If you’re going to break the rules, you have to…
I hear people say, “break the rules” all the time when talking about creativity. I agree breaking the rules is certainly one of the ways to be creative. You could almost argue, that if you don’t break some rule somewhere, can it really be creative?
But you must be willing to break the ruler as well.
Let me explain by walking you through what happens in a good many of the brainstorming sessions my fellow Before & After creative thinking coaches and I facilitate in the corporate world.
Typically we distill the best, freshest ideas throughout the session, building our consideration set, round by round. At the end of the day we have accumulated a “short” list, which, if we’ve done our job right, is actually rather long. Then we do a final distillation to get to the real short list, the list of take-away ideas.
The problem that too often happens is that when distilling to this final short list, people too frequently forget to break the ruler that measures these rule breaking ideas. So, the effect is that the real new ideas frequently get filtered out in the final screening process. So much for breaking the rules.
New ideas, by definition, are different. New ideas, at least the best ones, often redefine the playing field. But if we don’t redefine the criteria that measures whether an idea is “good” or not, then the final list really can only yield ideas that are acceptable to an old standard.
What we have to do before we disqualify a new idea, that otherwise feels pretty good, is ask ourselves, “by applying current criteria might we be losing ideas that are so new that they simply render the old criteria irrelevant?” Or maybe the better question, “Should we rework the ruler?”
So often new ideas don’t make sense in the current scheme of things. In my book, The Do-it-yourself Lobotomy, one the chapters I had most fun researching and writing is entitled “Stop making sense.” I site the Wright brothers’ huge breakthrough in manned flight, the TV show “60 minutes” and Marvin Gaye’s album “What’s going on” as prime examples of immense breakthroughs that didn’t make sense in their day.
Do you know the Wright brothers couldn’t find a single captain of American industry to buy their patent for the airplane? They finally sold it in France. Are you aware that producer Don Hewitt met all kinds of resistance trying to get the network executives to buy the concept for “60 Minutes,” now the longest running TV show of all time. Similar resistance was met with Marvin Gaye’s paradigm-shifting record, “What’s going on.”
In the Wright brothers’ case, not a single “visionary leader” in corporate America could see the potential for moving people and goods from city to city via the airplane. They were clearly using an old ruler.
For “60 Minutes” the response was “you can’t put a news show in prime time.” Old ruler talking.
At Motown, the executives told R&B star Gaye, after listening to the early mixes of his socially conscious record, that protest songs were for folkies like Dylan. They didn’t mention, of course, that this was according to the old ruler. “What’s going on” went on to sell millions as it elevated R&B to a new place.
These are just three examples of ideas that almost got squelched by use of old rulers. Imagine all the amazing breakthroughs that did die because they didn’t measure up according to the criteria of the day
Breaking a rule-breaker’s rules.
I remember years ago when I first started running creative camps this one guy was like a broken record. “Break the rules,” he urged. “Break the rules, dude,” like a mantra from hell. “Come on, people, break the rules!”
We used to give out T-shirts to our creative campers at the end of the 3-day event. Some people used to ask me to sign them. I would often scribe some creative encouragement above my name on the sleeve of their new shirt. When this mantra-wielding dude asked me to sign his shirt I said, “Hey want me to break the rules?”
“Yeah, dude, break the f-r-e-a-k-i-n’ rules,” he implored. I turned him around and scrawled a signature ten inches high across his back. I said, “I’m breaking the rules, dude! I’m breaking the rules!”
I wonder how he felt about rule breaking when he took the shirt off at home. I had signed Larry Bird on this dude’s T.
But I do believe in breaking the rules. I do. I do. As long as you’re willing to break the ruler, too.
© 2006 Tom Monahan, all rights reserved.
