Creativity and Imagination: Gregg Fraley (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Gregg Fraley’s talk titled “Creativity and Imagination” at TEDxStormont conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Intriguing World of Imagination

It’s like one of those exercises, isn’t it? This little red spot here. It is so amazing to be back in Belfast and be invited to speak at this incredible event. So, thank you very much for having me. Just another crazy American here to tell you something.

What I’m going to talk about is how to use your imagination. Everybody says use your imagination, but does anyone ever explain how you might do it? So let’s have a wee flight of fancy, if you please. And I’d like you to imagine the following. Imagine yourself sliding down a huge, half-a-mile slide. You’re completely naked. And you’re sliding into a huge vat of purple Jell-O. You there?

All right, so you’re landing in the Jell-O and you realize, to your horror, that you’re in a Salvador Dali painting. And you’re the clock, you know, the one that bends over the edge of the table. And you realize that you have to get out of the Salvador Dali painting or you’re in big trouble. And you’re looking around for a way to get out of the painting and you see a 300-pound taxi driver with one eye over there with a pink tutu. And he’s waving you over to his taxi. And he’s a pretty scary looking guy, but it’s your way out of the painting, so off you go.

So you get in the cab and he’s driving you out of the painting. And he’s eating a 50-pound pickle shaped like a rugby ball. And you’re not worried about that so much, but what you are worried about is that he’s texting while he’s driving.

So he drives you up to this spot and he points out the window wordlessly.

And on the sidewalk is a large plastic trash bag with yellow handles. You know those drawstrings on the newfangled garbage bags? And you see the drawstrings come open and close and open and close. And it’s your subconscious.

The Power of Creativity

Your subconscious is telling you that there has to be something about that that might be useful to you in some real-world challenge that you have. Let me get to a slide here. So that’s what you’ve been imagining. And so keep that image of the trash bag in mind and those handles. And we’ll come back to that in a minute.

When I first heard about this conference, they said the theme is ‘Imagine.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, what a great opportunity to talk about imagination.’ Because imagination is the working stuff of creativity. And creativity is the bridge to innovation. And that’s what we all want. Whether it’s for business or whether it’s for our personal lives. And I thought immediately also of the song, John Lennon’s famous song. One of my favorite songs. It’s so amazingly compelling. But there’s something about that song that I have to take issue with. And that’s the whole idea of ‘It’s easy if you try.’

Yeah, it’s easy to imagine things when we’re just having a bit of fun and thinking of 300-pound tutu-wearing, pickle-eating, texting cab drivers. That’s easy. But what about when we’re at work or we’re at home or we’re in some situation and it’s really a scary situation? It’s a real-world hairy problem, a really complex, difficult problem that gives you nothing but fear, anxiety, and doubt. That’s when imagination is not easy at all.

Exploring Imagination Techniques

And what I want to try to do today is talk to you about a couple of concepts. One is a concept called scaffolding. Another is a concept called mashing up. But first, I want you to look at Fraley’s hipster quadrangle, quadrant scheme, related to how people imagine or don’t imagine. So it’s basically two axes. One is intention or usage of imagination. And the other is awareness of it. Because after all, we all imagine every single day.

Everybody in this room has at least 65,000 thoughts a day. Many of them are imaginative thoughts that might have something to do with solving problems in your life. If you’re drinking cappuccino or espresso, you probably have 80,000 thoughts a day. If you’re in the middle of a divorce, it might be 100,000. But nonetheless, you have a lot of thoughts.

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And so where do you fit in Fraley’s hipster quadrangle? Are you a zombie? A zombie is a person who is completely unaware of the imaginative thoughts that are floating through their brains and makes no active use of imagination. Never asks their own mind for answers, for images, for ideas to help them with something. We should pray for these people because they need help. If you lead people like this, one way to kick them out of that quadrant into maybe the dreamer quadrant or the manager quadrant is to simply ask them to use their imagination. “Hey, Bob, come up with five more ideas. Use your imagination. Come up with five more options on that challenge we’re working through.” And who knows? Maybe you can move them along.

Dreamers are wonderful people. Perhaps I am one of those much of the time. I have a very easy time imagining things, and I enjoy imagining things, and I’m very aware of the imagination that I have. And I notice things. Sometimes I even write them down. And by the way, if you want to be a more effective imagineer, one of the things that you can do is simply write your ideas and imagination down on paper in a notebook. That will take you leaps and bounds farther than most folks.

The problem with dreamers is dreamers don’t take action. They might notice what’s happening in their imagination, but they don’t actively take action on those things, nor do they ask their imagination for specific images and ideas related to a specific challenge.

Managers do ask themselves for answers for particular challenges. But because they’re not as aware of their imaginative stream, they’re not as aware of their subconscious, they’re not as centered, they don’t tend to have very visionary ideas. And I might change this terminology over time and change the word manager to more like gang leader or gangster, because that’s what a street gang leader is, a thug with a few ideas that they’re taking action on that hasn’t thought through things enough.

The ideal place to be is the leader quadrant. That’s someone who’s aware of their imagination, writes things down, asks their imagination for more and better ideas all the time, and takes action on them. Now I’m going to define leader broadly. A leader can be a mother of a family. A leader can be a person who works for themselves. After all, we do have to lead ourselves to better potentials, as Jim Eastwood said. So that’s the hipster quadrangle.

Navigating Through Imagination to Innovation

Here’s the concept I would like to convey to you today, and it’s called scaffolding. So if you’re in that place of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, what do you do? Well, the first thing you do, the first level, if you will, of the scaffold, and scaffolding up to imaginative solutions, is simply to ask your mind for images, ideas, and fragments, poems, whatever comes to you in your imagination, ask.

Now sometimes you ask and nothing comes because you’re so wound down in fear, uncertainty, and doubt. So the advice then is to try, the next layer, if you will, up, is to try to relax.

Einstein, one of the foremost thinkers of the last 150 years, easily, spent a lot of time doing two things: fiddling, or violining, is that a word? And walking in the woods. And he would walk in the woods and think, and think, and think, and think about how the world worked.

And so, he incubated for about 10 years while he was a patent clerk in Switzerland, and then of course, 10 years of thinking, and he changed the world.

The Genius of Relaxation and Innovation

Thomas Edison was a great relaxer. He would lay down on a couch in his laboratory with a copper ball in his hand, and he would put himself into that trance that happens just before you go to sleep, asking his mind for images related to challenges in his lab. And he would drift off, and he would see these images floating through his head, and then when he sort of tipped over into sleep, he would drop the ball on the floor, it would wake him up, and then he would get up and he would write things down.

And that’s how he tapped into his imagination. So, relaxation is huge. What is it for you? Is it walking? Is it playing guitar? Is it having a few beers with friends? Having more than a few beers with friends? Whatever it is for you, you should do it more, and that will put yourself into an imaginative state.

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The Magic of Mashups

Now, the last technique is, in my mind, a power tool, if you will, for innovation and for the use of imagination to come up with solutions, and it’s called mashups. Mashups are magic, in my opinion. Mashups are basically conceptual blends of two very different concepts. Sometimes, when you blend two things that have never been connected before, you create something very, very new and innovative, and you can do it deliberately.

The reason I wore the headset today is because I have a Sony Walkman in my pocket. So, we’re going to do the old-fashioned audio tape, cassette, Sony Walkman, right? We’re going to do a mashup of this concept, or what this embodies in this Sony Walkman, with another challenge that I’m going to talk about in a second. But when I thought about this object, this Sony Walkman, I thought of a lot of different things, and that’s what’s depicted on my graphic.

Bridging Imagination with Community Engagement

There are those old cassette tapes and making mixtapes, and when I started thinking of mixtapes, I was sort of thinking about old girlfriends that I made mixtapes for, and I thought of the disco era and roller skates, and I thought of, well, the Walkman, or pardon me, the iPod, because that’s what succeeded this as the predominant mobile music instrument or system in the marketplace.

And that thinking had me thinking about change. So those were the images that came to mind in my imagination, which I wrote down when I thought about the first concept in our mashup example. So, I have a challenge. I live in a small community in Michigan called Three Oaks, Michigan. Three Oaks, Michigan is a very small village. It’s 2,000 people, mostly agricultural area. It’s close to Lake Michigan but not close enough to be a beach community, so it’s near a tourist area, and there’s a few tourist things that are starting to bud up in Three Oaks, including a brand-new fine art museum.

A wealthy donor from Chicago, who used to come to Three Oaks for vacations in the summer when he was a kid, donated an incredibly terrific fine art collection to the Three Oaks Museum. Now here’s the thing, nobody knows about the museum, nobody knows about the collection, and the museum has the collection, but they don’t have any money for marketing. So it’s a very, very low-budget operation, but if we can just get people to the museum to enjoy this fine art, it would be a wonderful thing.

So, I’m mashing up my Sony Walkman and this challenge. There’s the depiction, and I’m looking for ideas. Now, ideas don’t always come completely wrapped up in a bow.

Unlocking Imagination through Visualization

When you ask your imagination for ideas, they don’t come up with a nice one-page write-up, two-paragraph concept of a particular well-fleshed-out idea. What your mind, your subconscious usually provides you are just images, and sometimes you have no idea what they mean. For instance, my mind popped in a bicycle, and so what I’m going to do is show you these images and talk about the ideas that I sort of came up with as a result of getting them.

So, bicycles. Okay, it reminded me that Three Oaks is in a place where there’s a bike tour, and there’s a bike race every fall. So, a lot of bicyclists come through Three Oaks, get coffee, buy a croissant or whatever, and then just keep pedaling through town and up the road. So I thought, okay, maybe the museum could market itself in a small way to all the bike shops in Chicago and Gary and South Bend and the larger towns around Three Oaks.

Put a brochure in the bike shops, and when the bicyclists get to the Three Oaks Fine Art Museum, TOFA as we call it, provide them with some slippers to wear so they don’t have to wear their clunky bicycle shoes. So, there were some ideas.

The second thing that popped into my head was a giant pair of headsets, bigger than a person. And I thought, hmm, what does this mean? Well, maybe it’s that we’re not listening to the local community about what this museum means to them. Maybe we’re not listening to the customers that we do have. Maybe if we do a survey idea, we’ll learn more about what we should be doing to publicize the museum.

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The next image that came into my head was the same big headset, but it was on a billboard. And the idea for this came very quickly. “Wow, we should be doing a billboard on 994, which is only two miles away and has millions of people going by all the time.” So, that’s a pretty good idea. And then I had a further idea that we could partner with a distillery that just opened up and has some marketing money, and we could maybe do a joint effort on the billboard.

An old-fashioned radio came into my head, and I thought, okay, radio. We can’t do radio spots. It’s too expensive. But radio stations in the United States are required to do public service announcements. So, we’ll make up a public service announcement and distribute it to radio stations around our catchment area. The Pinterest logo came to mind, and I thought, what do we do with this? I still don’t know. Sometimes that happens.

So, I move along. “Hey, even the idea man isn’t perfect.” So, I had this wacky image of a band, but the band was holding different fine art paintings, different styles. One had a Van Gogh, one had a Dali, one had etc. And I thought, okay, so bands, music, genres, maybe we could invite, maybe we could have a weekly concert. And one week it could be bluegrass music, the next week it could be country, the next week it could be pop, the next week it could be blues. And that would be a way to draw people in with concerts.

And then the craziest image that occurred to me was the old cassette tape from the Sony. And the audio tape had spilled out, which happened to those tapes back in the day. You spend hours getting it back in. But I thought, “Wait a minute.” What does that mean when it’s superimposed over the map like that? This is what came up in my head. And I thought, well, huh. We really need to be talking to the people in Chicago, because there’s millions of people there. And we should be talking to the people in Gary, Indiana. We should be talking to the people in South Bend and farther east in Detroit.

And I thought, well, okay. Maybe we invite fine artists from each of those cities, really popular fine artists, to come and do an ancillary display at the TOFA Museum. And then we could build weekend trips from those areas and partner with bed and breakfast hotels in Three Oaks. So, those were some of the ideas I came up with.

Now we’re coming back full circle to the imagery that we started with. So, you see this trash bag. Now, I’d like everyone to reach under their seat right now. And you’ll find a small envelope, a small brown envelope. Now, I’m gifting each and every one of you in this audience with a condom. But now, what you’ll notice about this condom when you use it later, or maybe you’ll use it later, is that it is a very innovative new condom.

And the condoms have been the same for how many years, 40 years, 50 years? This condom has drawstrings. Did you know that 30% of condoms are put on wrong? And this addresses that challenge. And it saves a lot of problems, let me tell you. Now, I want you to take that condom home and do your own mash-up with it, with one of your challenges. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.

Ladies and gentlemen, imagination can be better for you. You can be better imagineers if you choose to be more imaginative, if you ask yourself for ideas and images, if you seek more ideas, and you put them into action. Because after all, ideas are meaningless if you don’t put them into action. Thank you so much. Good luck with your mash-up.