I want to tell you about Loonshots.

I'm fortunate enough to work in a role at IBM that trusts my leadership and gives me the autonomy to experiment with ways to push creativity. Rahul Kalia , Matt Wybrow , Ranjini Suri , Jeremy (Jez) Bassinder , Wayne Peacock , Angela Magee MCMI ChMC , amongst others, YOU have shown what progressive leadership looks like by allowing me this freedom. As a certified bookworm this means that I can actually try out some of the more experimental ideas that I read about, and one of those is LOONSHOTS.

In my opinion, one of the most significant challenges that creatives face is space and time: to think, but also to experiment and to play. Some of the world's greatest masterpieces have resulted from experimentation and play by creators who set out on a journey without knowing where it would take them. They follow a need to satisfy their sense of curiosity, or a desire to try something new and unfamiliar, or the juxtaposing of mediums and fields in a way that no one has done before.?

One of my favourite examples of this is by the English artist Damien Hirst. His work is always an attempt to push the boundaries of art and its meaning, and his work had impressed Charles Saatchi so much that he offered to pay Hirst to create whatever artwork he felt like making. Hirst had no brief, no deadline, available money and resources, and the creative traits of innovation, curiosity, and an ambition to create 'new'.

The results were a series of dead animals; sheep, cows, and sharks, cut in half and preserved in formaldehyde. Love it or hate it (and the art remains controversial), I think we can agree that Hirst's concepts are novel, unique, and highly unlikely ever to have been created if the artist had been filling his time with prescriptive commissions and briefs. In addition to that, he had various problems when making some of the pieces; for example,?The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living?is a tiger shark that floats in formaldehyde in a giant glass container, said to have sold for at least $8m. When Hirst first displayed the piece, it hadn't been preserved with the right balance of chemicals and, over time, began to decay and make the tank's water murky. This version was replaced by a brand-new shark in a brand-new solution of formaldehyde. Hirst had to experience this failure rather than learn from others before him – because, of course, there was no one. Luckily for Hirst, he was in a position where failure did not mean failure. In other words, he also had permission to fail.

Permission. To. Fail.

Of course, venturing into an experimental unknown does not guarantee great results – far from it – but the key takeaway is that we?learn?from the journey. We find things that don't work and some unexpected things that do. We hone our skills or become capable in new ones, and these skills and lessons are essential for our growth.?

So back to the problem: in our jobs at least, this space for experimentation and play is rarely a part of our process. We receive the brief, we get given a deadline, and we have a limited budget. There is no room for play within that iron triangle and little room for mistakes. In my experience, this even applies to those in the 'creative' part of businesses. These are the people whom we call when we need an innovative solution – but the only time we get to be creative is when we're working on someone else's briefs and deadlines! This stifles true innovation and is borne from the misconception that people are simply 'born creative' with ready-made ideas in our heads, ready to be shared upon request.?All?of us need to feed our creativity – and, in my humble opinion, it's both unfair and largely unviable to be expected to do this purely in our own time for the good of our employer.?

The solution is simple: we build in playtime to our work schedules. In Safi Bahcall 's 2019 book?Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries,?he discusses this topic at length, and after reading it, we decided to try it out in the Experiential Selling Team at IBM UK. This is the team who brings storytelling, immersive experiences, unique concepts and leading creativity to our deals. We have several squads that cover a fluctuating demand for creativity within the business, and we revisit these squads weekly to check that we have the right balance for the brief – the number of people, the right skills, no fatigue, and more. When we do this weekly exercise, we also form a small squad called 'Loonshots', usually comprised of 2 or 3 people, so about 10% of the team.?

This squad usually stays together for a week and is self-organising. Their remit is to play, to experiment, and to create, and each squad has a new brief that we agree on together. We look at technologies like AR, VR, and the Metaverse. We look at techniques like animation or 3D modelling, we try out different software like Prezi, Figma, XD, and Mural (amongst many others) to see whether we're missing anything, and we also challenge ourselves to push standard software to the limit – for example, we had a surprisingly awesome sprint seeing how far we could push the limits of PowerPoint – which is pretty far! And here's the importance of it all. At the end of the sprint:

• We have had fun, at work
• We have been let off any creative leash to experiment
• We have learned
• We playback, so that everyone has that learning
• We publish the work on our internal site to inspire anyone in the business who needs unique ideas for pitches
• We have grown our tool kit
• We have grown our armoury of creative options

When we receive a brief, we always check the 'Loonshots' work, and we offer it as a smorgasbord of potential routes for account teams. And before you think that it's yet another overhead, the economics of this are actually pretty sound. Think about it:

10% of capacity is spent constantly building up capabilities and ideas that are ready to be deployed. When a new opportunity comes in, we have a wealth of inspiration, and should we choose one of these ideas, we are ready to go, building on the foundation and skills that we have already created.?

Compare that with the usual way of doing things – a brief comes in, and we rush to get to a solution without considering all the potential options. If we decide on something new and unchartered, then the learning curve is usually steep, and often we simply don't have the time to venture down that path. If we do, we have very little room for mistakes and, therefore, a significantly increased risk of failure.?

The 10% pays off in dividends. The ideas are richer and abundant, the work is of a higher quality, risk is reduced – and, most importantly – the team gets to constantly engage in the fun part of creativity – experimentation and play.?

It may not work in every business due to the bureaucracy and economic boundaries that still exist internally in companies consultancies, however, if you?can?ringfence time for anyone in a pitch team to simply play and experiment, then you'll find yourself doing work that you love, and may have unique – even ground-breaking – results.?

Read the book. Speak to your leaders. Make a difference.