Why you should write a proper letter.

Emails, you don’t need me to tell you, are great. And there’s no fighting progress.

However, if you need to make your point clearly, don’t ignore one of the best tools in the book: a pen, paper, an envelope and a stamp.

Why?

1. Nobody has ever, knowingly, ignored a hand-written envelope. This shouts ‘this is personal and aimed at you and nobody else’. Try that with an email and the spam blocker will possibly intervene.

2. Eloquent writing is on the decline. Write well and you will be seen as rather unusual and worth reading about.

3. Because nobody writes letters any more, you will have been seen as having made a special effort. You almost certainly won’t get a written reply but it’s highly unlikely that, if your letter is good, it will be binned.

4. A letter doesn’t mean abandoning the digital age. You can refer to a URL or email address using a pen perfectly well.

Can you think of any other things a proper letter can do that ‘digital’ can’t?

Did you get an ‘irrelevant’ postcard? It’s worth £100.

Philip is on holiday at the moment but he’s been sending some postcards to selected people in businesses he’s interested in. Maybe you received one of them.

If so, here’s what it’s all about.

The postcard sent to you was selected at random. The image on the front is notable in some way but it has no obvious relevance to what your business does. However, that image can be used as visual stimulus in a Lateral Thinking workshop. It could potentially lead to the best idea your business has ever had.

One of the tools of Lateral Thinking – whether done in a conventional workshop or in one of our new Ambulando sessions – is ‘random input’.

Random input is a way to provoke a new idea. You focus on the random image and try to notice things that could be useful to create a commercially viable concept for your company. This search for a connection or an analogy could either provoke you to think of a new way to crack an existing issue or help you create something totally new.

Your commercial issue (let’s say ‘inventing a new toothpaste brand name’) and the picture of, say, a frog, seem unconnected. But your brain will force a connection if you think hard enough. (Maybe the new toothpaste could be called ‘Prince’. You get the idea?)

Keep your postcard and wait for a personal letter from Philip upon his return – week commencing 23rd August. This will be your invitation to a Lateral Thinking session in your office and your postcard will count as a £100 discount.

Why do we need new ways of thinking?

Posted by Philip Morley.

In marketing, as in life, there are moments when things change so much, we need to look for fresh ways of meeting challenges.

As far as I know, there’s no marketing book or qualification aimed at businesses or brands faced with the challenge of an international banking collapse.

And competition is increasing. It’s China’s Year of Innovation. Patent applications are up 30% this year. Which, unless you’re reading this in China, is quite alarming.

What are we going to do?

We’re going to have to think our way out of this. Intellectual property will be the most valuable commodity in the long run.

We need to encourage enterprise and originality. But, before that, we need to show people how to think differently.

Music – now an option in our creative workshops.

Posted by Philip Morley.

Over the past few months we’ve been experimenting with different forms of creating random input. Random input is key to Lateral Thinking (a term invented by Edward de Bono) and uses ‘things’ plucked from nowhere to provoke new thinking.

Sounds crazy but it works.

Well, we’ve been noticing that good musical lyrics are laden with concepts and ideas that can act as a very pleasurable random input.

Musical tastes vary but this doesn’t matter. It can actually help if you don’t like the music sometimes. What’s important is the concepts contained within the lyric.

We’ve compiled a playlist which we now bring along to all creative workshops. We believe that each one of these tracks contains numerous concepts that can be explored.

The idea is you listen once and you jot down the things that catch your ear.

Here are some of the things that jump out from Heroes by David Bowie. These are the things that I spotted. There are things other people would hear that I’ve missed. This isn’t really important.

1. Monarchy – kings, queens.

2. Repulsion – maybe some force field or magnetic push.

3. Diary, calendar, watch.

4. Conflict, soldier, war, struggle.

5. Drink, alcoholism.

6. Attraction, love, glue.

7. Dolphin, swim.

Just over six minutes. One listen. Not much concentration. But some rich concepts to explore – all we need now is a discussion topic so that these apparently irrelevant stimuli can have a real purpose.

Lyrics – what a brilliant random input.

Posted by Philip Morley.

Some people believe that playing music in the background whilst working is a distraction. At least, certain kinds of music.

I agree. And that’s why it’s good.

Listen carefully and you’ll notice – providing that you listen to good lyrics – that there are hundreds of random inputs (useful for Lateral Thinking) in every song.

I just listened to an old Kate Bush track and had to stop writing – I couldn’t keep up with the number of concepts I was being exposed to. More on this later.

Learning from apparent irrelevance.

Posted by Philip Morley

Try this.

Think of someone who does something different. And ask yourself if there’s a way that they work that could improve the way you do things.

Could be your butcher. Or your doctor. In my case it was my dentist.

As a creative person I’m used to being governed by the deadline. The deadline is king. If you need your work on Friday and today is Monday, your work will be done in between Monday and Friday.

One day, whilst having a root canal done, I thought ‘how could I be more like my dentist?’ with regards to workflow.

The result was what I call the Dental Planner, which I use to this day. To people not in the creative industries it will seem like the bleeding obvious but it’s a diary into which you plan when to do the work, not simply a calendar of deadlines. This is not the usual way of doing things.

What sparked this?

The dentist knows you are coming and knows what needs doing. He also knows how long it will take. When you arrive, he is not interrupted and he has allowed time for you to ask questions. You finish on time and you are given a large bill. There are no surprises.

Random input doesn’t always mean random output.

A while ago we ran a workshop using one of Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking techniques: random input.

The workshop was held at a convention for all British zoo-keepers and those who attended were involved in marketing. They wanted some new marketing ideas that would make zoos more popular and had, to a greater or lesser extent, become frustrated by the usual response from their agencies.

Random input can take many forms but in this case we asked those taking part to pick a place – the most ridiculous being ‘motorway service station toilets’.

Laughable though this suggestion was, it provoked an idea storm, with over twenty-five ideas being deemed good enough for commercial examination in just under ten minutes.

For example: toilets in service stations smell. And there are a variety of smells in a zoo. Why don’t we tell visitors why different parts of the zoo smell the way they do? Can’t we do a scratch and sniff card to send to all schools to encourage children to experience the smells of a zoo?

You get the idea.

The results of this workshop were concrete, commercial and totally sensible. They were totally logical in hindsight, even though random input sounded silly to begin with.

In a speech on TED, Steve Jobs uses a very valid and appropriate expression to demonstrate how sometimes the path seems strange but the destination just makes sense: “you can only connect the dots looking backwards”.

Random input provokes us to create those dots.

Further Ambulando trials at Childerley Hall, Cambridge.

Today’s Ambulando saw Philip walk for approximately three hours across the Childerley estate near Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire.

The purpose of this latest trial was to bench-test (or maybe track-test) the typical structure of a half-day course. Notably, to finalise the timings for creative pauses and the introduction of Jolt flashcards.

It was also a chance to test the performance of the new iPhone 4, which is now being used as the single digital device on Ambulandos – replacing dictaphones and cameras.

Maybe you should try to be more Plinky.

Plinky is based on a similar idea to Taunt and Jolt – sometimes you need a push.

It’s a lovely site dedicated to asking you to answer a prompt question in an imaginative way – to break down writers’ block.

NEW ‘Taunt’ flashcards, via iPhone for Ambulando.

Sometimes, particularly when your thinking is getting caught in the quick drying cement, you need provocation to get your brain moving.

With Ambulando, visual stimulation can come either from the natural world or via our ‘Jolt’ flashcards. But we now have new verbal stimuli, designed to elicit a response.

Our new ‘Taunt’ iPhone flashcards are, as the name suggests, there to provoke a comeback. They are almost always ridiculous sounding but they work with real life challenges.

Taunt is based on an Edward de Bono technique but inspired by the excellent Observation Deck, a book and pack of flashcards some top writers use to combat writers’ block.