.jpg "elBulli Classifications") Today I was reading my favourite creative book, A Day at elBulli: An insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adrià. At elBulli, Ferran’s restaurant, they create food experiences by inventing new ways of cooking and eating that have never been attempted before. The restaurant has 3 Michelin stars, and won “Best Restaurant in the World” four years in a row from 2006–2009. In 2010, Ferran Adrià was awarded “Best Chef of the Decade” by The Restaurant Magazine.
So how does an internationally renowned restaurant continue to innovate year after year? One of elBulli’s secrets is that all ingredients are classified into product families. For example: Fish, Flowers, Fats, Salts, Sausages, Juices, Sauces… These families become lists that a chef can use to make new dishes. She can decide to use a different flower, a different kind of fat, a different condiment, and the dish will be altered.
But it’s not just about the ingredients. The core of their creative process is something they call the Technique-Concept Search. They describe a technique as something that takes a series of ingredients and transforms it. Like how we make omelettes, salads, or sorbets. They are always on the look-out for new ways, new techniques, for making food. Some of their tamer discoveries have included savory ice cream and hot jellies. (Think about it, have you ever had hot Jello before?) In the creation of new concepts and techniques, Ferran’s team uses the following methods: association, inspiration, adaptation, deconstruction, and minimalism. In the book, they often state how difficult it is to describe these methods—especially things like inspiration or minimalism—which are subjective in nature and rely more on experience than following exact instructions.
 As a Creative Director with my own set of tools and systems, I couldn’t help relating elBulli’s methods to that of Michael Michalko’s Thinkpak. The Thinkpak is a series of cards used to help push your ideas further, to experiment, to innovate. The cards are variations on the SCAMPER method, a clever acronym derived from Alex Osborn’s 9 principles for manipulating an object. I have listed these principles below, and placed elBulli’s methods in parentheses:
Substitute (ingredient swapping by classification)
Combine (association)
Adapt (adaptation)
Modify/Magnify (see next paragraph below)
Put to another use (inspiration)
Eliminate (minimalism)
Reverse/Rearrange (deconstruction)
Modify and Magnify come into effect when elBulli considers the entire experience through the lens of the guest. How do they experience the food through all of their senses? The chefs think about how the food tastes, of course, but also how it looks, smells, feels (textures), and even how it sounds to their patrons. Lastly, they think about the emotions brought on by the food through memory, association, and the atmosphere at the restaurant. They call these emotions the sixth sense.
elBulli is now closed, but the inspiration and creativity will live on through the elBulli Foundation: a combination museum and think-tank for creative cuisine. Ferran and his team are some of the most creative people in the world, but it is important to remember that they became that way through a conscious process. They created a system to classify common ingredients. They transformed existing cooking techniques and discovered others by adhering to a philosophy of innovation principals very similar to SCAMPER. And finally, they created experiences for the customer that considered every conceivable layer of sensation.
If you want to be the best, most innovative company/business/agency/school/hospital/franchise/corner store/entrepreneur in the world, feel free to adapt these same techniques for your industry.
To sum up, make creative PIE:
- Process: Alter your processes (and look for new ones) with tools like the SCAMPER method. What changes have the most promise? What works best?
- Ingredients: Categorize and switch up your ‘ingredients’ (the elements that make up your product or service). Mix and match until you have exhausted all possibilities.
- Experience: Put yourself in your customers’ shoes (as well as their hats, pants, shirts, skirts, coats, and even underwear). How do they perceive you or your product? How do they feel when they experience it?
.png "elBulliLastWaltz") Detail from elBullilastWaltz Poster of elBulli's last served meal
Not long ago I took a horse & carriage ride at a small Winter Fair with my family. The two horses pulled about twenty people in a carriage in the freezing rain up a long incline. They had been doing this for half the day. They seemed exhausted and on the verge of disobedience. A young girl dropped her winter hat onto the road and the carriage had to stop. The girl and her mother stepped out the back to retrieve the hat, but the horses were restless. Just as the mother and daughter were about to climb back on, the horse broke into an impromptu trot, and they were forced to run and jump back into the car. Everyone thought it was good fun, and the younger children laughed and cheered.
To be honest, it made me very nervous. You see, when I was just a young boy of four years, I convinced my father to let me show off in front of my visiting friends. I wanted to ride our pony, Peggy, without him holding onto the reigns. I had done it a hundred times, but I wanted my peers to see what a big boy I was. My dad let go, and the horse, which had been cooped up in the barn for the better part of the winter, decided that this was its chance. It bolted. And because it had a rubber bit in its mouth, it didn’t care that I was pulling back on the reigns as hard as a four year old can pull. And because it was a fat pony (it had been boarded at a farm one summer and gotten into the cattle-fattening feed), the straps holding the saddle in place weren’t very tight. As it ran, the saddle slipped down the side of the young horse, with me yelling and pulling and finally falling under its hooves into the packed dirt. My dad was right behind me, and scooped me up. I was crying, but luckily unhurt. After that, I had a healthy fear of horses. They are big, strong, willful animals.
I couldn’t help but imagine the carriage out of control, the two horses galloping fiercely down the road, laughter turning to screams as the carriage sunk half-way into the ditch and pitched onto its side. I imagined trying to protect my children, scooping them in my arms like an action hero, holding them tight as we were thrown from the car… Such morbid, paranoid thoughts. I was ruining my own fun, so I decided to change the subject of my internal monologue to one of horseshoes. It seemed to me that a horseshoe is not lucky for the horse. They still have to slave away, day after day, pulling things and carrying things: a beast of burden.
According to folklore, the Devil became jealous of a horse’s shoes after seeing it gallop over a cobblestone street. The iron shoe striking the stone road was throwing off sparks, and made it look like its feet were on fire. The Devil thought this was pretty cool, and asked the local blacksmith to fit a special pair for his cloven feet. The blacksmith obliged, and fitted the Devil with iron shoes. The Devil was most proud for a few days, kicking up impressive sparks wherever he went, but soon the nails began to hurt and his feet became quite sensative. The Devil returned to the blacksmith and demanded he undo his work. The blacksmith refused. A few days later, the Devil limped back into the blacksmith’s shop begging bitterly for the shoes’ removal. Again the blacksmith refused. Finally, after one week of unbearable pain, the Devil crawled to the blacksmith and offered him a wish. “I will do anything you command,” the Devil promised, “as long as you remove these iron shoes.” “Very well,” said the blacksmith. “You must promise never to enter a house with a horseshoe hanging above the doorway.” “As you wish,” said the Devil, “Now get these damned crippling shoes off of me!” The blacksmith obliged the Devil once more, but not before nailing a horseshoe above his door, making his home safe from evil’s harm.
The trend caught on, and more and more villagers began nailing horseshoes above their doorways. Some knew told the story of the blacksmith, and some did not. Over time, people came to believe different things about this tradition. Some believed a horseshoe brought good luck because it had seven holes in it, a holy number. Some argued that when nailed ‘upright’ in the shape of a ‘U’ it would catch all the good luck that rained down from heaven. Still others maintained that the only way the luck was imparted on the inhabitants was if it could pour onto you as you left your house. These people chose to nail their horseshoes upside-down. Good fortune, it seemed, was in the mind of the beholder.
As luck would have it, the eight horseshoes pulling my family brought us safely back to the cold, muddy parking lot of the Winter Fair unharmed.
Capturing ideas is the most important task of a creative person (a Maker). It is part of a more involved system I call Capture, Catalogue, Review. First you make sure you write down—or digitally collect—your thoughts and inspirations (Capture). Then you file and store them in such a way as to access them again easily. This can be done with physical boxes, digital folders, and applications with labels, and tags (Catalogue). And finally, you make time to browse through your ideas on a regular basis to see if they serendipitously connect to anything you are working on, or spark a new project or idea (Review).
I’ve had trouble collecting lately. I’ve found my iPhone too slow for typing, I’ve had applications crash (I’m looking at you, Evernote), and my Jawbone UP—which was collecting my walking and sleeping patterns—randomly and intermittently lost data. It has been frustrating, and reminds me of all the things that can go wrong when you want to capture your ideas:
TECHNOLOGY
- Failure: Sometimes things just don’t work. My Jawbone UP is a perfect example. It was fully charged, and I was wearing it all day and night, and suddenly it stopped collecting data consistently. I have no idea why, except that things don’t always work.
- Power: Batteries run out. When you rely on something that relies on batteries, it is inevitable that they will let you down some day.
- Crashes: Applications (and apps) can just quit without warning, hang, take forever to boot up, or act temper mental. I don’t mean to pick on Evernote, but it crashed 3 times in a row on my iPhone, and I had to open a different app (Pages) to capture my idea.
- Offline: You won’t always have an internet connection, and if you are using the mobile version of Evernote, it might not allow you to launch at all. Connecting to Google Docs, or Dropbox also becomes difficult or impossible. If you are writing live on a website (like WordPress), it may not save and you could lose everything you have written. This has happened to me scores of times—including a few times on this very post. (This is why I SELECT ALL and COPY to the clipboard before ever saving a live document. I’ve been burned too many times by shoddy internet connections.)
DISTRACTION
- Driving: This includes operating heavy machinery, or doing anything where most of your attention is required. You might not physically be able to capture your ideas. This is why services like Siri are embraced so enthusiastically. Even though they never seem to work as well as advertised.
- Family: Whether it’s your mom nagging at you to take out the garbage, or your kids bouncing around for attention, or your partner needing help taking in the groceries; these things happen all the time. Your family, your friends, and random strangers, will continue to interrupt you at the most inopportune times.That’s life.
- Work: You need to pay the bills, right? Sometimes you won’t have a chance to capture that fleeting thought because you have an obligation to your employer or client that needs taking care of.
MULTIPLICITY
- Platforms: Paper vs Smart Phone vs Tablet vs Work Computer vs Home Computer. What device did you capture your last idea with? It might also be captured in video or audio or stills on your camera.
- Applications: At one time, I was using all of the following: Writeroom, TextEdit, Stickies, Notes, Evernote, Backpack, Email, Gmail, Google Docs, OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, Pages, Microsoft Word, Keynote… and others. When I wanted to find something I wrote, it became very difficult to remember where it was located.
UNPREPAREDNESS
- Nothing: Sometimes you forget your notebook or your phone and have nothing to capture with. Other times you are in the bathroom or in the shower, and have no way to capture your thoughts.
- Out Of: You can run out of paper, ink, space, batteries, memory, time.
To battle these and other capture disasters, it pages to follow these few simple advisements:
CAPTURE BEST PRACTICES:
- Capture Plan: Have a capture plan for most situations. Voice record in the car, Evernote when online, pencil & paper in the subway. Be consistent and persistent. Iterate and perfect your plans.
- Pencil & Paper: Have pencil & paper backup. Always. Everywhere. Pencils never crash or run out of ink. If you are always losing the pencil, then buy a quiver or to fasten your pencil to your notebook with a rubber band.
- Now: Write (or speak) things down as soon as they come to you. Get into the habit of fast captures, even when you are distracted. You can always return to them later and flesh them out as long as you have the core idea down. Ideas are like dreams; you always think you will remember them, and then suddenly you don’t.
Follow these simple instructions and you will get better and better at capturing you ideas. The more you perfect it, the faster and more effective you will become. Don’t let the big one get away (again).
Netflix quietly updated their user interface to include a section called Characters in the Just For Kids menu. What makes this so brilliant is that a preschooler can now choose the programming they are interested in by picking their favourite picture. They don’t have to know how to read. Whether you think a two year old should be picking their own programming—or even watching TV—is a debate for another day. But I think the move to more intuitive, iconographic interfaces for kids is fascinating. I am curious to see what these kids will continue to expect as they get older. Everything will be touch enabled, on demand, device independent, and in the cloud; with simpler interfaces. The present still a long way to go, however. A three year old could pick Franklin to watch, click play on the first episode, but would have a very hard time trying to trouble-shoot the accompanying Digital Rights Management error message. Perhaps Netflix should work on self-diagnostic, self-healing code next.
As I rode to work this morning on the Toronto subway, I noticed a significant reduction in passengers. It wasn’t a holiday, it wasn’t the weekend, and I wasn’t late for work. I couldn’t help but wonder why there were fewer people on the train. Was the subway half empty, or half full?
If the subway is half empty on the way to work in the morning, it means that the economy is not doing as well as expected. Less people going to work means more unempoyed who cannot afford transit. Less jobs means less people needed to head into the heart of the city. It also means a transit system that cannot afford to optimize, continuing to run inefficiently and lose money and ridership in the process. A half empty subway is a dying subway.
If the subway is half full on the way to work in the morning, it means that the economy is doing better than expected. Less people means more subway cars are running at a higher frequency. It is a sign that the city anticipates growth, an influx of people to take on the jobs being created. Also, due to higher wages, more people can afford to drive their fancy cars, decreasing ridership somewhat. A half full subway is a thriving subway.
There are omens of the impending apocalypse all around us. There are signs of recovery and healing surrounding us. It depends where you look and how you see it. Are you a subway half empty or a subway half full kind of guy? Or is your subway too crowded to think about it?
|
no comments