Secrets and synchronicities -- Ava Lindberg's blog

I am thinking about the fundamentals of the creative process.  The first part is radical brainstorming, ideation, and the stretch of divergence — in which many ideas are created to solve a central opportunity. During this free-form divergence phase, the facilitator and team will tap into many different creative exercises to expand, liberate, and augment the mind of the team from old thinking, unprofitable constructions, and strongly held but not viable preliminary ideas.

At some point in the creative process, we stop diverging and go to convergence.   The model of Creative Problem Solving has the intersections of divergence and convergence move like an electrocardiogram up and down, up and down, throughout the entire process.  Sometimes, for lack of time, however, we simply divide the time in half.  The first half is pure divergence, the D phase.   The second half is pure convergence, the C phase.  Convergence means that, given the huge pile of ideas we’ve just created, we now brainstorm criteria for choosing a few of these ideas for further exploration, and then begin to actively select the most potentially doable and intriguing ideas to expand, evaluate, and finetune in the C phase.

During this later C phase and after we’ve explored the potential of new ideas, we might come to the sub-phase called Great Doubt.  We take a few of the ideas that are promising and subject them to deep questioning.  This is intentional.  We question every element of the idea with strictness laced with kindness.   This is never a first step –which is the usual mistake of untrained teams — but one of the last.  Great Doubt is applied in order to be sure that the enactment of a particular idea has not forgotten something major and important.

I took this idea from Gengo Merzel who is a Zen master and Jungian philosopher with a website and process called Big Mind.   The reference to his blog, Big Mind, is http://bigmind.org/blog/the-value-of-questioning-everything

I’m planning on trying Great Doubt as one of the final convergence exercises that I train on for an upcoming creativity training workshop for qualitative researchers in Dallas called Facilitating Consciously:  A Mini-Training Workshop on Creative Techniques.    As the reader reviews the article below, one can change the word “enlightenment” to “creativity.”   One can alternate the word Buddha for “process.”    It is true that in qualitative market research and creative process, we hope to attain many things — insight, understanding, a good idea, a solution, breakthrough, unique selling proposition, direction, and the core of a successful strategic plan.  But, during the creative session itself, it can be beneficial to allow a period of Great Doubt to finalize the ideas and action plans before getting carried away on the heels of overexcitement, anticipation, and positive expectations, as valuable as enthusiasm and spirit for the work can be.

Always, in creativity, we must consciously alternate expansion of possibilities and free-form ideation with intentionally imposed limits, contractions, and doubt  in order to shape the final solution into a truly workable breakthrough.  Rather than blind faith — as valuable as this can be at the outset of a creative session — Great Doubt at the end may make the difference in how we view the category, brand, and our world.

The Value of Questioning Everything

Genpo Roshi, January 21, 2013

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research | No Comments »

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research | No Comments »

I am speculating — on the last day in the office before I’m heading to the upper Amazon basin in Ecuador for vacation and light anthropological research — whether it is possible to experience meaningful coincidences/synchronicity, the identification and evolution of new insights in qualitative research and group/individual creativity, or deep innovative solutions without a period of relaxation inserted somewhere in the creative process.   In the original Osborne creative model that was later redeveloped into new systems like Synectics and Creative Problem Solving, there are creative methodologies based upon four steps:

1. Preparation. A problem or need has been identified and there is intense activity trying to solve it.  New methodologies for creativity are applied.  The team or individual works hard to figure it out.
2. Vacation.  This is the moment when either through an intentional creative exercise that allows one to escape from the problem for a few moments (for instance, the essential paradox is one such Synectics exercise) or to actually go away for a period of time in which the problem is not thought about but the mind is focusing on something else delightful or adventurous.  This allows the brain that has been stimulated in the first preparation stage to recoalesce and reconfigure, unconsciously trying to solve the problem.
3. A-ha.  This stage is when the brain/unconscious has reconfigured the options and comes up with one or more elegant solutions.  Some may work; others may lead to something; others may have a part that is useful.
4. Verification.  This stage is the more analytical one.  The possible solutions are chosen and worked on to optimize.  A final one or two directions is then quantitatively tested or used to begin the new initiative addressing the original problem.

Although the model has many variations and exercises — depending upon whether we are working on a team creativity/vision session  or whether an artist, musician, or designer is working independently on a particular situation — the second stage of vacation appears necessary in order to let the brain power and unconscious archetypal material use all the stimulation and reform the new ideas.

It may be that synchronicity appears most frequently when the subject is in a relaxed state of mind.  However, this hypothesis would bear more investigation.

Nonetheless, while in the jungle and if the paper of the journal does not get too soggy or if the iPad can be plugged in, I will be taking notes of new ideas during this period of environmental change.

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings, Synchronicity | No Comments »

I am motivated to seek what we don’t know, i.e., ignorance.  I just read of a course at Columbia University in the City of New York, a new book Ignorance, that describe how ignorance drives new forms of knowledge.  MF’s thesis is worth a deeper look.

Let me know what you think.  How has not knowing and ignorance driven you to generate new insights?

The dramatic category called Ignorance may have subtle implications for qualitative research, creative generation, and deeper understanding of the archetypes in relationship to branding, motivations, and therapeutic breakthrough.  It most certainly has implications for the area of synchronicity, although this has not yet emerged in my thinking or showed itself to my conscious mind.  When these do — most likely in forms of synchronous occurrences —  I shall report back.  But, the fact that I am posting on ignorance and its relationship to new knowledge would imply that insight on the causality of new forms of knowledge is imminent… or immanent.

These images illustrate the relationship of the drive for new forms of knowledge starting with the depths of the unconscious and ignorance.  Some are from Jung’s Red Book; others are from mythopoetic symbols; another is from nature.   The center moon shape on the barge (Jung) implies that what we assume is ignorance is actually cradled by the drives for new knowledge.  In the second image, the Fool represents the place of unknowing, a pathway from Kether-Crown to Chokmah-Wisdom on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.  The third is a sea urchin deep in the ocean.

Below are reviews on MF’s Ignorance and upcoming lecture at Columbia University

The following comes from an announcement from Columbia University.

Posted in Creativity, Synchronicity | No Comments »

What I’m discovering through my depth psychological research is that adding a strong component of creativity increases the level, power, frequency, and speed of synchronicity.  This relationship has implications for artists, musicians, and creators as well as for qualitative research in which a creative, visual component is added to the design, execution, intention of the team, and outcome.

For this post, I am speaking of synchronicity related to artists and musicians.

Here is a two-step relationship that might form the beginnings of a synchronous process:

1) To manifest synchronicity more rapidly and significantly, use the Magician archetype intentionally.  The Magician is the archetypal that intensifies the intentionality to create, to bring new ideas and creations into being, and to apply focus and tools to generate a new idea into reality.

2)  Then add a powerful component of art, music, filmmaking, photography, or composing —  creativity in some form that brings imagery together along with ideas and intentionality.   It is evident today from two days of evidence that the artist’s power as manifestor allows imagery from the depth of the unconscious — the mythological basis of archetypal reality — to emerge and take form rapidly.

This appears as synchronicity — images that coincide with internal visual images created to form a quantum effect in a startling and exciting embodiment.

Posted in Archetypes and synchronicity, Creativity, Synchronicity | No Comments »

Don’t miss the September Qcast featuring Lindberg speaking on creativity. You can find the QCast on the www.QRCA.org website under September QCast.   I’m speaking on exciting new ways to intensify the power of creativity and brainstorming tactics within four radically different research and creative scenarios — generating marketing ideas with corporate teams, developing new missions and visions with senior management, debriefing research findings after qualitative research with the observational team, and adding archetypal and creative projective techniques to focus groups to gain depth of emotional learning.

Please join me at noon to 1:30 on Thursday, September 6, 2012, eastern standard time

Facilitating Consciously for Breakthrough Insights

September 6, 2012
12:00 p.m. ET (GMT -4)

Speaker: Ava Lindberg, President of SunResearch

Applying the right form of creative facilitation and brainstorming exercises can achieve breakthrough results in qualitative research.  But how do you know what the right form is, when, and how to use it for your particular situation?

Join Ava Lindberg as she shares her top four ways to increase the probability of breakthrough research and conceptual insight using case histories from major brands and other corporate situations.  These approaches are appropriate for:

• Cross-functional brainstorming sessions to develop new concepts and tactics
• Immediate debriefs for innovative co-creation of research findings
• Politically savvy high summits with senior management
• Stimulating creative focus groups using deep projective exercises

Ava Lindberg is President of SunResearch, a leading-edge qualitative research practice located in New York City.  For 20+ years, Lindberg has delved deeply into consumer behaviors, experiential-emotional need states, vision, brand imagery, and creative development as well as spearheaded innovative new forms of qualitative methodologies for leading brands and companies.

Posted in Announcements, Creativity, Methodologies and research findings | No Comments »

Mind-maps are exciting projective devics that can be used for personal creativity, consumer market research, delving deeply or superficially into new associations, expanding and ferreting out an issue, topic, insight, or any starting point.

The technique is deceptively easy.  Take a piece of paper, line up some colored markers, and put your first word or topic on the paper.  You can circle or box the topic in or leave it as is.  Then, draw a line and somewhere put another word that you associate with the original word.  You can put it in a box, circle, or keep it near or on a line.  You can work on that section, and add other associations, making it look somewhat like one side of a leafy tree or cluttery map.  Then, come up with a whole other association that is quite different, and start a whole new line of thought.

Continue this process with words and drawings until the entire page is filled with lines, arrows, words, and small drawings that represent associations of your topic.  Make it juicy, radical, no holds barred.

When done, look at it.  You will be surprised at what you have wrought with comparative facility.

I am in the midst of reading Carl Jung’s (ed. Aniela Jaffe) Memories, Dreams, Reflection — Jung’s last work partially created at the end of his life, then published after his death at age 83.  I was seeking around the internet about the book and discovered this mind-map of Carl Jung’s Memories by Steven Kleon of Steal like an Artist. I am fascinated by the idea of mind-mapping the work of a great theorist or doing one of my own work.  A mind-map could stand as its own work of artunderstanding or morph into something new based upon the totality of one of the associative images or branches of the tree.

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings | No Comments »

I am working with a client team on a hybrid qualitative research study (online, then focus groups, then ethnography) related to a consumer packaged goods category, first in Hartford, then Atlanta.   In the midst of this research, in conversation relating to the science and enactment of ethnographic observationals and qualitative research, one of my clients teasingly asks me, “So, what is the strangest research project you’ve ever been on?”

Since there have been many strange and wonderful projects, I pause to think.  Then one study comes to mind:  on fire ants.  It is many years ago.  The work is for a famous insecticide brand, Amdro which is connected to Raid as a subdivision, who needs to develop a creative TV campaign that will intensify motivation to use Amdro and provide clear understanding of how Amdro’s revolutionary bait works against fire ants in the South.

Fire ants are a powerful, insidious, ant nuisance that have come in from Central America, slowly, inexorably.  They are ever spreading, mile by mile, through the south, moving northward.  They only can live in warm weather that does not freeze, but warm weather in the U.S. covers all the South and Southwest.   At that time, the pest is mostly in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and South Georgia areas where we end up doing our research.

The problem with fire ants is manifold.  Fire ant nests are hard to see and easy to step into.  Sometimes they’re almost invisible, appearing and disappearing without notice.  If a young child, unsuspecting adult (drunk or gets out of his car near the side of the road for a quick break), a calf, puppy, or other vulnerable creature steps into a fire ant nest without seeing it, the ants have a maddening, instinctual behavior:  they swarm over the body and then, as if interconnected with a single nerve synapse, begin biting the victim all at the same time.

The bites are extraordinarily painful, sometimes fatal to young animals and children, leave utter burning sensations, horrible pustules stay unhealed all over the body for weeks.  The victim is in misery, requiring hospitalization if severe enough.  The ants live up to their name:  fire.

So, now it’s 15 years later on this refreshment beverage study.  The clients and I are researching outside of Atlanta, in Duluth, GA, and I continue to relate the story that the issue I needed to contend with was to interview farmers and other agricultural people who rarely were seen or interviewed in traditional market research….we set up research stations in location like Stark, Florida, where we recruited fire ant sufferers and set up closed circuit TVs in motel rooms and conference halls to create the research environment that Amdro and agency clients could then observe.

The creative issue, at that time, is interesting, actually.  How to communicate that Amdro as bait would eventually reach the queen of the fire ant nest, kill the queen, which would eventually wipe out the entire nest…when most farmers and landowners were pouring gasoline down the fire ant holes hoping to blow it up violently.   The issue creatively was that when we personified the killing of the queen and the hive in TV ad storyboards, the ants looked cute. The imagery of the ants and queen engendered sympathy and heroism rather than malice and deadliness.  How to un-herocize the queen and the ants?  To solve the creative issues at that time, we used focus groups and an iterative process to work it through.

So, here we are in late March 2012, and I’m talking with altogether different clients about this intriguing subject, who find it rather amusing as a creative problem.  it’s different from their own, but just as hard to figure out.   Not more than three hours later, we do an afternoon ethnography and go out for a run (exercise during authentic ethnography) with a respondent during a real-life observational in Duluth, GA.  As we (the respondent, me, and two clients) all run along a road, we notice mounds of gravel, sand, and small holes at the top of each mound.  The female respondent that the 3 of us are observing says with excitement, “Look!  There!  Fire ant mounds!  They’re dangerous!”  We discuss them quickly, and with amazement.

I can’t believe the fire ant scourge has reached midway into Georgia, near Atlanta.  15 years, farmers and Amdro had predicted it would, and now I’m seeing it.  The northward, spreading course of the nuisance is continuing.

The current clients with whom I have just finished discussing fire ants are astounded to hear about the subject of fire ants from this unsuspecting respondent.  Then, the respondent says, “You know, Amdro bait is the only thing that really kills them….it gets to the heart of the nest, bringing the bait down into the nest to kill the queen.  When the queen is dead, the rest of the ants die.”  Clients hear my words repeated from the mouth of a respondent in the midst of and talking about exercise and cold beverages for hydration and replenishment.

To me… It’s obvious that the TV campaign we developed for Amdro 15 years ago worked in terms of communication with education–since the education on how fire ants can be eradicated through Amdro bait is crystal clear to this respondent.

I am left with wonder.

As an observer of synchronicity, I am thinking to myself now that I’m back from this particular piece of research:  What does fire ant mean, more universally?  Is it just a coincidence?  Is it potentially a meaningful coincidence?  Why does the sight of these nests return into my experience?  What is the meaning of conquering pests through bait?  Is the fact that the educative effect works from the Amdro campaign…the reason?   What about Amdro anyhow?

What is the symbolic, archetypal, metaphorical, metaphysical meaning of ant?   Ants?   Fire ants?

Posted in Creativity, Ethnography, cultural anthropology, Methodologies and research findings, Synchronicity | No Comments »

There are threats of “global warming” relative to market research, written up in venerable research periodicals, but my personal feeling is that qualitative research remains alive and kicking.  There is no end in sight to discovery, understanding, discernment, and exploration, even if the form changes and the inquiries shift.

I left this post on the Qualitative Research Group on Linked In and on G. Heist’s Gongo Research blog, published today in the online version of The Green Book, but it is worth repeating here.   Market research may be changing, but God is not dead.  I think that respondents want to participate in consumer research–more than ever–and clients continue to want to explore and listen to in-person research.  Despite online or perhaps because of it, many want to hear and listen to real people discuss real issues in a real, interactive, exciting way.    Great recruitment still comes down to precision of screener, additional time, and paying incentives on the high side.

My sense is that qualitative research is like gardening–for those with the expertise, delight in learning and discovering, the seeking of new ideas, colors, and insights, and patience to till the soil, weed, nurture, love the process, and revel in th blooms and fluorescence–there will never be an end to market research. Like gardens, there are changes and shifts in what qualitative research may look like and how the various methodologies are created or enjoyed, but qualitative research is a perennial process that will not go away.  It will remain until, and after, the last person in the world stops being interested in finding out what others of importance to an inquiry are thinking, feeling, doing, and needing.

So, here’s my original post to G Heist of Gongos Research, and I’d be interested in how readers who are researchers respond to these ideas:

“For complex focus group, IDI, and ethnography recruits–with online hybrids such as bulletin boards or diaries to begin as part of this qualitative process–and which are specific to difficult, complex, emotionallly evocative projects, we are finding that adding more incentives and giving the fields longer lead time are very helpful strategies. This means getting go-ahead from clients on difficult, multiple-stage projects earlier so that recruitment can start earlier, with needed changes at midpoint of recruitment to motivate consumers if there is a lag. We try to have many status reports from fields throughout the recruitment process, and make changes wherever necessary to create a successful recruit. However, we are achieving success continually…if we pay what is suggested on the high side from field recruiters at the bidding stage and if we make the screener and invitation enjoyable. With additional time to recruit, we are discovering that high quality respondents are excited to attend.

So what is this timing? A 5-7 day turnaround is impossible, however, while 2 full weeks–10 days of weekdays plus 2 full weekends–for a complex recruit does give optimum results. The last minute recruit we will, of course, try if the client really wants it, but we put in warnings and caveats, then we have to pay or bid out overtime and much higher incentives…and perhaps lower the past-participation to the past 3 months or less. We set this up from the beginning with the client so all is known and all contingency plans are in place. There is total transparency.

I am curious what other qualitative researchers find they can achieve in terms of great project results when powerful money and additional time are adequate to recruit.

As for recycling Easel sheets, that’s a wonderful ecological move. G Heist shows a picture of himself shredding Easel sheets.  I applaud.  I love Easel paper, pads, and writing ideas on them.   On a more transcendental note: What I find is that scheduling two debriefs for each qualitative project is useful and allows us to get plenty of Easel sheets with great ideas on them.  Specifically: one is at midpoint in the field between regions so that we discover what we are learning and can make revisions before the next or final field. The second is an all-hands, long debrief immediately after the last field back at client headquarters (or at the very least, a long phone call with everyone on it), to be sure we on the core team and invited guests have a chance to play and think….to coalesce findings, gain early hypotheses, and bridge the gap between what we just saw and heard and what the final report will convey. Often, this 4-hour pre-report debrief at headquarters is the most valuable experience of the entire project.

There are lots of Easel sheets which can be worked from by me and my team of researchers for the report, and then, of course, recycled properly.

Thinking seriously about this…. (one of) my favorite parts of a study is often the moment when the report is sent, reviewed by the client, accepted, ready or finished for presentation, and I can clean up all my papers, piles of notes, Easel sheets all over the office, post-it notes, transcripts, and recycle them. Ahhhhh!”

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings, Qualitative market research | No Comments »

This categorization of learning by Rumi seems particularly vital today; I have never seen the distinction quite this way before.  I offer the poem called Two kinds of intelligences

“There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired,

As a child in school memorizes facts and concepts

from books and from what the teacher says,

collecting information from the traditional sciences

as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

You get ranked ahead or behind others

in regard to your competence in retaining

information

You stroll with this intelligence

in and out of fields of knowledge, always getting more

marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one

already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox

A freshness

in the center of the chest

This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate.  It’s fluid,

and it doesn’t move from outside to inside

through conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.”

From The Essential Rumi, by Coleman Barks

Can one be enamored of both styles?

I specialize in the first, which moves from the outside to the inside, but find myself drawn to the fountainhead…the one from within, moving out.

Posted in Creativity, Methodologies and research findings | 1 Comment »