Some practical tips for being creative under time pressure

Estimated reading time 4 minutes.

When it comes to creative strategy there is nothing like that moment when you suddenly emerge from the fog and everything clicks into place. Out of the blue, you see the answer that has eluded you for days.?

The pursuit of that ‘click’ is addictive for me. The aha moment that brings an emotional payload of euphoria, coupled with relief.

We strategists are expected to be endlessly generative. We have to re-frame problems, craft brand strategies, surface fresh insights and write killer creative briefs at pace. And keep on doing it. Yet, battling against the clock isn’t always conducive to creative thinking. Like many of us, I’ve had my fair share of creative blockages in these circumstances.

There’s a science behind why it happens. Mark Beeman Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist and John Kounios Ph.D., a professor of psychology, have conducted a lot of research into the cognitive neuroscience of insight. They conclude that we are more likely to solve problems with insight if we are in a positive, relaxed mood. In contrast, anxiety has the opposite effect.

In their research they found differences in brain activity between those people who tended to solve problems with a flash of insight and those who tended to solve problems analytically.?Prior to encountering a new problem, the analytical thinkers had more brain activity over the frontal lobe – the centre of executive processing. By contrast, the brains of insight-led thinkers were more likely to be in resting-state before tackling problems.

This resting-state part of our brain (the Default Mode Network) kicks in when the mind doesn’t have anything else to do. When we allow ourselves to step away from a problem that we’ve been worrying over we actually allow our brain to carry on working on it subconsciously. That’s when it can make unexpected connections, allowing new creative solutions to emerge.?

It’s why we often get those glorious click moments when we’re in the shower, on a run or when we wake up in the morning. Our conscious mind can’t see these connections because we tend to tune out anything that seems irrelevant to what we are focusing on.

Creative breakthroughs are never easy. I describe it as a kind of pleasurable pain. If you go all-in and embrace the messy, foggy process for what it is, the satisfaction you feel when it all clicks into place is incredible.

Here are some practical tips that help me that I offer up to anyone else facing similar time-bound challenges:

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1.?Do what you can to buy yourself thinking time

Never easy I know, but unless you set some boundaries for full immersion into the challenge, you're actually going to starve your mind of the 'information oxygen' it needs. Even if it's just for 24 hours, hole up and unplug from email and other distractions so you can fully immerse yourself and do the deep work you need to do to understand the problem in the round.

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2. Try not self-censor at this point

In this immersive phase, when you are probably focused on desk research due to time constraints, you are filling your mind with all sorts of inputs, and the more diverse the better. Your unconscious mind isn't going to make those unexpected connections if you're giving it too restricted a diet. My mind tends to naturally work in a mind-mapping way. Starting with the central question or problem, I work in an associative way, with one field of investigation triggering another, and so on. I've taught myself to speed read, so can cover a lot of ground quickly. (It's worth doing!).

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3. Find a friendly expert

One of the advantages of having a good network is that you'll know someone who knows something about the problem you're tackling. This could be a strategy peer, a researcher or academic who understands the category, or a friend or family member who buys into the brand or category you're looking into. I am eternally grateful for the generosity of those in my network and am a firm believer that what you are prepared to give to others (notwithstanding confidentiality limits) comes back to you in wonderful ways.

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4.?Once you've filled your mind, force yourself to step away

As a crammer, I find this the most difficult thing to do. I could spend hours and hours in immersion mode, but experience has shown me that this leads to diminishing returns. The longer you go at it, the more addled your brain becomes, and that's often when anxiety can set in, as the ticking clock gets louder and louder. Make shutting down the computer a deliberate act in which you are saying to your brain 'I've given you what you need, now get to work in the background and start making those connections.'

5. Be comfortable in beta and start to share

It's often more effective to get these new connections to bubble up by talking things through at this stage with someone on the project. I always look for that person whose brain works differently to mine - a more concrete, analytical thinker to my abstract, more conceptual approach. Something magical happens when I allow myself to verbalise my stream of consciousness and invite someone else to play back to me what they're hearing. The pathway?starts to emerge. I make sure I tape these conversations!

6. Avoid they tyranny of the blank page

It's great when you're starting to define the problem or the solution in your head, but it can't stay there. My advice is to get your early thoughts down on paper as soon as possible. Work with your favourite template(s) to organise your early thinking into a strawman that you can take into the work session with your team. The strawman is meant to be a first-base pass that is designed to be pulled apart and re-built. Rarely have I found it not to have value. We can all spend too much time trying to get to the right answer alone. It's far better to give ourselves and our teams permission to use our early thinking as the ignition for the final answer.