Feeling small makes me creative

This blog is a riff on the theme of a recent blog by Seth Godin. You can find his post using the link at the end of this post. 

It was a very short comment but, as I read it, I had an instant flashback to a trip I made some years ago to Yosemite National Park in California.

Driving into the valley I saw a sheer rock face rising up almost 900 metres from the bed of a river.

It was a breath-taking sight, which exerted a kind of gravitational pull on me. I just started driving towards it until I was able to park close by and walk to the foot of it.

I have always found mountains inspiring but this one was in a league of its own. 

El Capitan dispenses with the niceties of foothills, slopes, hidden peaks etc. and just stands there; brutal, monolithic and perpendicular.

Looking up this monumental cliff with my head tilted as far back as it would go, I had a sense of being incredibly small, in a way that you can only know when you are standing next to something massive. And you know what – it felt really good.

For me, it was a deeply spiritual experience.

As in any genuine spiritual experience, I was forced off the throne at the centre of my world and made to view myself, and my world, from a completely different perspective.

And then the ideas began to flow. It was almost as though the shift in perspective had unstopped a channel in my brain and a profusion of ideas came cascading into my consciousness.

Original Photo: Mike Murphy

I think there is some kind of a principle in creation that the smaller I feel outside my head, the bigger the ideas that flow inside it.

I wonder if it is this sense of smallness that quietens down my ego and, in doing so, makes all the assumptions and paradigms that are associated with it a bit less dominant. And maybe, this allows the quiet thoughts and partial ideas that are floating around my right brain to surface and be recognised.

For this to work though, I think it is very important that the thing making me feel small does not have an ego of its own.

If it was a person, I know my fighting instincts would kick in and it would quickly descend into a contest of wills. But how can you argue with almost a Kilometre of rock!

It is not trying to make me feel small. It just does, because it is undeniably bigger, more impressive, more splendid than me. To paraphrase Mario Puzo's famous line: "It's nothing personal, just bigness."

To me, that is the golden key to inspired creativity – I need to feel small but not diminished.

Seth's post is here:  http://htl.li/jreD2 

Childish tales from beyond the corpus callosum

Liberating your right brain through improvised story telling

© 2013 Mark Buchanan

Let me begin by saying that I have no connection whatsoever with Rory's Story Cubes  - the makers of the dice in the photo above - other than the fact that I bought their product.

You can find out more about them at: http://www.storycubes.com

Anyway, more about the story cubes later...

I have two beautiful daughters who, for most of their lives, have lived 500 miles away from me in another country. 

Since they were tiny, we have chatted every couple of days, wherever I am in the world. Initially we used to chat on the phone but for the last 5 or 6 years we have been talking on iChat.

Over the years, we have built up our own little rituals and routines and one of our favourites is to tell stories.

At the beginning , this was just an extension of our bedtime routine where I would read them a story from one of their favourite books. But, as they have got older and technology has become more sophisticated, we have started to explore more creative ways of making and telling stories.

Sometimes, we do line-by-line story making. One of us will type a line in to the chat window of iChat finishing the sentence with a branching word like "so" or "but" or "then".

The other person writes a line that picks up from that branching word, moves the story along a little bit and then finishes with another branching word.

We carry on like that until we either get bored or we have scripted ourselves into a literary blind alley. Of course, all stories have to have an ending and so our final lines are often our most creative (not to mention our most bizarre) as we attempt to tie all the loose threads together. One of my particular favourites came not so long ago:

"and so the horse ate the rose, which made him belch, and the force of his breath blew the leaves off the raspberry bush and there was the king's ring lying on the soil."

At other times, we take it in turns to choose a name, an object and a colour (or sometimes a place) and then one of us has to make up a story that incorporates all those things.

In the background we have had a long-running, episodic story going for quite a few years now.

it has a core cast of characters - the beautiful Princess Daisy and her husband - Prince Charming, two stupid villains - Larius and Noodle (actually the central characters of our stories), Princess Daisy's father - an eastern silk merchant called Gerald and a magical sunflower that glows in the dark.

Our Larius and Noodle stories (as we call them) have roamed the planet, moved freely back and forth through time and have often embraced elements from different eras and places at the same time.

We freely borrow, and then modify, themes and ideas from children's literature, current affairs and our own lives and adventures. Often we will find ourselves repeating and refining themes or story lines we have enjoyed in previous sessions.

Sometimes we come up with fantastic stories with a beginning a middle and an end but, most of the time what we produce is,  frankly, bonkers! Definitely not for consumption by others.

Needless to say, none of our stories have ever been published!

And you know what? we don't care. We are not trying to please anyone but ourselves. We don't have to follow any literary conventions and the only judges of quality are my two daughters and me.


I am the one that usually instigates them but, the truth is that my daughters are the creative engine of our storytelling sessions. Their childish lack of inhibition sets their creativity free to fly on the iridescent, gossamer wings of absurdity, adventure and wilful optimism. 

In the face of this gleeful anarchy I find the strength to disobey my "grown-up" inhibitions and fly off with them into their crayon-coloured world of infinite possibilities.

Now, whilst we are busy explaining how a pink-and-green-striped fish joined a turtle with a cracked shell to rescue a young girl's dog from an evil shark, something magical is happening inside our brains...

We are engaging in the story-telling equivalent of improvisational jazz.

We start with something known and conventional (supervised by our left brain) and then we take it off in a direction and style that is uniquely our own (aided and abetted by our right brain).

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have been studying brain activity in Jazz musicians as they improvise and they have discovered two important activity patterns in their brains.

Firstly there is a decrease in activity in a part of the brain know as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (pink). This is the part of the brain associated with planned actions and self-censorship. IE it is the brain centre from which we control our behaviour to fit in with social norms; what we could term our personal brand management HQ.

Whilst this is happening there is a corresponding increase in activity in a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (green), which sits in the centre of the brain’s frontal lobe. This part of the brain is closely associated with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

I am sure that something very similar is going on during my story making sessions with my daugters.

Their sense of need to modify their behaviour to fit in with norms and niceties is far less developed than mine. Their ability to express themselves without fear of ridicule or rejection is, consequently, much more liberated than mine.

Curiously, when I am with them, I am much more self-expressive and liberated than I am in adult company. It is as though they give me permission to abandon "grown-up" rules and join in their game.

I have started to use story telling as a way to help some of my training groups exercise their right-brained creativity. This is where the story cubes I referenced at the beginning of this post have been so useful.

Taking it in turns, we roll the dice and each person selects 3 or 5 of them (depending on group size.) The aim is to link the pictograms on our selected dice into a story. In jazz terms this is the pattern of notes on which we are going to improvise.

We then set our right brains free to come up with whatever story-line connections between the images on the dice they want to. The more outlandish the better!

People are a little embarrassed at first but the more playful we make the atmosphere, the quicker those inhibitions disappear. 

As the game continues, people start to loosen up and think less before they tell their story; gaining confidence that their right brain will come up with something interesting as they relax their inhibitions and let their right brain go where it wants to. 

This makes a great prelude to innovation, brain storming or blue sky sessions.

Injecting our product or service into the game, alongside the random pictograms on our dice, is a brilliant way to come up with story lines or marketing copy.

When the right opportunity arises, I would like to try bringing some kids into those sessions and see what impact they have on the creative outputs.

I suspect it will be substantial.



You can find out more about the Johns Hopkins research into improvisation at the other end of this link: http://htl.li/j54j1 

Looking differently at familiar things

© 2012 Mark Buchanan

One of the paradoxes of human behaviour is that, the more familiar we become with things (or people) the less we notice them. We stop exploring and our understanding of them starts to fossilise. 

Deep down, we long for novelty and surprises but, at the same time, we crave the confidence and safety that come with familiarity.

Perhaps there is a way to provoke surprise and delight from the familiar, by finding a new way of looking at it.

We can do this literally, as I have done with the photo at the top of this page. 

It is a view of the centre of my hometown (Chester, in the UK), which has been photographed literally hundreds of thousands of times before.

Tourists love it but, to those of us who live here, it has long since faded into the background. We just don't notice it any more.

I found it fascinating, however, how much interest and conversation it provoked when I photoshopped this picture into a planet panorama.

The "strangeness" of the image made us all examine it in a new way and, as a result, new details caught our attention.

Of course, you don't have to go as extreme as a planet panorama if you don't want to. 

You could swap the picture you carry of your loved one(s) for a picture of just their eyes, or their hands and see how that makes you feel about them.

If you have a favourite photo as your computer (or mobile phone) wallpaper, try rotating it through 90 degrees and see if something new strikes you about it.

There are, also, some less literal ways we could apply this approach.

The next time you are having a product innovation meeting, why not start by asking your team members to list 5 things they hate about your product or service.

Or, list 3 things your competitors do better than you.

On a personal note, what is the one thing you would absolutely not want to have written on your tombstone?

That's an easy one for me - "He was predictable."

High Dynamic Range Thinking

This is a view of handbridge in the beautiful, Roman city of Chester in the North-West of England, where I live.

I was staring out of my window yesterday afternoon and I saw the low, winter sunshine start to break through the storm clouds so, I grabbed my camera, dashed out of my office to this spot and started shooting.

I used a special technique  to produce a rich and vivid picture and, as I was clicking away, it occurred to me that the same principle can be applied to our thinking, to generate richer ideas, which will generate more beautiful results.

The technique is called "High Dynamic Range" whereby I set my camera to take 3 shots in quick succession - one under-exposed one "correctly" exposed,  and one over-exposed, which are then combined to produce the finished photograph.

You can see the 3 pictures below:

The middle shot is the one the camera thinks is "correct" and it is certainly a really nice picture. However it lacks the richness and texture of the picture at the top of this blog.

Unlike the human eye - the greatest optical masterpiece on the planet - the camera's sensor cannot expose the rich depths of the shadows AND the sparkling details in the highlights at the same time. 

So, it averages them out - losing detail from both ends of the dynamic range - and the result is, well, average!

If I am honest, a lot of my thinking can be pretty average, especially when I am under pressure. I just don't take the time to explore the full dynamic range of my ideas. 

I get results and they're are often good ones - but they're not great.

And then there is the brain bias issue to deal with.

The right-brainers amongst us will have a natural tendency to over-expose. It's all about bringing out the unseen details in the shadows - at the expense of the more obvious highlights.

The left-brained community will tend to under-expose, carefully preserving all the obvious highlights but losing the shadowy details in the process.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography achieves its rich, textured results by combining the under and over exposed shots with the correctly exposed one. It takes the highlights from the under exposed shot and the shadows from the over exposed shot and blends them into the correctly exposed shot, so increasing the dynamic range.

High Dynamic Range thinking works in a similar way. 

We take our initial thoughts and then deliberately push our thinking. First to the left to capture EVERYTHING we know on this subject, and then to the right to release our creativity and imagination to explore hidden possibilities and trigger new ideas.

Just as in photography, the results will be more beautiful, more textured, richer and more satisfying