‘If there’s an original thought out there, I could do with it right now.’ Bob Dylan, Brownsville Girl
In 1997, UK public relations firm August One Communications gave all employees an allocation of days off work that could be taken for no reason. They were known as ‘Duvet Days’. I heard about them when I was working in the marketing department of a cable company and our ad agency was in for a meeting. One of their team couldn’t attend and it was put down to them taking a ‘duvet day’. Being extremely proficient in the sleeping department, I think that moment very nearly persuaded me to go work in a hip creative agency. However, over the years I have thought about those ‘duvet days’ and wondered how many great ideas came from those pressure free days just lolling about.
Who needs a good idea anyway? Can’t businesses do just fine doing what they have always done? Probably not, and here’s why. Since time immemorial the lifeblood of a business has been its market. The market is populated by customers with needs, and the business seeks to fulfil those needs. The fulfilment of need is underscored by a value exchange: the business provides goods or services and the customer generally parts with money. However, the market is not just populated by customers, it’s also the domain of competition which is great for customers (as it provides choice and keeps prices keen), but not so great for business who would far prefer to dictate the terms of the customer interaction. So, the question for most businesses (unless you happen to be a water company or a rail franchise holder) is ‘how on earth do I constantly provide more value to my customers than the competition?’ in order to avoid becoming obsolete. Well, at the risk of over-simplifying, you’d better hope you don’t run out of seriously good ideas..
If you accept this basic premise, then let’s unpeel the onion a little more and explore where those ideas might come from - under that duvet perhaps? But first, a brief side note, to shore up support for the theory that good ideas are really worth pursuing.
If you work in a large enterprise then the concept of corporate mortality is probably not something you spend much time pondering unless of course you worked at Blackberry (see our story: ‘Will You Miss Me’, April 3, 2023), Nortel, PanAm, Toys R Us, Compaq, Blockbuster, Comet, Phones4U, Thomas Cook.. Considering the aforementioned, perhaps you should, because if you look at the research (McKinsey’s famous 2014 study on corporate longevity), the facts are alarming: in 1958 the average lifespan of the S&P 500 was 61 years, at present it is around 18 years.. Now of course it is overly simplistic (and not the point of this article) to suggest that good ideas will exclusively prevent companies going to the wall. The point is rather to say that survival is far from guaranteed and to stand some chance of lasting longer than 20 years then you had better make sure that your organisational capacity to ideate, adapt & compete is well oiled.
With McKinsey’s rather sobering research leaving an unpleasant taste in the mouth, we should redouble our efforts to understand where good ideas come from, because (until you read the research), it feels like they simply come out-of-the-blue. Disappointingly, those ‘a-ha’ or ‘eureka’ moments tend not to have fabulous mystical origins, rather their roots are in neuroscience and our own daily physical rhythms. But before we dive into the science, stop and think when you last had a ‘good’ idea - where were you and what were you doing at the time? I’ve been keeping a log of mine recently, largely because it is now beyond debate that my best ideas rarely come to me when I’m sat in my office in front of my laptop. In no particular order my new ideas have come to me whilst driving, washing the dishes, pruning the fruit trees, repairing the chicken coop, painting my son’s bedroom, brushing my teeth and walking the dog. Broadly speaking then, these are solitary times when I am distracted from the day-to-day running of the business and immersed in something that is either repetitive, outside of my work environment or deeply relaxing. Dog walking probably comes out on top with pruning the fruit trees a decent ‘runner up’. As the owner of a young Airedale Terrier, I tend not to include Monty in the pleasures of maintaining espaliers as there would be far less time for those good ideas to come forward.
As I considered them, it seemed that there was a bit of a pattern surrounding those idea-producing-activities. All of them seemed to allow me to subconsciously ‘process’ complex issues without realising it. Indeed the research and the science says that this is absolutely what is happening. Incidentally, it has been proven that creativity is not a skill exclusive to certain personality types - it can be influenced by both situation and context in a phenomenon known as Psychological Distance (studies carried out by: Lile Jia, Edward R. Hirta and Samuel C. Karpena of Indiana University and covered in this story in Scientific American by Oren Shapira & Nira Liberman). Essentially the research shows that creative ideation can be improved by distancing people from the problem that they are trying to solve - asking, for example, ‘how might Elon Musk solve this problem?’ By taking a different perspective, people are freed from their own perceived limitations or professional ‘can’t do’ biases, coming up with hitherto unimagined ideas.
Now let’s get back to why we have our best ideas when we are invariably somewhere other than work. Let’s assume that you have been wracking your brain, wrestling with a particularly challenging business issue. You're sat there in your office, staring at the wall or your computer screen, going through a myriad of fuzzy permutations for a possible solution and frankly not much is coming back, by way of good ideas. You call it a day, close down your laptop and hit the road home. Once home, there are few things that need doing and judging by the tail-wagging, it looks like the dog needs a walk. Half-way round your favourite walk and Bingo! a thought pops into your head and you’ve had an idea how to fix that problem. Why on earth didn’t it occur to you earlier?
Well, several neuroscientists (Shelley H. Carson, Alice Flaherty, Mark Fenske and others) explain that activities such as walking, or taking a shower, or yes, pruning fruit trees satisfy some key physiological conditions that are good for creative ideation. Getting out of that ‘work environment’ or changing the scenery to a place that is contextually different gives you psychological distance from your problem. This, in turn, allows you to consider different alternatives (usually subconsciously). Furthermore, engaging in a relaxing activity that is removed from your usual environment provides you with 2 key conditions to stimulate creativity. Firstly, relaxing activity (such as walking) stimulates the production of dopamine (a chemical linked to creativity) and secondly these activities allow our brain to be distracted. Distraction is an important part of the creative process as it both counterbalances the effect of dopamine (which in excess can actually hinder creativity), whilst providing space for what has been termed ‘an incubation period’ in which the ideas, that have been produced in our subconscious mind, are able to manifest themselves in our conscious minds - giving rise to the expression, ‘an idea popped into my head’.
Why engaging in relaxing, mindful activity allows us to be creative is a vast area of complex neuroscience and, without wishing in any way to do the work of incredible academics a disservice, the research in part aims to prove what we have instinctively known for millennia: that some activity is particularly good at giving rise to the odd great idea. In fact, the evidence that activity such as walking is good for our creativity can be traced back as far as Aristotle who founded his school of philosophy in 355BC. Aristotle’s school became known as the Peripatos because of its peripatoi (covered walkways) along which Aristotle lectured his students whilst walking. Over the course of history, many other famous names have extolled the virtues of walking as a catalyst for great ideas and creativity, from Nikola Tesla and Ernest Hemingway to Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs - even the miserable genius Nietzsche said, ‘All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.’
In bringing this fascinating topic to a close let’s go back to duvet days because even though they are not exactly linked to creativity, they serve a similar purpose: they aim to address issues that are seemingly tricky to resolve, like employee energy, motivation and sense of worth. So, in a simple, grown up and brilliant way they acknowledge that we are not robots and every so often we need to get off the hamster wheel in order to recharge our batteries. In the same vein we have seen that corporate mortality rates have dropped from 61 to under 20 years driven by less stable markets, increased technological disruption and global competition. If enterprises are to do more than just survive, they need an ideating workforce that can create value and drive growth more than ever. On that basis, it might just be time to insist, that every so often, all employees are sent out on a jolly good walk.
Acknowledgements and Further Reading: