Creativity can be taught!

Commercial creativity can be boiled down to 6 templates that can be applied to sell any message. Actually there are two models that are used most frequently with success. I know this rubs against our normal understanding of creativity - inspiration. "Patterned creativity" sounds like an oxymoron - but it seems to be true. Apparently, using these models helps you to think more productively and they have proven effectiveness in helping your message "stick" with other people.

I won't get into the nitty gritty details of how they discovered this information or what the templates are (you can read the article above). The general idea is that they viewed successful commercials and discovered underlying patterns in the "best" commercials. Commercials that did not use these patterns tended to be less creative (and less memorable) even though they were tyring to "think outside the box" and be creative. To "test" this theory they taught these templates and people using them were able to develop more "creative" commercials. Obviously this does not encompass all of creativity - they aren't trying to do that. It does show that there might be patterns in places that we don't expect though.

This is just one little gem of an idea in the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I think this might be my new favorite book. Basically, it has systematically explained to me why I am not a good communicator and helpfully showed me how I can improve. I intend to share more nuggets from this book -but as it says - if you have three ideas no one remembers any of them.