Ideally has just turned three! We’ve made it past the precarious newborn phase and the petulant tantrums of the terrible twos (thankfully, not many) and are now entering into a new level of maturity. Which got me thinking... Whilst I’m keen to encourage my clients to be thoughtful about their ideas and their creative processes, it’s important to keep the child-like, playful aspect of creativity which allow us to find and explore possibilities. In other words, to get them cr

Creativity is notoriously hard to pin down. In fact its mysterious, ethereal nature is the very thing that drives it and makes it valuable. But for those of us in the business of ideas it sometimes helps to have a framework by which to try to understand creativity (even if it fully evades totally logical rationale), so that we can get the best out of it. I’ve been in the media business my whole professional life. Now two years of running a creativity strategy consultancy,

“Television needs to innovate, not regurgitate.” So said Liz Warner, a top TV exec, recently in a speech. As Broadcast, the industry rag reported: “Warner used her Bafta Television Lecture to call on the industry to snap out of its creative lethargy and recognise the “creative chasm” that has appeared in its failure to respond to the digital age”. The vital issues that Warner raises of connecting with young audiences and keeping the broadcast television alive and well aside,

Earlier this year I was really pleased to welcome Sam and Carla from Bath Spa University as Ideally’s first interns. But what does it mean to be a Junior Strategist – and what even is a creative strategy consultancy? And how can a second year media & communications or psychology & business studies student both learn from and contribute to a one-person start-up? Over to the interns themselves to explain… Sam says… On my first day at Ideally in January this year, my fellow int

Why Twitter may have reached its ceiling of users - and what that says about how the medium dictates the message. Sometimes, honesty isn’t the best policy. Just ask Twitter. In June 2015, after admitting that its user growth rate was slower than predicated, the Chief Exec ended up resigning the following day and just six weeks later share prices were at their lowest level in a year. And this, despite reporting revenues and earnings for the second quarter that were better t

The great and the good might acknowledge that creativity is necessary for the market to flourish - but is the market necessary for creativity to thrive? The current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has gained quite a reputation for speaking into contemporary social issues and not just sticking to the more traditional topics of faith and spirituality. Whilst some think this is beyond his remit, I’m of the opinion that a) the church should have a point of view on how we l

This post was reproduced as an article in Broadcast on 13 March 2015 Far from killing ideas, strategic thinking and carefully-chosen stimulus can generate the conditions which allow creativity to flourish. And stay human. In his recent acceptance speech for a BAFTA Fellowship, maverick film director Mike Leigh expounded the virtues of truly independent film-making. Proud and fiercely defensive of this “offbeat, alternative, original, idiosyncratic, personal kind of popular c

How artistic expression and appreciation is a human need, to nurture both individuals and communities - and means we are all creative. When I first watched Dead Poet's Society back in 1989 as a teenager, most of the wisdom of Robin Williams’ character, John Keating, was totally lost on me. But following the tragic death of the actor in August 2014, social media was awash with genuinely inspiring quotations from the man himself as well as from his best-known performances. On