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Simon Baker
Take A Glug Of Creativity
I want to start this tale by stating that I’m not trying to condone the use of alcohol. But neither am I condemning it. I’m sitting solidly on the fence (with a non-alcoholic, gluten-free beer in my hand). With that said, let’s get on with it.
If you’ve ever watched Mad Men, you’ll have noticed that the characters often held a glass of booze in the office. This was undoubtedly exaggerated but even in the early 90s, when I started in advertising, alcohol was still a big part of the scene.
It was common for us creatives to go to the pub at lunch and not quite so common to return to the office afterward. We often worked from a sticky table with a pint by our side. And it felt more creative and enjoyable. So The Drum magazine, John Jessup and myself decided to run an experiment to see if alcohol improves your ideas.
We recruited 18 advertising creatives and split them into two equal teams. One team was given an endless supply of alcohol and the other team was only allowed soft drinks. We gave them three hours to work on the same brief and watched the chaos unfold.
The results were overwhelming.
The inebriated team came up with more ideas and came up with ideas more consistently throughout the night. But what we really wanted to know was which team came up with the best ideas.
So we took the five best ideas from each team and sketched them up to the same standard. Then we presented them to a group of advertising creative directors who were gathered together to judge an awards show. They ranked the ideas from best to worst, placing four of the alcohol team’s ideas at the top of the pile. We then put the ideas to the public and got almost exactly the same results.
From every metric, the drinking team came out on top.
Obviously, this experiment wasn’t done to rigorous academic standards. But that hasn’t stopped it from being cited in academic papers on the topic. Yes – since we did this experiment, academics have run their own studies and had similar results.
You may be wondering if I’m recommending getting boozed up before working on creative ideas. The answer to that is a clear ‘no’. For lots of reasons.
So I want to share some other factors that I believe contributed to better ideas in the days when people worked from the boozer.
✅ Trust
In Dan Pink’s book ‘Drive’, he lists autonomy as one of the three elements of motivation. When it comes to creative thinking, it’s important to give people the freedom to work where, how and when works best for them. As long as they’re clear on the deliverables, how they deliver should be up to them.
✅ Environment
Offices influence the way people’s brains work. The environment you’re in directs your thinking and what your expectations are. They limit people’s capacity for ideas. Personally, I find coffee shops and bars to be better environments for creative thinking. Even better are airplanes, tropical beaches and jacuzzis. (I planned two of my books from a jacuzzi in a health club – then wrote the words in the cafe. Seriously!) Get out of the office and find a place that works for you.
✅ Altered States
Alcohol isn’t the only way to change the way your brain operates. So does coffee, tea and those repulsive energy drinks. Hunger can be a good way of focusing the mind too. But nothing is better than exercise. It releases some fantastic neurochemicals, floods your brain with oxygen and improves your ability to learn information. I currently do a lot of my work from a health club near where I live (although you couldn’t tell that by looking at the size of my stomach).
So it looks like I’ve got some more experiments to do.
Maybe in a gym next time.
Who’s in?
