A few Fridays ago I changed my usual routine. I shifted my gym session from an hour to 45 mins (who knew a 45-minute workout would be worse than an hour one?), I zipped back to my desk, and I just got there to see Mark Earls excellent webinar What Kinda(!) Thing?. Actually I missed the first minute, but that was just the waffle
Copy, copy, copy
It was worth the effort. If you tuned in, youll have heard Mark talking about his forthcoming book Copy, copy, copy, and its central theme steal widely, and steal well. Mark wants us to face it that there are no really original ideas, just ideas that have been repurposed. We need to relax about being original and start casting around for the thinking other people have already done.
And if there are no new ideas, then we can try to figure out, when were thinking about our project work, what kind of problem we are looking at, and what kind of answer we need to apply.
Big picture thinking
Mark wants us to do more big picture thinking so we can deliver better content to our clients (he reckons were in the content business, which I found very motivating). He thinks this broader thinking is more useful to clients.
If you remain unconvinced about his argument, if youre a devil is in the detail person, or you think trying to simplify thinking is whats wrong with the world today, thats OK. I was partly thinking that while I was listening away to what Mark had to say. And that internal dialogue is the good stuff that the Hub delivers.
For me, the webinar offered us half an hour on a Friday to join in with other researchers, wherever they where, to learn something new. And the listening in was really enjoyable. If youre a radio fan, if the kind of learning you do well is aural, then youll love being able to scribble down interesting ideas, and tips on inspiring thinkers. It was nice too, to hear Mark chuckling away at his own jokes, it felt both close and remote at the same time.
Listen again
You can go back, too, to the Hub to listen again, or if you missed it the first time, its here on the website:
I went back to re-listen, and Im so glad I did. I listened to Marks explanation of how people choose and his four boxes, which simply describe how people make decisions, and I realised what kind of thing
Im dealing with on my latest project.
So, Im going to re-purpose Marks thinking for myself, and copy, copy, copy