It’s easier said than done, but there is a tool that I use with every creative brief I work on.

It’s the one-word technique; a deceptively simple tool from one of my favourite and best-thumbed books on creativity – Michael Michalko’s “Thinkertoys” and it’s a great starting point to help you to unravel ‘mess’ and ignite creative ideas.

Think of it as another tool in your creative strategy arsenal. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: start with a simple sentence

Grab your pen and paper. Start by distilling your problem into a single, as-concise-as-you-can sentence. This is your starting point. 

For example, instead of “our marketing campaign isn’t resonating with the target audience,” try “there’s a disconnect” or in plainer English, perhaps “the message is not hitting the mark” or “people are ignoring the campaign” or from the customer’s point of view “it’s not for me”.

Step 2: one word 

Now, review your sentence and ask yourself, “What single word captures the heart of this problem?” Is it “confusion”? “blandness”? “misalignment”? Choose the one that feels like the bullseye.

Step 3: make the thesaurus your creative buddy

Now dive into the thesaurus, exploring synonyms and near-synonyms. This opens up new perspectives and unlocks hidden connections. “Misalignment” might lead you to “dissonance,” “discrepancy,” or even “friction.”

Step 4: dig deeper

What does your chosen word truly mean to you? Write down your personal definition, weaving in your lived experience and understanding. This imbues the word with depth and emotional resonance. “Friction,” for you, might signify a rough, bumpy experience, while someone else might envision sparks flying.

Step 5: dictionary detour 

Consult the dictionary definition of your chosen word. Does it add another layer of meaning? Does it contradict your personal definition? Embrace the dissonance! This friction can spark new ideas and challenge your initial assumptions.

Step 6: the word evolves

Within the dictionary definition, lurks another possibility. Is there a sub-word, a hidden gem that better captures the essence of your problem? Repeat the process, diving deeper. “Friction” might lead you to “abrasion,” or “imbalance.”

Step 7: collective clarity 

Don’t go it alone! Share your one-word journey with your colleagues, team, or even your boss. See what words resonate with them, creating a diverse vocabulary of the problem or opportunity. This collaborative approach fosters a richer understanding of the issue and gives you options.

Step 8: sanity check 

Step back and evaluate it with your team/client/boss/colleagues. The idea is that this pause, this interrogation of the challenge, should offer room for different perspectives and to banish jargony, bland, corporate speak. 

It should also offer different jump off points for problem solving or creative ideas.

Does it ring true? 

Does it accurately reflect the problem without oversimplification? Be willing to pivot and refine, ensuring your one-word compass points towards a solution.

Studies by the University of Chicago found that focusing on a single word improved cognitive flexibility and problem-solving accuracy by 25%. It’s like zooming in on a satellite image, sharpening the blurry edges and revealing the hidden patterns.

Distillation isn’t just a solo act.

It’s a collaborative superpower. A 2020 study by MIT showed that teams that used distillation techniques to identify shared priorities before brainstorming outperformed teams that jumped straight into idea generation. Distilling fosters a sense of shared understanding, a common ground from which creative solutions can blossom.

The one-word technique is a helpful gateway to creative thinking. By focusing on the essence, finding unexpected connections, and embracing collaboration, you can find fresh and interesting creative territories.

P.S. Want to dive deeper? Check out these resources:

• “Brief” Make A Bigger Impact By Saying Less Joseph McCormack
• “Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence” by Daniel Goleman
• “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande
• Read our blog on question storming, another great creative strategy process

The post The Zen of One Word: Unlock Creativity with Simplicity first appeared on Now Go Create.

The Creative Strategy Grand Prix and the Creative Data Lions winners at this year’s Cannes both demonstrate how good creative strategy can support a product or service, as well as helping to achieve long-term business goals. What we love about both these campaigns is that they are that heady mixture of imagination and maths – exploring different ways to frame the problem before they begin to offer solutions.

Creative Strategy Grand Prix 

Plug-Inn, from Renault (Publicis Conseil)

Effective creative strategy involves an alchemy of understanding pain points, comprehensive market research, audience understanding and a laser-like focus on the business objectives to devise a campaign that connects multiple dots and is based in solid, robust critical thinking. The creatives behind Renault’s Plug-Inn campaign set out to tackle the problem of just how few electric car chargers there are in rural France, a real social problem as the country lags behind in its adoption of electric vehicles. And clearly a serious barrier to long term business growth.

The creative approach: Renault, who sell more EVs in France than anyone, worked with Publicis Conseil to develop ‘The Airbnb for plugs’ – a peer-to-peer app that connects the drivers of electric cars with other people’s home chargers.

The delivery: With 680,000 private chargers (compared to just 80,000 commercial ones), the campaign set out to unite the EV-driving community by conveniently and easily allowing users to book a charge slot pretty much anywhere – and pay a reasonable price for the electricity too.

Success metrics: Renault claims to have developed the “fastest growing recharging network for all brands” – and turned a business problem into a new business model via its marketing efforts. Next stop: the rest of world. Numbers? 140m impressions and 31,000 users so far.

This work also won a Gold in Creative Business Transformation and also in Mobile.

We love it for the lateral thinking around the problem and it’s a great example of combinational creativity – taking existing resources and using them differently. Also the ability to summarise your idea in 4 words is a clue that you’re onto a winner – ‘Airbnb for plugs’ – you’re halfway there with selling your idea if you can bring people on board in a way they can easily understand.

Cannes 2023 – Creative Data Lions Winner Grand Prix

The Creative Data Lions celebrate the interplay of ideas and information. According to the Cannes Lions website criteria “entries will need to demonstrate how the work was enhanced or driven by the creative use, interpretation, analysis or application of data. The creative use of data must sit at the core of the idea and the results / impact must be clear and robust.”

Of the 418 entries in this category, there were 15 Lions were awarded – two Gold, five Silver, seven Bronze, and of course the Grand Prix. ‘The Artois Probability’, for Stella Artois, by GUT, Buenos Aires, Argentina bagged the highest prize and is one of my favourite campaigns this year. It combines history, art and technology, glued together by data – all highlighting Stella Artois’ heritage, raising brand awareness.

The creative approach: Thousands of famous works of art including famed artists like Van Gogh and Manet feature people drinking beer. Using hundreds of datapoints from the year when the picture was painted, to the place it depicts, to the glass it was being drunk from to the colour of the drink the team created an algorithm to calculate the statistical probability that the beer in question is actually a Stella Artois.

The delivery: An outdoor ad campaign, art exhibition and art exhibition all brought the idea to life. AR was used to allow consumers to interact with the art.

Success metrics: The campaign delivered over 7 million impressions and during the exhibition, 24,000 people interacted with the web app.

I love it because it’s a truly creative idea from the outset – looking at something in a completely different way and supporting it with data – in this case fine artworks – and creating the hypthothesis that all the beer in the art is likely to be Stella. The product is front and centre too and reminding people of the heritage of the brand, whilst using technology to bring it bang up to date!

We have a range of awesome courses designed to help everyone from novices to creative veterans up their game. If you’ve already completed our popular Creative Ninja training and wondering where to go next, why not upskill with our brilliant Insight course?

The post Making creative strategy look easy first appeared on Now Go Create.

It’s that time of year when thoughts turn to planning and hatching and scheming plans for what’s to come next. But the word ‘strategy’ has the power to intimidate and confuse even seasoned creatives.

Here at Now Go Create, we work with individuals and teams to help them understand and devise strategy. And we use established concepts and frameworks to help you get to where you need to be.

Einstein famously said: “Make everything as a simple as possible, but no simpler.”

With the 2023 Ocean Race kicking off this month, we were reminded of the late Sir Peter Blake‘s philosophy. He headed up the New Zealand America’s Cup yachting team in 1995 at a time when the US dominated the sport. He had a clear vision and a simple mantra that drove the team to victory.

Whatever they were doing, his one question for every member of the crew was:

“Does it make the boat go faster?”

If the answer was no, then the activity was abandoned.

A race-winning approach

That single-minded focus directed from Blake – who was tragically killed in 2001 after being attacked by pirates in Brazil – is credited for the team winning the race. He didn’t have just the one victory under his belt, by the way. He once won the Whitbread Round The World Race and also bagged the Jules Verne Trophy (handed out for the fastest circumnavigation of the world) in 1994.

So if you want to know how to develop creative strategy, think about honouring Blake’s legacy and ask “will it make the boat go faster?” In other words, start with the essence of the problem. Learning how to do that is a key skill to develop.

If you’d like help with your planning over the next few months, give us a shout. We can work with you and facilitate a strategy workshop or creative strategy session with your group to help you make your boat go faster. Contact claire@nowgocreate.co.uk

See some of our favourite creative strategy frameworks in the next post, and here. And don’t forget to take a look at our Ask Me Anything with Now Go Create strategy maven Anahita.

The post Does it make the boat go faster? (Not just a question for the Ocean Race 2023 teams) first appeared on Now Go Create.

In this TED talk, Stuart Firestein gets to the heart of science as it is really practiced and suggests that we should value what we don’t know – or “high-quality ignorance” – just as much as what we know. He says:

“There is an ancient proverb that says it’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat.

I find this a particularly apt description of science and how science works – bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things, trying to figure out what shape this might be, what that might be, there are reports of a cat somewhere around, they may not be reliable, they may be, and so forth and so on.”

Check out the full talk below.

It’s not always easy to admit that you don’t have the answers – particularly if you are a manager or leader, but not knowing everything offers a range of possibilities. Amongst them are:

1. It’s an opportunity to collaborate
2. It’s an opportunity to learn something new
3. It’s an opportunity to find new ways of doing something
4. It’s an opportunity to show courage

On our Strategy Ninja Training, we teach different methods for investigating the problem, asking better questions and getting to what EE Cummings calls :a more beautiful answer.” Email me to find out more about our creative strategy workshops online and in person.

We’re running an online session on 29th November 2022 (9:30am-11:30am) and other dates before the end of the year, just in time for your 2023 planning.

Check out these other strategy blogs.

• How do you define strategy? 
• Define your strategy in 3 steps
• The 5 why’s root cause analysis
• Everything you wanted to know about strategy but were afraid to ask with Anahita 

The post How about some ‘high quality ignorance’ to help your strategy? first appeared on Now Go Create.

Creative strategy resource #1: Who. What. How. Brand Strategy by Mark Ritson

The post Devise your creative strategy in 3 easy steps first appeared on Now Go Create.

The search for ‘business strategy books’ on Amazon yields over 90,000 results. One of our favourite definitions we like to share is from Greenpeace…

I heard how David McTaggart – one of the early members of Greenpeace – is said to have described how they went about doing things on a recent Radio 4 documentary:

“Go the shortest route with the least amount of energy for the greatest return” 

McTaggart was the one who took a small, embryonic organisation in the early 1970s and transformed it into a global force for change. After the nuclear testing protests, McTaggart set up International Greenpeace organisations in Britain, France and the Netherlands. He bought a trawler from the British Government, and famously re-named it The Rainbow Warrior.

“He successfully drew attention to the issues in ways that no-one had previously considered by putting himself directly at the heart of the action – in the line of fire of a whaler’s harpoon, or being rammed by a naval frigate,” says writer Emma Shortis.

Now that’s what I would call a good strategy! You can listen to the full Radio 4 documentary here.

This HBR review article on strategy defines a business strategy as:

“A business strategy is a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making. A strategy is therefore about how people throughout the organization should make decisions and allocate resources in order accomplish key objectives. A good strategy provides a clear roadmap, consisting of a set of guiding principles or rules, that defines the actions people in the business should take (and not take) and the things they should prioritize (and not prioritize) to achieve desired goals.”

How do you define strategy in the work that you do?

What I find confusing about the word strategy is that there are many different kinds of strategy. And in a lot of the work that we do here at Now Go Create is about devising PR and comms strategy, marketing strategy and creative strategy. All of these sit underneath the overall business strategy and should meet the company’s overall objectives and mission. It’s requires simplification and distillation easy enough to explain to your gran, not over-complication and confusion which the word strategy often seems to conjur up.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how we help demystify strategy, check out our open course dates here  and take a look this blog on the topic: Everything you ever wanted to know about strategy (but were afraid to ask)

Try also The Theory of Change – a free creative strategy tool.

For details of our next open Strategy training – two hours packed full of frameworks and approaches – email lucy@nowgocreate.co.uk for dates.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

The post How do you define strategy? first appeared on Now Go Create.

Problems often arise in teams when trying to agree and decide what the problem actually is!

As the founder of modern management, the legendary Peter Drucker, once warned,

“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.”

Strategy tools can help. Using the 5 Whys, for example, will help you find the root cause of any problem by asking the same question five times.

The origins of the 5 Whys

The 5 Whys method is part of the Toyota Production System and was developed by Sakichi Toyoda, a Japanese inventor and industrialist.

“The basis of Toyota’s scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.“ Taiichi Ohno

One of the key factors for successful implementation of the technique is to make an informed decision. This means that the decision-making process should be based on an insightful understanding of what is actually happening in your context.

There are lots of useful free templates out there to help you with the process. MIRO has this free template where you can collaborate with team members

The post Strategy tools we love: 5 Whys – root cause analysis tool first appeared on Now Go Create.

Theory-of-Change-Size-A4

The post The theory of change – free creative strategy tool part 1 first appeared on Now Go Create.

What is it?

The Evidence Planning tool is one created by the National Endowment for Society, Technology and the Arts – NESTA – the innovation foundation. They describe it as:

“A quick way to help articulate and improve what you are trying to accomplish, especially designed for practitioners to invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results.“

What is it for?

Let’s say you’re interested in “improving brand awareness” – this tool will help you to work out exactly why you want to do that and provide you with clear evidence that you want to proceed… or not, in some cases (mass brand awareness may kill a boutique vibe, for example).

How does it work?

You start off in the middle by writing down your key focus. Then you look at the four quadrants to see how that key focus will enhance, replace, re-use or limit what you do. You’re encouraged to think of the questions not just in micro terms, but from the point of view of the wider world.

Who is it for?

Anyone who thinks they have a problem that needs solving, and needs to make sure that they really do. In many cases the tool will give them the validation they need – and will provide a variety of areas on which it would make sense to focus.

If we stick with “improving brand awareness”, for example, the tool might lead to thoughts about how commitment to this path would need you to shake off past values or invest in new talent.

How long does it take?

How long is a piece of string? On a major project, this could help inform the background thinking for weeks – but it could equally help you to approve/kill ideas in a very short time.

Difficulty rating

1/5. Simple and effective.

Why we love it

Due to time pressures we sometimes don’t spend enough time validating what we perceive to be the problem and poking around a bit. Before throwing everything but the kitchen sink at fixing something, the Evidence Planning tool gives you a clear picture of whether or not it needs fixing in the first place.

Pay particular attention, then, to that bottom right-hand quadrant!

If you’re interested in hands-on practice in creativity tools and techniques join our next Open Creative Ninjas training or Creative Strategy Training or book one for your in-house team. Contact lucy@nowgocrate.co.uk

The post The best strategy tools to try: Evidence Planning first appeared on Now Go Create.

“Once you see a campaign in its entirety, you then realise how important it is that it all hangs on something” – Now Go Create’s Anahita Milligan

The importance of strategy in creative campaigns is not lost on Anahita Milligan, a seasoned media planner whose Now Go Create courses leave delegates with a crystal clear picture of how to map out their next campaign. Our interview with a creative strategist reveals her take on how strategy and creativity feed off each other.

What do people often incorrectly think strategy is?
There are so many issues with jargon and people not really being sure what things mean that I think strategy is often confused with tactics/ideas. People think that ideas are strategies, when really the idea or the tactic needs to fall out of the strategy. Sometimes people even think that channels are ideas. You might say, ‘This is the strategy, let’s have an idea for it, and they’ll say, ‘OK, my idea is that we do social media.’ That’s not an idea, that’s a channel.

How do you help to unravel all this?
The first thing I tend to do on any of the Now Go Create courses that I run is spend some time picking the language apart so that everybody is clear on what their personal and also their company’s definitions are. We all need to know what objectives, ideas, strategy, tactics and so on are so that everyone’s working off the same page.

For the record, then, what’s your definition of strategy?
It’s about giving clear and exciting direction and it’s the thing that everything else hinges off. It’s your most effective means of getting from A to B in a way that is articulated so that everybody immediately knows what you’re all striving towards and how you’re going to get there.

Ideally, you should be able to explain it in a sentence, so that everyone knows exactly what the plan is. I think good strategists are people that are clear and jargon-free, and also have vision.

When did you come to learn the importance of strategy?
I spent nearly 10 years with Manning Gottlieb when I had the great privilege of working with some amazing clients, from government agencies to Sony PlayStation, and so much of what we needed to do was to be clear and effective and single-minded and directional. And that meant that devising strategies was absolutely key. We were working with many people, many agencies, many departments within those companies, so we had to make sure that everybody was working together to be greater than the sum of our parts.

“Part of the whole creative process includes that frustrated bit when you’re banging your head against a wall.” 

Are there key steps when it comes to strategic planning?
Yes, there are key elements to what makes a good strategy, but before that there are key steps to getting there.

Like what?
The single biggest thing is defining the problem in the first place. It’s really important to know exactly what it is that you’re trying to solve. And that sounds really easy, but it’s surprising how many clients don’t know what it is that they’re actually trying to solve. If you do enough work in that early stage and really define it properly, then you know where your starting point is, you can see what you need your endpoint to be and therefore you can explore all the different ways of getting there – your strategic options. It’s surprising how often in-depth investigation throws out the thing that you didn’t even know you were looking for.

What about the strategic planning itself?
What makes a really good strategy is having proper focus – focusing all your energy and resources in a way that can accomplish what you need it to do. This then cascades into favourable outcomes for other people – for example the client and the consumer. I think it also needs to be really simple: you need to be able to boil it down into no more than a slide with a core reason for your diagnosis and your solution.

Anything else?
I think it has to be based in insight. It has to be really robust. And it has to be a really clever diagnosis of the situation before you even start. So it’s got to give direction and be empowering – because it has to be actionable – and then it also needs to be agile, because if it’s any good then there’s an element of risk involved and if there is risk, you need to be flexible. A good strategy should allow for that.

How does this all dovetail into creativity and Now Go Create?
In terms of Now Go Create, we’re all about creative problem solving – but that isn’t just at the brainstorm. I think there’s a misnomer that the creative bit all happens when you’re having a brainstorm, but the creativity should all be happening right from the beginning. You should be using tools and techniques to tease out what your problem is and what your solution might be, because there might be many – you should be speaking to different stakeholders, calling on different resources, leveraging different elements of the marketing mix and so on. There are many ways to skin a cat, as they say, so you need to do divergent thinking at every stage – and then convergent thinking at every stage, too. It should be fun, but challenging. Part of the whole creative process includes that frustrated bit when you’re banging your head against a wall, but you really need to go through that. I explain how to keep that interesting, and show people the tools and techniques that can help at every stage.

Are there certain key moments that often seem to resonate with delegates – moments when they suddenly see how strategy works?
I often play a trick on people by asking them to do a word association on something really ubiquitous. And when you get the words back, you see that actually, even though they work in the same company or in the same industry, they have very different starting points, very different brain-banks. And I think that can be quite an ‘Aha!’ moment.

Any others?
We also spend quite a lot of time unpicking really creative strategic campaigns. We might go through the latest Cannes Lions winners and work out where it all came from. We’re lucky enough to work at Cannes every summer and it means we get to ask the winning strategists and creatives how their ideas came to be.

• What do you think the strategy was?
• What’s the insight that has driven the core idea?
• How do you think they employed it?
• What were the tactics?

“We tease it all apart, and once you see a campaign in its entirety, you then realise how important it is that it all hangs on something – that it has direction. Nothing should exist for the sake of it, it should all be there for a reason, and if you’ve done a good strategic job, everything will be. And it will make it all so much more powerful.”

To book a place on Anahita’s open training –  ‘How to Devise Strategy’ training workshops, please email lucy@nowgocreate.com

The post Everything you ever wanted to know about strategy (but were afraid to ask) first appeared on Now Go Create.