Brad Besancon: You truly believe that creativity can be taught and there’s a lot of people–

Rodney Hill: They’re set up. People are creative and what you’re doing is you’re setting the environment for them to get into themselves.

Brad: So it’s basically that everybody has kind of a core of creativity within their brain but because they never set up the right environment…

Rodney: Right, right. Nobody’s ever going to do it.

Brad: Nobody’s ever going to do it. So let’s talk about, what is that environment? What is a good environment? I mean, you see Google with the sleep pods, if they’re with a massage therapist or something.

Robert Riggs: But the stereotype, typical thing is, I’m in the shower and voila, here it comes. So what are these environments?

Rodney: Where nobody can interrupt you, nobody is coming in, you’re in isolation and you can think.

Robert: Is it free think though, you’re not actually really thinking about the problem?

Rodney: Right. It’s free thinking and you have the associations like going to sleep at night. Your hemispheres just sort of makes, everything comes up. I think, was it Scott Fitzgerald, what makes a really creative genius is a mind that can hold two just position of ideas at the same time without you accept the both of them.

Brad: Makes sense

Rodney: Then you figure out maybe how to blend them up eventually. Minota has soundproof chambers for their scientists. When you’re coming up with an idea and you go into a set of flow, the last thing you want is somebody to come and walk up behind you, slap you on the shoulder and say, “What about 99 flip ball?” You’re broken out of it, so like if you’re in a place where there’s a lot of people, if you put on earmuffs even though they don’t have to be wired to anything; the wire could be there but no sound, the last one that they will pick on as they come in the room is the person that has the earbuds own.

Brad: They don’t want to feel like they disturbing them, right?

Rodney: Yes. The students studied late at night by themselves because nobody will bother them.

Brad: Nobody will bother them.

Robert: But Rodney, it seems to me that we live in the absolute worst environment now for not getting interrupted.

Rodney: Right, we do. Right.

Robert: With the smartphone, and so how do you turn it off? How do you isolate? How do you let stuff percolate?

Rodney: You just have to turn it off. [laughing]

Brad: [laughing] It’s amazing. It does have an off button or do not disturb but you just choose not to do that.

Rodney: That’s right. But if you can just get away from that, you’re way better off.

Robert: So you should kind of try to apply itself to the problem and then step back, go do something else and not expect that, oh, this will come up right now?

Rodney: Right, and don’t define the problem. You don’t want to because it’s like the coffee cup; if you say coffee, they’re going to design coffee cups, so like the good example is 3M and post-it notes which it was never designed to be post-it notes.

Brad: That’s right

Rodney: Somebody said, “Hey, we can use this for this and this,” and they probably sold a zillion. 3M has a policy that I think every four years, a fifth of all the products have to be new.

Brad: That’s brilliant.

Rodney: So they have to invent and come up with new products, plus they require that all of their employees bill 10% of their time to daydreaming.

Brad: That’s brilliant.

Rodney: How long a process is that? Is it a few minutes to get into that space? Is it, I got to leave my desk, go outside? What?

Rodney: It depends on the person. Samuel Adams used a purring cat, a cup of tea, and he would do that, and then it would pop into his head. I don’t get blocked anymore but if I did and I was trying to come up with something, I would listen to some 18th century music and drink five cups of tea as I wander around the house, and then I can just sit down and come up. Mozart would take long walks in the woods and then maybe listening to the Babbling Brueck and see 50 different shades of green coming through a tree. He could feel the breeze, smell the odors, then he could sit down and actually write a piece when he got back. Beethoven had to hammer around for months to come up with a piece, so it’s different–

Brad: It all depends on the individual. I mean, I know with me, it’s a whiteboard. I get in front of a whiteboard and just start drawing stuff out, whether it’s graphically or whether it’s word maps or outlines, or whatever and you just get out there and we just start, Robert and I just start talking about stuff and here it comes.

Robert: Back in writing and journalism, and television, what I thought would kill you is if you just sat and thought about it, that you just need to start and you got that first draft, and then I would walk away from the document, you walk away from the first draft and then have a different view when you came back. Is that..?

Rodney: Yes, sure. The more you can distance yourself and see things in a new eye.

Brad: Well, I think the other thing we learned too in business and talking to our clients is you always have to be ready, not necessarily in your full-fledged flow but you never know when that’s going to pop in your mind, so be ready. I had a professor one time tell me, because sometimes, my brain starts going in the middle of the night, is put a notebook and a piece of paper, a pen and paper beside and just write down whatever it is that’s got your mind going, so things like that because you never know. And then we’re in social media and we’re working with clients and they’re trying to tell their story, you never know when that moment of your story’s going to occur either so you got to be kind of ready.

Robert: Alright, so do you want to know more? Do you want a part 3? Give us a teaser, where do we go next on this?

Rodney: Who knows? Well, like about writing, Kipling used to write with blue ink and then his assistant ran out of it, and ran and got him some black ink and he goes going like, [groans] but he had a zigging idea so he started writing, and a thousand ideas came out, and he decided he wouldn’t write again unless he had black ink. It was like a post-it [00:06:21] suggestion.

Robert: Okay, hold that thought, black ink.

Brad: Go grab your black pens.

Robert: Part 3, coming up.