Want more creative consulting? Get more structured.
Twenty-five years in, I’ve learned the wildest ideas come from the most structured people. Here are the ten creative ways to find structure
My happy place as a consultant is a stack of butcher's paper, a fistful of whiteboard markers and a client in the room, and I can stay there for hours. Every consultancy I've started in twenty-five years has begun much the same way, with an ugly PowerPoint I call the think piece and a diagram of the problem that I draw, rub out and draw again until the client picks it up and calls it theirs.
For a long time I assumed the drawing was the creative bit and the method was the dull bit to keep my utilisation up. I had it round the wrong way. The drawing only works because the method sits underneath it.
I was reminded of this reading a piece in Entrepreneur by Safaque Kagdi about an advertising creative director. He walked into the room with a blank sheet of paper, wrote the product name in the middle, and sat in silence for ten minutes with his eyes closed. Then he drew a circle around the name, surrounded it with smaller circles (for a cheese slice: cow, pizza, family, comfort), and made each of those the centre of its own ring, several layers deep, before he drew a single line between any of them. The campaign ideas came from the lines. Kagdi's conclusion was that creativity is structured.
That's why I'm drawn to design methods, and why my favourite kind of job is structuring the unstructurable, whether that's systemising a consultancy or bringing order to a program nobody can describe in one breath. The consultants who find the one idea or distinction that turns an organisation around have a method for having ideas.
Here are ten of the structures I use.
