by John Brooker | Mar 20, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 80 If you want to have more creative ideas, you need to change your signals and divert other trains of thought through your brain station “There are trains that don’t come by again or ones that don’t even stop at the right station.” Juande Ramos, Former Coach of Tottenham FC, discussing his reasons for joining the club. Do you need to change your signals? We were on holiday in Venice, a perfect place I thought, to get creative ideas for a Gorilla article. Certainly there were catalysts; the picture on my mobile telephone changing from the Houses of Parliament to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as I switched it on in Venice airport (what a lovely idea!); the way the Venetians use the water for everything (e.g. collecting the rubbish); the absence of modern buildings; the speed of the vaporetti (water buses) helping to destroy the foundations of buildings the Venetians are trying to save. I had so many ideas they were all running round in my head until my wife bought me a wonderful blank paged notebook (Moleskine brand) and I sat on a train from Venice to Padova and began sketching the ideas in a radiant map. As I mapped I thought how maps are remniscent of railway junctions, which set me thinking about metaphors for creative thinking and so I had yet another idea! Information bombards us all the time through our senses and the brain filters out the information we don’t need at that time so we don’t go crazy. To use the railway metaphor, think of information like...
by John Brooker | Jan 27, 2012 | Facilitate meetings
YES! AND… Facilitate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla # 27 Metaphors are a great tool for transformation and innovation. Are you using metaphors to their full power? “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.” Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883 – 1955) Spanish philosopher “Tim, you’ve changed. You’re caring. Giving. You’re… loving. And you’ve got a termite coming out of your ear.” TV Programme Home Improvement; script We were driving round the Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa, when our ranger stopped at a termite hill. “This one is dead” she remarked. “The aardvark (anteater) has burrowed in to feed on the termites and has rooted out the queen along with the others. Without the queen, the colony dies within weeks.” As we drove on I considered that if the aardvark had been brighter, he could have had an endless supply of food, as the queen produces twenty thousand eggs a DAY. I wondered too if we couldn’t use this as a metaphor for some organisational interventions. In a bid to capture the most “termites”, e.g. obtain greater productivity, from the “termite hill” i.e. the organisation, the “aardvark” i.e. management, destroys the “queen” that sustained it, e.g. its creative staff? Having pondered that, I got on with my holiday! So Metaphors are a powerful way to view a situation. Zoltan Kovecses explains in his book (“Metaphors. A Practical Introduction”) that the metaphor has a target (e.g. the organisation) and a source (e.g. the termite hill). You compare the characteristics of the source (e.g. aardvark eats queen) with the characteristics of the target to visualise the target, (I’ll let you imagine your...
