The Creative Touch

In a business like advertising and marketing, the process of developing cool concepts that translate into actionable solutions for clients isn’t just important, it’s invaluable. So keeping the flow of creative ideas going is vital.

What happens when that essential “faucet of thought” dries up? Or gets stuck? Or, to follow the analogy, grows rusty? A wrenching moment, to be sure! Where’s a good mind-plumber when you need one?

Here at PlattForm Advertising, we resort to some playful, but effective, means of maintaining liquidity of ideation. With apologies to Hasbro, we call it “the Play-Doh Connection.”

What does modeling clay have to do with fixing the idea pipeline? Believe it or not, it’s founded in research on learning theory. We all learn, develop thoughts and express ourselves using three main sensory channels: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Most (70%) of us learn and create primarily through visual or auditory channels. The key, then, to getting unstuck is activating your least-used sense. For most of us, that is our kinesthetic sense.

What that means is: for the majority of us to get ideas flowing freely again, we need to touch, or we need to move, or both. Often this translates into certain activities, and the formula is this: Do something that’s not thought-intensive. It can be any combination of playful, entertaining, immersive or habitual. But, it needs to occupy your hands and/or your body, not your brain.

Here are some examples:
• For writer’s block, try Play-Doh. One member of our Content team kept an emergency supply by her keyboard and swore that rolling out snakes and crafting robots helped her refresh her word supply.
• For stale thinking, write on a chalkboard. Here at PlattForm, we have an entire chalkboard wall. Amazing how holding chalk and randomly scrawling thoughts or making sketches can inject new color into a creative milieu that’s stubbornly black and white.
• For concept fatigue, mindless activity delivers. Walking, filing nails, doing laundry or washing the car frees the subconscious to work on the problem without pressure.
• For strategy failure, stack blocks or construct Lego structures. There’s something about physically redefining order from chaos that can provide newly inventive solution formation.

There are many more possibilities to consider: At PlattForm, we also engage in Wii bowling, shooting pool, playing ping-pong, or shaking down the pinball machine. Then there’s walking through a sculpture park and connecting with the statues, dancing for inspiration, trampolining, knitting while listening to music (perfect for activating both the kinesthetic and auditory sides of a highly visual learner), cutting out photographs and pasting them on a storyboard, playing drums, planting bulbs—well, you choose.

The object: To cultivate one or two favorite activities, both at work and at home, that can “train” your neurons to begin connecting in new and enjoyable ways. Voila, the idea faucet is back on, full-force. Speaking of which—I’ve got a creative challenge to solve. Excuse me while I go take a long shower.