How to use the Stacked model to be more creative and dent the environ.
You can’t tell the temperature of water if you’re a fish, or so the saying goes. Once you’re within a system it’s very difficult to see its shortcomings, unless you’ve been dealt an external shock or otherwise developed a critical sense of your surroundings.
I remember it like yesterday when I completed my final task as a broadcast journalist. I’d worked for a number of stations across the BBC and independents. The network I’d worked for needed to cut costs and so they let go a dozen or more regular freelance producers, including me. It was painful but I soon found myself unexpectedly filling in jobs in the era Dotcom I.
This was the frenzied time of start-ups in Soho, a codified time-money matrix, and a burgeoning digital industry placing a microscope over many sectors e.g. travel, commerce, and communications. Blogs, just like this one, emerged back then as an antidote for writers who wanted to share their thoughts, but before the Great Turn would have to battle for a publisher to show their wares.
Blogs back then have a similar buzz to Podcasts right now.
Like many people, I liked to consider my self creative. The new world though was a bazar of entrepreneurial thinkers modelling a cacophony of fresh ideas and embracing a collaborative spirit.
Collaboration that would give birth to that thing called a minimum viable product was hard fought and won. It’s worth noting collaboration at a business level is generally seen as antithetical to its practice in many parts of the world. I was reminded of this by a senior journalist and entrepreneur Avinash from India who paid me a visit yesterday and if you’ve read Kai Fu Lee’s AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order you come to realise how it’s a war of attrition in start-up land.
Over those two decades however, I’ve researched, strengthened, failed some and refined approaches to being a creative, and why it matters. I’ve packaged this approach into a meme, demonstrating how almost anyone can become a creative and create something that has demand.
I’ve mainly though, not exclusively, directed my resources to the industry I know well — the media and journalism. In my career I’ve been a producer, a reporter, a news presenter, freelance correspondent in conflicts and a video journalist/ doc maker. And in all of these, I like many conformed to a structure and belief system that ensured journalism, or the production of it ran efficiently and according to what managers expected.
You don’t need me to tell you that in the last decade or so there’s been intense navel gazing at journalism and the media. But remarkably it’s held firm. It still more or less runs along the same lines, habits and systems as it did when I was an everyday practising journalist and it continues to do so. In universities around the world they largely continue to produce journalists to feed the status quo and that therein presents a problem.
A friend, a former senior executive within the BBC, once said to me “if you keep on doing what you’re doing you’ll keep on getting what you got and that thing you called progression is in fact regression”.
You’ re the fish surrounded by water in which that rising temperature goes unnoticed. Hence one of the pursuits I’ve been engaged in over the last decades is how to look to a different form of journalist.
I achieved a modicum of success when I taught my first coding class in 2003. This was the onset of digital journalists and in 2005/6 I bagged a slew of international awards. Many of my former students have through their own hard work gone on to earn serious stripes in journalism; many too have left to pursue other dreams.
Take Avinash Kalla, a humble man, who likes to big me up. Ultimately he was, and is, an entrepreneur at heart. Yes, we went down my Alice in the Rabbit Hole of building platforms in 2012, and blogging in which as a student he grabbed an exclusive interview with Assange. He also posted more than a 100 stories in 12 weeks.
Today, he’s a successful author; he reported on the Trump election as a road trip with friends e.g. Aqueel across the US and wrote a book. He founded and runs one of the biggest and most successful journalism conferences in India, TalkJournalism, which has featured international speakers such as, Snowden, ICIJ’s director Gerald Ryle, US columnist Eugene Robinson, and The Guardian’s award winning investigative journalist Nick Davies. His next conference moves ever closer to confronting head on an alternative to this thing called journalism.
But what about the future? Is there a model which encapsulates what journalists do, but even more, and as I’ll explain should they even be called journalists?
The world you will likely agree will always need normative journalists who trade solely in information telling viewers and readers what we need to, or feel we need to know. “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is a well worn saying of the craft.
But we’re on the cusp of a greatly unfamiliar environment. Disinformation won’t disappear and perennial problems within the ‘wicked world’ seem untouched. We report on the environment and what then? Oh yes someone else, an environmentalist, or otherwise academic is tasked with finding a solution. We tell stories that are soon forgotten. Why? And then one of the mot dramatic systems awaits us: AI.
Applied storytellers is the name I’ve come to see within this new incarnated professional; a storyteller and some who works in the space of psychology and interdisciplinary subjects whilst looking to AI for solutions. Just as Chess guru Kasparov integrated AI into Chess playing Applied Storytellers will do similar. I’ve seen glimpses working with Google as one of their reviewer for Google’s News Innovation European fund in 2022
A storyteller whose multi-hyphenate approach creates a matrix of solutions. I graduated as an Applied Chemist and hence can see analogies with the motivated applied end of a practice.
At the heart of their practice is the pursuit of creative solutions, and actively finding problems. This ranges from building assets e.g. apps to an immersive storytelling mode that incentivises action. Imagine that!
Before he turned to Cinema, Spielberg had journalism on his radar. Incredibly, the way he works is akin to, though not exactly journalism practice. It’s something within the overlap.
Equally I’ve found young journalists from an assignments on the Syria border — friends of the Oscar nominated and multiple documentary winner Waad al Kateab who made For Sama.
In 2015 premiering at Apple Store in London I referred to the group as cinema journalist, and they span Robert Drew to Clive Myrie.
And all alongside this, there’s a deep sense of cultural awareness and heterogenous diversity. An element of this, driving deeper diversity forms the basis of an up and coming panel talk at create UK.
Later this year I hope to reveal a project that brings together pretty amazing people, their teaching and writings, to whom I’ve had the privilege of working or interacting with over the last two decades. In a nutshell, that model thinking around creativity can be found in this matrix called Stacked.
It’s an acronym for a general approach around the well known lean system, as well as system analysis, which, but incorporates specificities around the art of storytelling, building, and forecasting.
A brief introduction goes likes this.
S is for Search, scour, and source to that question that’s been tickling you. You’re still that fish in water and if you can’t see it solicit the help of someone outside your domain who sees what’s wrong. It also stands for stimulate and story tell. Be stimulated by the unfamiliar. Apple’s Steve Jobs spent a lot of his time visiting galleries and exhibitions where his ideas were sparked. S too is for story? What’s the story you’re telling and is it compelling.
T is a reference to T people — someone who has a deep understanding of a subject, whilst knowledgeable across others. We have secondary interests, but often these are muted, seen as insignificant within a domain. For instance as a journalist being a seamstress, plumber, artists or economist opens up all sorts of analogous thinking. In his critically acclaimed book Range, David Epstein cites psychologist Robin Hogarth for his revelation that economists and chemistry students are amongst leading professional that invite a thinking model that embraces wide reasoning. T, is also for the impact of technology and its fit. More recently experts have begun talking about V people.
Analyse, assess and ask is something we all do. We’re always evaluating. But actively being presented with complex problems where you’re given time, and you can make connections across domains ( however silly they might be) and then ask for feedback creates a powerful model towards being creative. In my experience people who might be shy or don’t participate need assurances they’re in a safe space where they won’t be ridiculed. Enquiring from a Wisdom of Crowd is desirable but be cautious of group think and confirmation bias. We can tackle group think by interacting with diverse groups. A, too is for the incorporation of, or appreciating Art. A too is for assessing whether it’s doable. Have you got access to the groups, people, and if not how will you go about achieving this?
C is to create and that means externalise. I could think about doing this post, but physically creating it allows for collisions with other people’s thoughts. A lecturer once told me, “do something everyday that scares you”. Intrinsic to creating is play, and within the lab we’ve created, play is integral to free thinking and creativity.
If you consider your self structured look to become unstructured. The former is what psychologists refer to as Hedgehog like traits, whilst unstructured peripatetic work is more Fox like. The concepts of Fox and Hedgehogs re-emerges from work by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
C, too is for copy. It’s generally shunned but it’s been the basis by which China’s philosophers sought perfection. “Rigorous copying of perfection was seen as a route to Mastery”, writes Fu Lee. It’s been the building blocks to innovation and its vast and competitive apps industry, he adds. Culture, as shown here matters in creativity.
K is knowledge. One of the oldest technologies still proves to be a stimulant for our wildest imagination and dreams. It comes in many forms, but its most robust lay within the leaves of books and journals reviewed by those who possess similar or related knowledge.
The Internet has made knowledge an abundant quality. Most of what is read is now treated a true. Hence the emphasis is on primary Knowledge, examined by others.
E is for edit and the notion that that singular brilliant idea will likely require more refinement, but it’s no reason to stay silent. Recycling, an idea, reassessing and re-evaluating it should be within your DNA more moving forward. Editing is the gift to understand how to make the familiar more engaging. It requires an age-old mantra. Acknowledge failure as part of the lip to success. Fail fast, edit, fail again, and edit.
Dis for a myriad of things. For instance, diversity not as a cosmetic aesthetic procedure but that diversity of thought, and heterogenous diversity yields results that are creative and different.
It also stands for that drive on the road ahead, and of course delivery. When can you be quite sure you’ve applied that last stroke? If you’ve followed this surrounded by critical voices, you’ll deliver in line with something that is viable, which may require refinement later. If you’re an artist, that voice you’ve developed within you will nudge you. My experience with artists as perfectionists is leaving the project and pronouncing it as deliverable.
See how we run our future lab below.
Dr David Dunkley Gyimah is one of the UK’s leading videojournalists. He’s the first Brit to win the US coveted Knight Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism. He’s been a journalist working in innovation for thirty years. A former artist in residence at the South bank Centre, he specialises in inter-disciplinary innovation. He’s a reader/ Associate professor at Cardiff University specialising in Innovation, Diversity and Creativity. He’s designated one of the top writers in journalism on @medium which has 60m active users. More of him here www.viewmagazine.tv
