality, an idea that has never been thought of before? But smashing together two existing ideas which have never been connected – that is a breakthrough. That is what makes creative friction and sparks something fresh.

‘Smashing together two existing ideas which have never been connected – that is a breakthrough.

That is what makes creative friction and sparks something fresh.’

As the psychologist Steven Pinker has observed, that is how jokes work. In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler says we laugh when one idea, or frame of reference, sits next to a second, which doesn’t initially seem to make sense in the context of the first. So here’s a joke: Lady Astor supposedly said to Winston Churchill, ‘If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your tea.’ He replied, ‘If you were my wife, I’d drink it.’

Why is this funny? Well, clearly no one wants to be murdered. But when we gear-shift to suicide as a welcome escape from poor old Lady Astor, it becomes funny.

This slamming together of two unexpected frames, where the latter is surprising and causes you to reconsider the former, is called a paraprosdokian (from the Greek ‘against expectation’). Paraprosdokians are what the rest of us might call ‘dad jokes’. Like Stephen Colbert’s: ‘If I am reading this graph correctly – I’d be very surprised.’ And Groucho Marx’s: ‘I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.’

Koestler’s The Act of Creation looks beyond comedy to art and science. Creativity in these disciplines, he thought, is also about exploring the relationship between two unrelated ideas. He calls this ‘bisociation’. For him, creativity is the bisociation of two self-contained but incompatible frames of reference. In short, a dad joke.

IT’S HARDER THAN EVER TO BE CREATIVE TODAY

But it is not as simple as that. We’ve become really bad at bisociation. Creativity may be higher on the cultural agenda, and it might be a key skill for the future, but the truth is, it is now harder to be creative.

Why is this? Today, we simply don’t have the bandwidth to be creative. Our technology both overwhelms and distracts us. Every 24 hours people are bombarded with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information – that amount would overload a laptop within a week.

We can’t calmly absorb all this information and metabolize it into beautiful creative thought.

Digital overload is making us act like Dug, the talking dog in Pixar’s movie Up. Every few moments, he interrupts himself mid-speech, ears pricked, nose quivering and shouts, ‘SQUIRREL!’ Dug is all of us, except our squirrels are tweet storms; siren calls from abandoned, half-filled online shopping carts; the jerk of the leash when we are tagged in a photo.

So we’re too distracted to be creative. But even if we manage to focus, our own creativity – our ability to bisociate – is under threat from algorithms. When Amazon nudges us to buy a similar book to the one we’ve just clicked on, when Netflix cues up yet another film ‘with a strong female lead’, when social media echo chambers only feed us news that is palatable to us, we’re being pigeon-holed. We’re being funnelled down a narrow path. Instead of the quirky, interesting people we imagine ourselves to be, we’re becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, living in a bland monoculture. All of this amounts to a navel-gazing outlook (or in-look) which keeps us thinking in the ways we have always thought. We are stuck in a monotonous spin-cycle of our own experience, which is a profoundly uncreative place to be.

THE STATE OF PERMA-DISTRACTION

Gloria Mark studies digital distraction at the University of California. She has found that it takes about 23 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. So that quick minute spent on Twitter or Facebook isn’t just 60 seconds. It’s 24 minutes down the drain.

‘Everyone thinks they are right all the time about everything,’ innovation strategist Faris Yakob told me. ‘We can’t see anyone else’s point of view with clarity. We assume they are idiots and racists. It’s got to the point where I can’t emotionally understand a position that is different from mine. I tend to like reading books about history and politics, but I’m forcing myself to read more fiction. Reading fiction helps you develop empathy and understand better where people you disagree with are coming from.’

We also bristle at any opinion that differs from our own. Ian Martin, writer on political comedy The Thick of It, called Twitter a ‘shrieking tunnel of fuck’. In the midst of this polarized battleground it is harder than ever to find common ground, to flex our positions and move forward. Without respect for another’s perspectives or empathy for their experiences, we can’t make connections, bisociate and progress our thinking. Remember, the dictionary definition tells us creativity is: ‘the use of imagination or original ideas to create something’. Ouch. Cultural zombies can’t be creative, can they? Shrieking trolls won’t open their imagination, will they? How can we escape our ‘tunnel of fuck’ and find the fuel for empathy and inventiveness?

STEREOTYPING + CREATIVITY

Evidence suggests that lack of empathy for others is indeed a block to creativity. A 2012 study by Tel Aviv University found that people who ‘believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences’ did not do as well in creative tests as those who saw racial categories as ‘arbitrary and malleable’. So those who pigeonhole racial groups have ‘a habitual closed-mindedness that . . . hampers creativity’, the study authors wrote.

BECOMING T-SHAPED

The creative industries are always on the hunt for what they call ‘T-shaped’ people. The vertical bit of the T – the I – is depth of experience in a specific subject. The horizontal bit of the T is a broader range of experience across subjects, which encompasses the capacity to peek over the top of parapets, to collaborate, to find links between different disciplines. Essentially, the horizontal bit of the T is the knack of Koestler’s bisociation. So this magical T-shaped human combines the vertical skill of rigour and the horizontal skill of empathy.

But it’s really hard to be T-shaped these days. The vertical is being fuelled, meaning we are being made more I-shaped by the algorithms that feed us more and more of what we already know. But the horizontal – empathy – needs our active attention. Cross-pollination requires us to break out of our echo chambers, broaden our horizons and open our hearts and minds to the new.

‘Notice things, be curious, talk to people, figure out new ways of doing things.’

Travel is one way to do this. Remember both Darwin and Wallace were committed explorers. Faris Yakob and his wife Rosie are nomadic creatives who travel around the world working for their consultancy Genius Steals. Travel is very important to them. Faris told me: ‘Habituation makes you blind. It turns your brain off.’ Rosie says travel turns it back on again. ‘There’s a discomfort to being in new places,’ she explains. ‘It means you need to notice and be curious. The more you travel and the stranger the situations you are in, the more likely you are to expand your surface area and serendipitous things might happen.’

It’s not enough to simply go on holiday. Two weeks on a sun lounger in Majorca won’t cut the creative mustard. You have to do what Rosie talked about: notice things, be curious, talk to people, figure out new ways of doing things.

Not all of us can afford the luxury of travelling in order to boost creativity, of course. But many of us can at the very least get out of the workplace and go for a walk. Research from Creative Equals, an organization that champions diversity in the creative industries, shows that just 9 per cent of people have their best ideas in the office. Fans of the walking meeting include Arianna Huffington, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama.

The first reason to go for a walk is that we need to move more. We’re living in sedentary times, sitting on average, for 9.3 hours per day, longer than we are sleeping.

The second reason is to boost our creativity. Researchers at Stanford University asked people to think up new uses for common objects while sitting at a desk or walking. Over three-quarters came up with more ideas while walking than sitting.

At Starling, Adam and I walk to client meetings rather than taking the Tube. It means we leave in good time and don’t rush. We use the journey to discuss the meeting ahead, or just chat. Some of our best ideas and conversations happen on walks – a time which otherwise would be a deadzone of getting from A to B.

Walking is second nature. It doesn’t require concentration. It allows the mind to wander. The state of the wandering mind has been shown to be fertile for creative ideas and flashes of insight. When we don’t try hard to have an idea – sod’s law – it comes to us.

HOW TO BE T-SHAPED