Jolt: The Currency of Ideas
March 18, 2011
A lot of creative agencies believe they are in the idea business. Ideas are currency – that much is true. But creative agency business is about results.
Ideas are constantly generated in infinite numbers. What makes an idea valuable is its outcome. How will your idea, better than any other yet conceived, best solve client problems?
Once a week, we put a bounty on good ideas. Part of our weekly staff meeting is dedicated to individual team members sharing innovative ideas that will drive value for our company and our clients. Once a month, the entire staff votes on the best idea and the winning presenter gets cash.
Cash for creativity? Why not? We are trained from a young age to think of ideas as loose, floating thoughts that have no inherent value. At VIVA we change that paradigm, so that our talent is consistently thinking of ideas – and especially great ideas – as valuable.
This attitude changes our entire ideation process. First, we don’t call it ideation. Ideation is a lame buzzword. It sounds like surgery. It doesn’t do justice to the energetic, passionate, and intense process of coming up with new ideas.
At VIVA we call it Jolting. The process of forming innovative ideas that solve client problems requires an influx of energy, attention, and focus from people who challenge established patterns of thinking. This energy is the Jolt.
Our brains are conditioned to be storage and retrieval systems, preferring patterns and repetition. We easily accept new ideas that are similar to old ideas because they comfortably “fit” into pre-existing formulas. Truly new ideas sometime don’t compute at all. They often don’t make sense. Sometime innovations are discovered by “accidental” crossing of paradigms, combining things that just don’t belong together.
In our Jolts we deliberately mix up, stir up, and dream up new solutions that address real problems, often using illogical techniques to generate logical solutions. It’s the only way to discover unique, original, fresh, and leading edge ideas that realize intended outcomes.
Here’s how it works: a project leader calls for a Jolt whenever, wherever it is needed. At VIVA, Jolts happen at all times, scheduled or unscheduled, at a conference table, on the floor, in the kitchen – it doesn’t matter. The project leader pulls in people from different departments, creative thinking is everyone’s job.
The Jolt itself is an unstructured and safe environment that encourages creative problem solving. We leave judgment at the door – skepticism and nay-saying are banned. Jolts are about divergent thinking with a goal to generate as many ideas as possible in the timeframe available – sometimes minutes, sometimes hours.
When the Jolt is done, we finally invite reality to the party. Then we begin the process of analysis and evaluation – which we call the Bolt. Bolting is the process of bolting down the best ideas and making them workable and real.
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