My Japanese isn't quite what it used to be when I lived in Japan, but whenever I visit Tokyo, I always buy a couple of books that catch my eye while wandering among the shelves of that city's great book stores. It's a great way to get the Japanese side of my brain working again and connect with what's current, but even with electronic dictionary in hand, I usually find it hard slogging, and I'll find myself still struggling to get through them on the flight home and for several weeks after, simultaneously extending the pleasure of my recent excursion and prolonging the pain of separation from the place I've come to see, ever more distantly, as my second home.
On my trip to Tokyo last summer, I found an entire shelf lined with books by and about a creative director named Sato Kashiwa. Since leaving Dentsu, where I worked for ten years, I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with creative trends in Japan. The Sato Kashiwa shelf called to me, promising to bring me up to speed with what's happening now in the world of advertising and design. I picked up a ten-year retrospective of his work and one of his own books, Creative Thinking. I wasn't disappointed.
Creative Thinking is an amazing book that should be made available in English, so I'd like to at least make a start of introducing it here. Despite my linguistic handicap, I found myself breezing easily through this book and deeply connecting with the lessons Sato has to share. It may be that I found it easier to read because I've been doing some translation work over the past year, but it probably has more to do with the simplicity and clarity of Sato's writing, which is designed to make his deep insights into creativity accessible to all.
Sato Kashiwa, born in 1965, is a creative director who worked on many award-winning campaigns for Hakuhodo (Japan's second-biggest ad agency) before starting his own design agency, SAMURAI. Some of Japan's leading brands - such as Kirin Beer, NTT DoCoMo, and Rakuten - have turned to him for innovative thinking that goes beyond advertising, encompassing product development, retail-space and office design, and business consulting. While not yet a household name outside of Japan, he was tapped to manage the global rollout of Japanese clothing retailer UNIQLO in cities from New York to Moscow, overseeing store design, branding, and adveritising.
Creative Thinking was written with the intent of reaching a more general business audience, which is what makes it so approachable. Sato writes that design is not about artistic self-expression but about creative problem-solving:
It's the work of teasing out the passionate ideas your client can't put into words and finding a way to communicate them to society and making them real. You might also call it being a "communications consultant."
In this sense, while not written for designers per-se, Creative Thinking will inevitably have a more direct appeal to readers broadly engaged in marketing and communications, especially because his examples tend to arise from his own work. Nevertheless, Sato's lessons in "creative thinking" are truly applicable to just about anyone who wants to improve their "problem solving" ability. It's also worth nothing that some of the world's best businesses are increasingly turning to design agencies like IDEO rather than traditional management consultants to help drive innovation even at the organizational level, a trend that's consistent with Garr Reynold's insight that being design mindful is an asset in any undertaking. More and more, "design" is about structuring the way people interact with the world around them.
But let's get into Sato's insights into creative thinking, and how to develop it. The first part of his book is structured around seven suggestions for developing the creative mind. I'll list them here, and dive into the first three, saving the next four for a later post.
Developing the Creative Mind
1. Are your assumptions correct? - Questioning as the starting point of creativity.
2. Listen to what people say. - The power of the interview to elicit your client's true feelings.
3. When worried or confused, try writing down your thoughts. - Giving order to your feelings.
4. Cultivate the habit of mitate. - Communicating the essence through analogy.
5. Draw your work. - Visuals can communicate more powerfully than words.
6. The search engine of memory. - Tag the things that capture your attention.
7. Capture the heart through presentation. - Moving from persuasion to empathy.
1. Are your assumptions correct? - Questioning is the starting point of creativity.
"There are many ways to develop the creative mind - not just one - but the most important is embracing the question: Are things right the way they are?" You can't expect dynamic change without questioning the assumptions of past practice and common wisdom. Embarking upon any endeavor without first examining the assumptions can lead you far from the mark. At the same, time, questioning does not necessarily mean always negating the way things are or creating change for change's sake. Making an effort to calmly examine things from different angles is a good way to start the creative thinking process. If you feel something is not quite right but aren't confident enough to start a public debate, Sato suggests starting by privately questioning the way things are with colleagues. You may find agreement, or you may find another opinion that broadens your perspective.
Sato mentions a few historical figures who questioned the status quo - such as Edison and Galileo. To bring the idea closer to home, however, I can think of one example that stands out in my own career. Several years ago, a Japanese client asked for my agency's help in launching a portable photo printer. He came into the meeting with a product positioning firmly in his mind: He wanted to call it the "living-room printer." This was obviously not right, but contradicting him was not going to work. So we decided to do some low-budget research by contacting current owners of some of the company's other products and inviting them in for a product demonstration over lunch. The resounding reaction was that it was like having your own photo lab, and since it printed in 85 seconds, we suggested calling it the "85 second photo lab." After showing our client video of the group and a few illustrations of a neon sign reminscent of the traditional "one hour photo lab," we were able to convince him. The result was one of the most fun and effective campaigns I have been associated with, and while that doesn't happen every day, it does prove it is possible. In a later post, I'll show how Sato used this principle to fundamentally refashion a Japanese clothing retailer's business model.
2. Listen to what people say. - The power of the interview to elicity your client's true feelings.
Communication skills are essential to any work, but because most of the time we communicate without being fully conscious of it, it may be difficult to understand how we can improve. Sato breaks his method down into four simple principles:
- Listen carefully to what others say.
- Try to grasp the intention behind their words.
- Carefully order your own thoughts.
- Communicate in a way that's easy to understand.
As Sato concedes, this is all completely common-sense, but these basics are actually hard to put into practice. We must try to be more mindful about how we communicate.
The first skill to develop is that of accurately listening to what the other person is trying to say, as a doctor or counselor would. Too often we enter into business discussions seeking to communicate our own point of view, so that even if we understand what our client is saying on the surface, the effect is a one-way conversation. A more productive way of communicating with your client is to take a stance of aggressively drawing out their thoughts. Sato likes to compare opening meetings with clients to performing a medical consultation. By calmly listening to your client's concerns, you slowly surface various problems and identify core elements.
Sato calls this a process of "turning thoughts into information." You need to make an active effort to make your client express his thoughts in words. Again, this sounds like utter common sense, but what I love about Sato's writing is his relentless focus on the fundamental concepts we tend to ignore.This attitude reminds me of a conversation I had with a former head of PR for several major companies, who told me he saw his job as "interrogating CEOs until they confessed a strategy." Here's a more elegant way of putting it by Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design, from Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen:
When sketching for a client, it's important to listen to what they say, but it's more important to identify the intent of what they didn't say. - Nancy Duarte
Once you think you have a firm understanding of your client's real issues, Sato recommends restating them in different words. "So what you're aiming for is X." Or, "in other words, this is what you want to achieve." This is where "ordering your thoughts" and "communicating in a way that's easy to understand" come into play. If you're off the mark, the next step is to ask how. Ideally, after a few rounds of question-and-answer, you should succeed in closing any gap in undertanding.
However, there may be cases when you just can't bring things into focus. If you run into that problem, rather than walking away and hoping you'll come up with an acceptable solution, Sato suggests it is better in the long run to take a more radical approach. Recognize that you seem to be having trouble reaching agreement on the goals of the project and suggest looking at the basic business issues from square one - in essence, starting over. Taking care to show respect for your client and making him understand that the success of the project is paramount in your mind, you can even recommend suspending the project for a few days while you both think things over. The idea might surprise your clients, but hopefully it will shock them into reexamining their goals.
One of the perceptive insights that guides Sato's philosophy is that it's just incredibly difficult to understand what other people are thinking and what their words really mean. I can think of several times earlier in my career when a client asked me to produce "concepts" and I later wished I had asked what exactly they meant by "concept." Making the extra effort to play the role of a doctor aggressively trying to identify the symptoms behind a patient's complaints might well save the pain of a botched operation.
3. When worried or confused, try writing down your thoughts. - Giving order to your feelings.
Sato frequently reflects on periods of doubt and uncertainty during the formative years in which he graduated from art school and started work in corporate advertising, and how he found a way of working through his problems by writing them down. When we are emotionally worked up about something, our thoughts tend to be confused and somewhat undefined. Getting into the habit of arranging these thoughts into words helps move them from the level of abstraction and into the realm of logic.
Writing down whatever thoughts come to us makes our feelings visible. It helps to unburden the mind, like dumping out the contents of your bag. While you can start with simple words and phrases, Sato recommends asking yourself some questions to stimulate problem-solving. Just as when interviewing a client, going through several rounds of questions and answers can help to zero in on the underlying issues.
Here's an example, adapted from an illustration in the book:
You can look at this as an extension of the principle of "Listening to what people say." Except you're listening to yourself! In that sense, the usefulness of writing down our thoughts underscores the importance of two habits to Sato's approach to creative thinking:
- Ask questions.
- Turn thoughts into information.
Questioning assumptions. Questioning others. Questioning yourself. Asking questions leads to better information. Sato Kashiwa's approach to creative thinking is really about taking steps to ensure you're communicating effectively and working with the best information. Only then can you come up with creative solutions. In my next few posts, you'll see how this applies to the rest of his principles, and to his work.
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