{CHAPTER 11}
SARAH LUND FROM
THE KILLING, THE BLUE
ELEPHANT, AND A BIT
ABOUT LEGO:
CREATIVITY AS A
QUESTION OF WORKING
ON THE EDGE
What if we just keep sitting here? What if we suddenly see a blue elephant standing down there?
Welcome to this interview with Ingolf Gabold, former head of drama at DR. This is an interview that in some ways develops slightly differently to the interviews across the cups of coffee at the law firm and at the café in Østerbro. Michael Valentin and Pernille Aalund describe the enormous energy and determination that lies behind their results. Ingolf too sees himself as having that kind of dynamic energy, and we shall place particular focus on this in Chapter 12.
In this chapter, however, we will hear more about why Ingolf refers to blue elephants, and we shall highlight examples of creativity, understood as being a product of working at the periphery of the box. The evidence actually shows that DR dramas have moved along the edge of existing genre formats in, for example, crime drama and, perhaps because of this very subject matter, have shown their creative potential. Just like LEGO bricks, which we shall also hear more about in this chapter.
Ingolf Gabold was born in 1942 and, after a long career as a composer and a controller of programmes at a number of TV stations, became DR’s head of drama in 1999. Ingolf retired from his post in 2012 but still held the position when the interview took place.
We meet Ingolf at the Café Grand, a café connected to the arthouse cinema of the same name, in Copenhagen one day in August, just after we visited the lawyers at LETT law firm. While Ingolf makes rather gallant attempts to ingratiate himself with Lene as he drinks his white wine, there is a constant background hum of voices and chatter in the café, and we are drawn into a psychodynamic universe.
One of our selection criteria in relation to our choice of interview subjects has been that we wanted to target people who had, by way of their creativity, not only succeeded in Denmark but also managed to gain recognition and/or sell goods and develop themselves creatively outside of the country. With this in mind, approaching Ingolf was an obvious move.
Danish TV drama has been hugely successful in Denmark, with millions of viewers glued to their screens on Sunday evenings as series such as The Killing and Borgen have been broadcast, and this success has been replicated abroad. Thus, on March 19 2011, The Times in London carried a feature article entitled “It’s cool to be Danish” as The Killing was being aired on British TV. The article goes on to describe how English women had become enthralled by Sarah Lund, independent-minded and forceful female detective in The Killing as well as how this particularly Danish type of crime drama, in which characters differ from those in the classic English crime series, has become a source of fascination in the UK.
In the interview, Ingolf Gabold does not mince his words but insists that much of what has been said and written about creativity has been “quite simply a load of bullshit”. So, we are clear on that score then. Nor is there any doubt that Ingolf is an interview subject with some very strong opinions on the question of creativity. It is for this reason that he is given a platform in not one but two chapters of this book. In other words, in this chapter, which focuses on the underlying framework for creativity, and the next chapter where the importance of passion and the striving for perfection in creativity are considered.
THE SPACE BETWEEN YOU AND ME
Before Ingolf begins on blue elephants, he speaks of how he has been inspired by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who publicly proclaimed his indebtedness to the theories of the legendary Sigmund Freud. For Ingolf, this rather speculative universe has formed a kind of model for his work in leading and driving creative processes forward. Lacan is well known for his mirror theory about the development of infant children. According to Lacan, when, at the end of a child’s first year or beginning of its second, the child looks at itself in a mirror, it begins to gain a sense of its own self. Ingolf says:
“At this point, a split takes place within the child’s subjective self that’s expressed as an intuited difference between ‘I’ and ‘the other’. It’s in this space that we find the origins of imagined scenarios, dreams, and fantasies. In the space between ‘I’ and ‘other’, there’s a reaction, something occurs, it takes place. There’s a gap. Just think how this is expressed. ‘I imagine’ (a scenario other than I); ‘I’d like’ (some other thing); ‘I want’ (some other object). It’s in this space that fantastic things can develop, particularly for my actors and scriptwriters. It’s in this place we can develop drama and action. I may ask of an actor: ‘How do you see this developing? What do you think should happen to your character? What’s the character’s ego?’ The whole ego/other scenario is generated by imagination – a huge attempt at wish fulfilment. The central question is: ‘What if?’ What do you think would happen if this spatial phenomenon suddenly disappeared and the three of us floated off to some other universe somewhere else? If we saw ourselves anew? Imagining a scenario is all about having a wish, a need, about satisfying a desire. Herein lies the whole psychological basis of creativity: ‘What if I did this…?’”
The I/other divide is the driving force behind an actor’s creative processes. Ingolf continues by pointing to a sunflower: “What if, for example, in my newly imagined reality, sunflowers don’t look like that? Now I’m imagining that sunflowers actually look like this. In other words, sunflowers of a completely different order. That, essentially, is how I work creatively.”
The ability to imagine scenarios that do not yet exist is, in other words, a basic motivating force in the creative process. But those blue elephants turn up in this part of the interview as well because, according to Ingolf, the ability to posit scenarios is insufficient on its own for creativity to take place. Ingolf ’s perhaps surprising view is that our powers of imagination have to be reined in before they can be used to proper advantage.
“What if we just keep sitting here without moving? What if we suddenly saw a blue elephant standing down there? Well, in all seriousness, that would be of no use to anyone. In my view, excessive creativity is just as uninteresting as regimented thinking. Creativity just for the sake of creativity gets us nowhere. With adults, it’s the transformation process that counts. How can you best express your creativity? How are you going to use that elephant you’ve conjured up? And it’s here that professional training and craftsmanship make their mark.”
Ingolf does not want pure, uncultivated creativity from his staff at DR’s fictional drama department. The ability to posit oneself in that imaginary space between “I” and “you/object” must be tempered with the kind of professional expertise and insight that can spark the creative dynamic within a tangible context. That is also precisely the point behind our idea of thinking at the edge of the box. Sheer power of imagination can be used to get yourself “out of the box”, but that in itself is only one of several prerequisites that need to be in place before you can actually start to create something that is truly new and meaningful. During the interview, we raise this apparently unorthodox approach with Ingolf, who replies:
“It’s my experience that thinking outside of the box is the point when we imagine we see a blue elephant down there. Now, that’s not interesting in itself. But to be at the edge of the box; that’s far more interesting. It’s asymmetrical, non-institutional, non-uniform – contrapuntal even.”
By itself, thinking of blue elephants is not interesting. It has to be coupled with a context, a process, an idea. Thus is Ingolf critical of fanciful castles-in-the-sky-type scenarios. But at the same time, he expresses in the interview a concern for the suppression of free thought processes in the school system:
“Spatial thinking is in full flow at the young child stage. The mental leaps that children perform are wild, random, non-linear, and circular. This circular, associative thinking gradually gets squeezed into linear channels as the child is socialized. This process is complete by 3rd Grade. In our school system, the key process is to rid the child of these propensities. In all modesty, I try to bring people back to that primary way of thinking, which they are all still capable of doing. Everyone starts off life as a creative being. This can be developed even further, but not everybody is equally creative. Some people can take their creativity to greater heights, are more talented than others.”
Ingolf also believes that, in the last decade or so, creativity has been eradicated from schools via the prioritization of tests. The problem, as he puts it in his own laconic fashion, is that we are actually putting our ability to compete at risk: “I, for one, can’t use the people that emerge from that kind of educational system.” Without being complete merchants of doom, it is obvious that as far as Denmark’s societal survival is concerned, our most successful drama guru does not believe we are heading in the right direction in terms of educational policy. There are quite a few people who agree with his view.
For a more extensive debate on the relationship between testing and creativity, Lene’s book Fornyelsens kunst - At skabe kreativitet i skolen from 2010 (The Art of Renewal: Promoting Creativity in Schools from 2010 Onwards) serves as a useful text. Here, by way of an interview-based investigation and by citing evidence from the work of other educational researchers, Lene asserts that the school system as it works at present carries the risk of undermining teachers’ desire to experiment with their teaching methods. It also risks producing students who are good at answering already assumed questions (those found in the testing system) but not necessarily good at imagining new questions themselves (for example, in imaginary scenarios).
She concludes that the less teachers improvise their teaching methods, the less the students themselves will witness improvisation and the more difficult students will find it to engage in experiments and improvisation. Having the will to experiment requires an awareness of how experimentation is carried out, requires that one has witnessed such experimentation and has been encouraged to improvise in daily situations. Professional standards and diligence are important, but there is a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and forgetting to cultivate in the school system students’ imaginations, fantasy scenarios, and abilities to weigh up different options.
Later in this chapter, we shall demonstrate in a more general way that it is not just Ingolf Gabold who takes a keen interest in Jacques Lacan. Researchers involved in studying pedagogic creativity have also in recent times revived their interest in Lacan and others. One such researcher is Anna Herbert, who has also shown how new neurological studies can help reinforce the significance of fantasies, dreams, role-playing, and the posing of scenarios in the creative process. But first, we will look at a few more examples of what it means to move along and be creative at the edge of the box.
TV CRIME SERIES AT THE OUTER EDGE
One of the best examples of creativity at the edge is actually the type of crime series for which DR Drama has become famous. But one shocking and fascinating fact is that Ingolf himself hates TV crime series. “Detective and crime dramas are some of the most boring programmes I can imagine watching. The police ones are the most boring of all. ‘Bang bang. You’re under arrest.’ Detective and police dramas are never off the screen these days,” Ingolf says. “When I began as head of drama at DR, we broadcast the Rejseholdet (Unit One) series, which, on the surface, was about the Police Commissioner’s Serious Crime Squad in Denmark. So that’s officially what the series is about. But what really fascinates people is psychopathy. In other words, the warped mind of the criminal and minor sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies. Outwardly, what we’re watching is the story of the crime investigators Fischer and La Cour, but it’s the things going on under the surface that are driving everything.”
Being active and creating at the edge is all about using a conventional concept – TV Crime or Crime Squad-type stuff– while actually telling a whole set of other stories underneath it all. Here, we have a concrete example of traversing the edge– namely, the edge of the crime genre. Otherwise, is there any reason we would all be cheering the arrival of yet another TV crime series? Or as Ingolf puts it, “We have access to hundreds of English-language crime series on the goggle box every evening. My point is that we hang in there as viewers precisely because DR dramas are not simply crime thrillers.” According to Ingolf, the insane element must be present; otherwise the crime genre is uninteresting.
We will leave Ingolf Gabold’s interview for now and pick it up again in the next chapter, but we will continue with our theme of working on the edge because – perhaps unsurprisingly – it pops up again in other interviews we have carried out.
OTHERS ON THE EDGE
We find a good spread of creativity along the edge of the box in other areas of our empirical research. At present, LEGO is being successful in its move to re-embrace its traditional brick and not stray too far away from this concept. Noma moves along the creative edge by using Nordic cuisine as its ethos and gradually modifying it. Royal Copenhagen, meanwhile, has designed a new porcelain series by enlarging the original blue-fluted design. Andreas Golder and Søren Rasted have been inspired by what was already in place and have, in that sense, worked along the creative edge.
We think it is worth dwelling a little on the LEGO example. First, let us take a short trip to the town of Billund to identify the elements surrounding the concept of the brick, or more precisely: how has LEGO succeeded in maintaining sales of the play bricks and renewing its brand on the basis of little bits of plastic?
AT THE EDGE OF THE BRICK
At LEGO’s headquarters in Billund, Jutland, we have arranged to meet three creative designers/directors and interview them on how precisely LEGO handles the creative process. The meeting had to be arranged six months in advance – it was that difficult to find a time when everybody could attend.
The interview takes place in “The Duck” at LEGO’s Idea House, which is a small meeting room. Some of LEGO’s instantly recognizable rectangular boxes are stacked in the corridor outside the meeting room. Some of them carry little stickers stating that the image on the box has not yet been approved. Here, in other words, are toys that children right across the globe will be dreaming about come Christmas. Those bricks are still selling. The LEGO designers explain this phenomenon later in the chapter. The underlying subtext to everything LEGO does is quality. The head designer – who is a trained carpenter from Norway and a subsequent Bachelor of Toy Design in the USA – tells us that he sometimes does the rounds in other toyshops to get ideas and inspiration. “But those other toy products don’t last long. Ours are pure quality.
“In a way, it’s remarkable that LEGO can continue selling something as simple as plastic bricks. Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that these small bricks have become part of the story we tell about ourselves. We buy LEGO because our parents bought it for us. Now we buy it for our children. LEGO has managed to become part of our national myth about the happy idyllic childhood and has slowly but surely spread this legend to other countries.
“Whereas, not so long ago, very few of our 120 designers came from abroad, today around 50% come from other countries. This is a big advantage, given that LEGO now sells all over the world. We need first-hand knowledge of how children’s myths in the respective countries are perceived and told. But of course, at the same time, we need to know what will sell right across national boundaries.”
THE PERENNIAL FIGHT
BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL
The designers tell us that most LEGO boxes do not just contain those famous bricks and figures but also carry a story about the fight between good and evil. If that game in your hand is only about bad characters – say, warriors fighting one another – then you are not holding a LEGO game. LEGO is about both sides of the coin – good and evil beautifully balanced and matched. Back in the meeting room, a little poster on the wall tells the story of the first wooden duck that was put on the market in 1936. The duck was LEGO’s first real product. In fact, the meeting room is called “The Duck” because this duck was manufactured in this area from 1942 to 1960. Today, this old factory caters for meetings and larger exhibitions on LEGO’s history. And the building positively oozes history and tradition. On the poster, it says that Ole Kirk Kristiansen, whose motto was “The best is not too much to ask for”, developed the duck. It also states that it was Godtfred Kirk Kristiansen who developed the play brick. Meanwhile, out in the corridor, there is a quote on the wall from present owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, which runs along the lines of “The past is our launch pad into the future.”
THREE DESIGNERS SPEAK CREATIVELY
The three design chiefs are Kim Yde Larsen, Torsten Bjørn, and Erik Legernes from the development, product, and design department. Cutting a long story short, we are interested in hearing their views on creativity as well as their explanation for LEGO’s current success. We tell this story over the coming chapters, but at this point, we will focus on creativity on the edge. What is clear is precisely the fact that LEGO is not just about selling play bricks – just as DR does not just show detective series. LEGO sells stories based around positive and creative play, and the company’s current success is down to its ability to be creative in that area around the periphery of the box.
At the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, the LEGO company experienced two periods of serious upheaval. In the interview, the designers explain the crisis by arguing that the company had moved too far away from the core LEGO values. Suddenly, there was way too much focus on technology, and a complexity imposed itself on the number of elements and colours used. This was highly detrimental to the company group as a whole. In truth, LEGO had become too creative and had overheated. As one of the measures taken to tackle the crisis, it was decided to purge the number of platforms, elements, and colours. The key concept, Torsten explains, was a return to core values:
“There are lots of different parameters at play as far as our success curve is concerned. The most important, however, is that we went back to our traditional strengths and values. We’d become afraid of simply accepting our own strengths and developing them. We shrank back and were fearful of believing that children around the world were still happy playing with common or garden bricks and had become convinced that what they really wanted was technology. Some of the products at the end of the 1990s were just too far from LEGO’s real raison d’être. There are a huge number of children out there who really like our bricks. We’ve got better at concentrating and focusing. We’re much sharper at marketing and interaction with businesses all over the world. Both as a business and a customer service, we listen a lot better as well. To be honest, we’d got a bit arrogant. And there were symptoms of this disease that weren’t dealt with.”
Essentially, LEGO had gone too far over the edge – or if you like, had moved too far away from the box. Now the company is systematically exploring the periphery of the brick concept and concentrating on one simple but central fact: that children still like playing with bricks. And also the fact that parents are happy to pay for quality products for their children. It is noteworthy that LEGO did particularly well during the years of the financial crash in 2009 and 2010. The designers explain this by pointing out that many parents appear to believe that neither financial crashes nor unemployment should be allowed to unduly affect their children and that the play brick was a familiar product to them. So, once more, we hear the lesson that it might not be good to move too far from that at which you excel.
Another important aspect of creating at the edge of the box is the ability and willingness to study and search the market for good ideas. We ask LEGO’s designers how they view their competitors and whether they allow themselves to be inspired by products developed and put onto the market by competitors. Erik answers:
“There’s no shortage of competitors and they, of course, see our success. Looking forward, we see competition coming our way. We watch the other big guys in the market very closely. How do they deliver their products? We’d also like to break into the new social gaming that’s going on. Don’t forget that we also simply buy the games our competitors make and we play with them. But we also check their business indices and market shares. Overall, we watch what’s coming down the track. Toys and games included. Then, of course, we need to watch those who are engaged in copyright theft and replica goods. That said, we can’t afford to become too obsessed with what our competitors are doing. LEGO itself has to be able to lead the market and take it in completely new directions. Just like with our ‘LEGO Games’, where we’re going into a different category and taking the initiative ourselves.”
An important part of creatively traversing the edge is watching other players in the market and sniffing out new trends and tendencies that are in the air about you. Yet we are not talking about simply running off and plagiarizing established masters; what we have here is a form of sampling, creativity at the edge. Another very interesting aspect of the LEGO interview is that the designers, just like the ethos of their product, stress the fact that they have been put on Earth to inspire people to create for themselves. In other words, LEGO is a business venture that thrives on the ability to facilitate and inspire creativity in its customers. Torsten himself uses the term “co-creation” several times, and they mention the elation they feel in having jobs that provide children with game and play experiences, with the chance to be creative.
This new approach often consists of combining things that are already available. So, being creative is about sampling, synthesizing, mediation, building bridges – or perhaps picking something up that was invented in the USA or Korea and making it work in Denmark. Being creative is about reimagining old knowledge and expertise. As Einstein is meant to have said, “You don’t always have to reveal where you got your ideas from.”
As the snapshots, stories, and insights from the creative workshops and organizations described in this book show, it is this form of sampling and creative traversing of interfaces that the creative groups have mastered. Expressed in more everyday language, we have to break down barriers and turn things upside down. Put briefly, we have to make a TV crime series that is not just another cops and robbers show and make a play brick that is far more than just another brick in the wall. We need to be able to combine knowledge and expertise gained from others and sample new methods and approaches. But at the same time, we need to carry on doing what we are good at and are successful with – such as the core attributes that the LEGO staff have described. One can also be too creative for one’s own good, an important point in an age in which creativity has been deified and worshipped. Or to use a rather heretical expression, we need to work smarter but not necessarily harder. The crisis at LEGO arose because things were overcomplicated, and there was an excess of innovation. The cure was to return to a simpler approach.