Bumblebee sex, a creative buzz.
You know my favorite way of being creative?
Bumblebee sex.
You’ve seen bumblebees going from flower to flower. They think they’re sampling the buffet of sweet nectars from the garden. The flowers know better. They’re creating.
That’s pretty much how I like to work out a creative challenge. Or better yet, a few challenges at once. (I’d guess I’m drafting 6 or 8 blog posts at this very time.)
Besides being one of the most effective and efficient paths to fresh ideas, and in spite of it’s seeming on-again/off-again appearance, this method is also a pretty fast way to find creative solutions. And in these time-pressed times, who isn’t looking for a way to manitain creative quality.
Like my little winged friend in the striped jacket who buzzes from rose to daisy, daisy to mum, I believe in working on this creative challenge, then that one, then another, then back to one of the earlier ones, and so forth. Buzzing around. Picking up pollen here, depositing it there. It’s really quite a dynamic way of bringing creativity to your thinking.
I discovered this by accident and by necessity when I was in a professional phase that, ironically, one might think would limit my creativity.
It happened when I started my own ad agency, and being the president and executive creative director began spreading me thin and pulling me away from the creative part of my job. It was then that I discovered a way to shift my game that actually made me better, creatively. I simply had no choice but to be a bumblebee.
I remember when I would take on a new art director partner I’d have to tell her or him about my creative realities. I’d say, “I can spend about an hour when I first start a job, then I have ten minutes here, twenty minutes there after that.” At first this was foreign to them. But most realized soon enough that when I buzzed back for a brief creative interlude after half a day away, we’d discover we were both down the road creatively. And we had a wider variety of ideas than had we gone down one path together.
For me I had no choice. I was forced to let my creative ideation on any particular assignment continue as background processing, as I was busy doing executive stuff. My creative partner was making progress either by applying direct time and energy, or by this magical bumblebee sex method. In any event, instead of hammering away at the problem for, say, five straight hours, after two hours (an accumulation of a few minutes here and there over, say, a day’s time) we were usually able to make great progress. We had lots of ideas. Some we arrived at together. Some we arrived at separately. Some we found separately together, if you know what I mean (and people who have done this know exactly what I mean).
I had no choice but to float from this executive task to that creative challenge, my equivalent of different flowers. Actually, I feel the very different mindset that was required to address these quite disparate issues became integral to my creative process.
Again, in this deadline filled, multi-tasking reality that is business in the 21st century, we all do this to one degree or another. But do we do it consciously? Do we do is because we see the wisdome of it, or do we do it because we have to? Do me make it a part of our creative process?
In a post at my blog last month, in an article entitled “Sleep on it,” I spoke of a way we process ideas subconsciously. I said there, and I’ll say it here for any reader who has been through my DIY Lobotomy workshop or read my book of the same name, this is exactly what we talk about when we say, “Ask the question early,” which is a variant on the “Ask a better question” method of spurring fresh ideas.
This way of thinking doesn’t cost a nickel and it doesn’t take much time. Actually it usually saves tons of time. Plant your creative topic on the back burner of your mind, then go do something else. Your subconscious mind is always working on it even when you’re not aware of it. That’s what accounts for those ideas you get seemingly out of nowhere. You do do this. But, again, do you do it consciously and consistently as part of your creative routine? Why not?
Fresh ideas don’t come from the same place as logically deduced ideas. Thinking through a creative problem is rarely the best way to find a truly original solution. I suggest you try picking up a little pollen from this challenge and go place it on that. Do the rounds in your idea garden, and see what blossoms.
(This post is excerpted from an article that first appeared in Before & After’s quarterly newsletter, Q1, ‘07. For the complete article, which also discusses bow to bring this bumblebee sex process to group brainstorming, subscribe to our newsletter.)
© 2007 Tom Monahan, all rights reserved.
