B******ks to Blue Sky

I’ve recently been working with an international production company to develop ideas for new TV shows.

It’s rare I work with full on, professional creatives – people who’s day job it is to have ideas. I’m normally helping people who’ve had most of the creative confidence beaten out of them by the school system followed by a career in banking, pharma or any other industry for that matter.

So I have to admit I was a bit intimidated to be leading them out of the box (see what I did?) on two x 3 ½ day creative retreats. What could I tell them that they didn’t already instinctively know? How could I help them to think more creatively than they already do? How would they respond to the provocations of the naïve outsider – someone who’s TV viewing is largely limited to University Challenge and wildlife shows?

But what I found was a group of people who, despite being talented and passionate about their industry, were facing a bunch of familiar issues namely:

• Stuck in ‘rivers of thinking’ – a consequence of their expertise, amplified by the fact that, because spotting a hit new format is nigh on impossible, it’s always easier to tweak what you did last season
• Hamstrung by constraints – not least the thought of pitching brave ideas to cautious TV channel commissioners who reject 99 of every 100.
• Habitually mixing ‘expansive’ with ‘reductive’ – trying to create and judge at the same time, without being aware of it
• Victims of muse – aware that their individual ability to have fresh ideas ebbs and flows, but with little understanding of how to influence that

I.E. all the problems we see in adult Homo Sapiens, from any walk of life, charged with thinking freely enough to come up with something genuinely new.

And the solution?

Structure.

B******s to ‘blue sky’ thinking (which apparently was first coined to describe people trading in worthless securities – junk then, junk now). To be truly free, and whether you consider yourself creative or not, you need guardrails to guide you.

In our TV show retreats this took the form of:

• A nicely focused brief, expressed without any assumptive jargon
• A carefully planned agenda, albeit one which changed constantly (‘planning is everything, the plan is nothing)
• A set of rules of engagement – ways of being with each other, thoroughly briefed in and policed
• A whole toolkit of stimulus, thinking frameworks and exercises, deployed as a when they were need (and left in the box when they weren’t)
• Someone gently, tactfully in charge, spotting when teams were either on a roll or in a rut and suggesting solutions

Watch this space (or your telly) for some breakout new TV shows. And in the meantime, if you need to think freely, think structure not blue sky.