Bringing yourself to the work – thoughts on creative intuition
“Creative intuition is the source of authentic creativity that arises from inner personal experiences thereby giving rise to highly personal responses to the world – deepest feelings, oldest memories and private ponderings.”
Cool, right?
Doing some research about intuition recently, this thought caught my attention and made me think about how much of this we’re being able to bring to our work in the advertising industry.
We know that strategy and creativity are interconnected, and that intuition is relevant for both types of thinking. But with all the industrial timelines, rigid processes, obsession with data and sometimes dispensable collaboration attempts, we might be making people’s highly personal responses to the world stay well hidden.
The creative industry needs processes, needs tools, needs collaboration. That’s a fact. But a good question is how much of these things are actually helping the current work we’re creating - and how much of this might be getting in the way of people’s richest and most powerful sources of insights and ideas.
Jung considered intuition to be an unconscious process whose primary function “is simply to transmit perceptions or relations between things, which could not be transmitted by other functions”. The Taoist understanding of intuition is that it is “a private awareness of one's innermost being, where there is no separation between the knower and the known”. And for David Lynch “Intuition is seeing the solution. It’s emotion and intellect going together.”
Well, these are all great and inspiring definitions, but let’s bring it closer to our lives of developing communication solutions.
Dan Wieden once said that if he saw something passionate, personal, visceral, coming from someone from his team, even if he hadn't initially liked the idea, he would encourage the team to move forward with it to see what would happen. ”I would let the horse run for a while to see where it might go”, in his words, showing his belief in creative intuition.
Josy Paul, Chairman and CCO of BBDO India, while talking about Ariel’s “Share the Load'' campaign mentioned something that reinforces the importance of being open to creative intuition. According to him, during the campaign process and after several rounds of internal discussions, approvals with the client and even pre test research, the team ended up changing the idea in the final stages, making the iconic campaign we all know.
“We thought about our own lives, we thought about how we could incite change. We thought about things that we had not spoken about before because suddenly a new rush of emotion took over”, revealing that the team created a new script in just a few hours. “No data could have helped us make that decision, it had to be conviction based on our own personal experiences.”
In the midst of recurring chaos and excessive pressure that agencies often have to deal with, it can be hard to get to a level of openness and trust needed for people to think and share these personal experiences and perspectives.
But it seems like an important thing to keep as a reminder: processes, data and tools are essential, but the creative intuition in each and every person, regardless of their specific role and seniority level, can be a powerful weapon to generate fresh insights and ideas.
And we can also put in a bit of effort, even though these thoughts might not always be easy to express in words. As a thought starter, a while ago I remember trying to bring different processes in the agencies and teams I worked with. In a few projects, I adapted a design thinking tool for the start of the strategy process, asking for each person involved in the creative brief discussions to come with their personal imprints about the brand/product/problem, before anything else.
And all these thoughts, ideally people’s highly personal responses to the world, would work as our starting point and areas to start exploring in our strategies.
I don’t remember having anything revolutionary coming out of it, to be honest. It was just me trying to dive deeper and get closer to people’s creative intuition, even before doing this research that I just did to be writing the piece of text that you’re finishing to read now.
So If you made it all the way here, I really hope it didn’t feel like another human vs data discussion like we all read dozens of times already. Maybe it can inspire something for your next strategies, briefing sessions and ideas, because as someone very smart once said (that the internet refers as Henri Bergson):
“Intuition is the most direct way of knowing reality, the movement of conscious-ness is always from intuition to intellect; it is impossible for the mind to move from intellect to intuition. So, true creativity starts with intuition and is followed by intellectual thought processes, not the other way around.”
And I also hope that it could plant a seed about creative intuition, in case you haven’t spent much time thinking about it yet: It could be where your and your team’s next best insights and ideas will come from.
References:
-Journal of Creativity: “Understanding Creative Intuition” - Theresa Jane Hardman
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374521000066
-WARC - “Agencies can’t forget creative intuition”
https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/agencies-cant-forget-creative-intuition/en-gb/38418
-Dan Wieden - “Move me Dude”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNbEfl9IMJY
-Harvard Business Review - “Data and Intuition, good decisions need both”
https://www.harvardbusiness.org/data-and-intuition-good-decisions-need-both/
-HappyMag - “David Lynch reflects on creativity”
-Henri Bergson “The Creative Mind”
https://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/bergson.html
-Psychology Today “Curiosity: the key to creative intuition”
