Idea generation has never been an exact science. Think about it. How do you come up with a great idea? The answer, in reality is sometimes with great difficulty and sometimes, for an unknown reason, with surprising ease. Like I said, it’s never been a science and that’s the way it should be.

I’ve worked within the creative industry for quite a few years now and my mum still can’t understand exactly what it is I do. "I’m an Art Director Mum. I’m a Creative Director Mum." It seems clear that no matter how simply I try to put it and how intently she listens the whole ‘creative thing’ is a bit of a mystery to some people.

We all cope with developing our ideas in different ways. For some it involves looking at as much material for inspiration as they can. Others prefer to lock themselves away and stare into space. I know someone who runs for his ideas. Literally, the process of running helps him focus his mind in a way that delivers interesting, creative thoughts. Mine often come to me while driving in the car. The point I’m making here is we all have our own different ways of developing our creative thoughts.

The old agency model used to rely on putting teams of people together (usually based around a Copywriter and Art Director) that way you get the might of the pen and the drama of the visual working together right? Makes perfect sense and utilising this model has served the creative industry well over the years.

However, our world is changing and fragmenting so quickly now that creative businesses are exploring and developing new models for idea generation that take into consideration the complexity that communication is going through at the moment.

Christoph Becker our CCO has been instrumental in developing and driving through our business a new way of developing our thought processes and finding ways to generate ideas that are relevant, simple and impactful. We call it the Ignition Process. This process is designed to utilise thinking from every discipline within the agency structure. So instead of idea generation being owned purely by the Art Director and Writer, now it’s developed by Planners, Designers, PR experts, Digital Programmers, Strategic people and yes, Art Directors and Writers too. When you have such a wide range of expertise, viewpoints and disciplines all taking responsibility for idea generation you end up with an array of exciting and interesting thought.

Of course all these people need parameters and a channel for their thinking in order to ensure that nothing gets wasted or lost by not being relevant, strategic or focused. To spark the thinking process and ensure collective relevance we all work around a single expression of thought we call The Ignition Point. This is a distillation of all the strategic planning, market analysis and client challenge. Christoph Becker describes the Ignition Point as a spring board. Something that propels all that strategy to somewhere interesting, exciting and ‘Igniting’. It holds all the creative ideas together uniting them across any discipline and provides the kind of impetus that inspires creative thought.

There is one other ingredient within our Ignition Process that is a big shift in attitude and process. That is the move from ‘directing’ the creative process to one of ‘curating’ it. Curation is very different to direction. Curation makes complete sense when you consider a multi-discipline approach to idea generation. Curation is about organisation, identification and collection, rather than simply providing direction. It’s more collaborative, more focused and much, much more rewarding.

CONSIDERING TODAY’S INCREASING FRAGMENTATION OF COMMUNICATION GENERALLY IT MAKES TOTAL SENSE TO WORK IN THIS WAY

Gone are the days when we develop a great idea and think about how it can flex into different channels like digital or PR. Now when ideas come flooding out of the agency we get thinking that has been conceived for the digital space by digital people, or the PR space by-yes you guessed it-PR people. It’s pretty unsurprising then that our thinking works brilliantly within these spaces simply because the ideas have come from people who are passionate, committed and very knowledgeable about their own area of expertise. It’s fair to say working this way has changed us (for the better I’m happy to say). It’s made us more open, it’s made us explore things we maybe wouldn’t have done before. It’s also made us a more interesting place to work I believe. Less hierarchical and more inclusive. So here’s to being open to changing the way we do things and long may curation live.

I’ll be having Sunday dinner back home soon. Mum will probably do her usual roast chicken and I will probably try explaining "I’m a curator Mum".