{CHAPTER 3}

PASSION AS
THE DRIVING
FORCE OF
CREATIVE
PROCESSES

The American creativity researcher Paul Torrance wrote in 1972 that creativity is a “natural human process that is motivated by a strong need”². The last part of this statement in particular is something with which most readers will agree. We are creative when we need to be. It is thus that we, as citizens of the world, currently find ourselves in a situation in which we have the opportunity to be creative as never before. Never before have we been confronted by such massive problems: we are in the middle of financial turmoil while wrecking the climate, the world’s population is skyrocketing, and we are involved in war after war. The opportunity to sense necessity and see the possibility for creativity is unprecedented. But how do we get the desire and the need to be creative?

One of the interview subjects in our book who most clearly expresses that the basis for creative processes can be a strong sense of drive or passion is Peter Stenbæk, creative director at the We Love People advertising agency in Copenhagen. Peter’s series of advertisements for a mobile phone company, concerning Polle from Snave (a small town on the Danish island of Fyn), ended up taking Denmark by storm and being transformed into a feature film. Peter has also made music videos for the pop band Aqua as well as a crazy series of “112%” advertisements for Toyota. Peter was driven by the need to escape the little town in the country where he grew up and moved to the big city. “I wanted to get out of the village,” he says. This, in other words, is a story of both suffering and desire, a true Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.

The interview with Peter takes place at Galleri V1. Galleri V1 is located in the old butcher’s shop in Copenhagen’s former Meat Packing District. We sit talking beneath the neon lights while the gallery owners haul up paintings from the basement for the next day’s exhibit. After the interview, we end up at a bar on Halmtorvet that serves cheap beer.

² Torrance is the originator of creativity tests for children, which are still in use. He was of the opinion that creativity can be taught by instructing children in divergent thinking and motivating and rewarding them when they display creativity. In Chapter 11, we will take a closer look at the possibility of promoting creativity in school.

BEING LIKE ANDY WARHOL

Peter describes how he dreamed as a child of being like Andy Warhol. Imagining being someone else and dreaming oneself into an alternative world became his driving force, and with a school librarian for a father, he had all the necessary books and comics at home for entering into the imaginary and alternative world. Peter experienced not being like the other boys in the south of Fyn, who played football and drank beer. Instead, along with his good friend Claus Skytte, who is today Peter’s partner and strategist at We Love People, he lived in an alternative world of crazy ideas, jazz, red wine, graffiti, school magazines, and school radio. It was here that he discovered that crazy ideas could flourish.

That early friendship has now become a business. We Love People was established in 2003, after Claus and Peter had spent more than 20 years in the advertising industry. The company has big clients such as DR, Falck, the Tryghedsgruppen, Danske Spil, Nordisk Film, and Coop. The focus seems to be advertisements that combine sales and acting, where we as consumers live within the advertisements’ universes. Polle from Snave took Denmark by storm, getting people to both smile and think of mobile phones.

For Peter, the whole thing began with him being permitted to create an internal advertising bureau for the Ecco Corporation – as he puts it, “maybe because their CEO was pretty green and trusting at that point.” Here, he was able to romp around and do some quite wild things in an environment characterized by security and trust. But what else might lie behind Peter’s ability to create effective advertisements?

As far as Peter is concerned, the most important thing is that he loves what he does: “I always fall in love with the project.” Indeed, it is not just the project but also the people for whom he works since Peter is driven by a deep love for people and their eccentricities. It may be precisely this love that allows us to see ourselves in the advertisements and to regard them as more than just attempts at manipulation and sales.

Peter explains his creative process: “One thing is getting started. After that comes all the hard work.” At the same time, he emphasizes that he tries to turn everything into a game, that fear is the worst thing, and that he makes use of his curiosity and openness. Peter constantly seeks to clarify this balance between play as the fundamental element and hard work as the underlying precondition for the entire story. “I wasn’t happy going to school, and I fooled around a lot, but it’s also lucky that the thing I love is actually useful.”

Another important factor is that the advertisements are, indeed, effective: “We solve people’s problems. In this day and age, people need an effect, really concise problems, and a lot is being required from the very start. Now we need to find something fun, make the hard sell, and reap the love.”

To do this and to get the best out of people, explains Peter, the most important thing is to listen. And then he gathers together the threads. At this point, Peter – who is also a composer – draws on his experience with music: “Gathering the threads together is like improvising musically,” he says. “And so I gather details, fantastic details, that come to drive the narrative. I build on top of information, start one place and build from there and put things together.” Peter does not simply believe that this type of sampling and synthesization is a creative technique; he also believes that it is specific to his generation: “We are a sampling generation. You get answers, and you don’t need to build the whole thing from the bottom up. We can get by with sampling. That guy who can’t draw, well, he’s come a long way regardless.”

There may thus be something generation-specific about creativity. Peter feels that it is not necessary today to be able to do everything from the bottom up. The question is whether this has ever been the case. Sampling, however, pops up in a number of our interviews, so it may indeed be true that we are dealing with a temporally typical phenomenon – namely, a kind of sampling creativity.

“The idea for Polle came down in Ørsted’s Park in Copenhagen. Suddenly, I had this revelation about a guy named Thorvald. I wanted to make a short film, but the film consultant said to me straight out, ‘No one wants to hear dialect in films anymore.’ So I was just burning inside with this project. But then Ulrik Bülow, CEO for Sonofon, came along. They wanted to make an advertisement, where they wanted a complete universe, like Duckburg in Disney’s Donald Duck stories. They were, of course, the first ones to use mobile phones. And it went from there.”

So, the ideas may well be there, but they can meet with resistance. If we are to learn from Peter’s story, then the lesson it teaches is that creativity requires having the right basic materials at hand, a strong urge to be creative, a skill at sampling, and a willingness to seek out and be open to the opportunities for creativity. The films about Polle, which initially encountered opposition, were nevertheless realized because Peter did not simply give up on the idea. Instead, he kept it alive until he met the right person at the right place, who could help turn the idea into reality.

Peter is good at taking up all the ideas that are available. He samples them expertly in a postmodern collage and then places them within his own processes. The key, according to Peter, is being able to search for that which is incomprehensible – something that has been thought but that has not been anticipated. “That’s the most fascinating,” he says. At the same time, an important element of his story is that Peter loves his work: “We love what we do, and we love the people for whom we work. That should be the hallmark of everything we do.”

A PARTICULARLY CREATIVE PERSONALITY?

Peter Stenbæk’s story is of interest for a variety of reasons. As is the case with a number of the interview subjects in the present book, it seems that those who succeed at being creative love doing what they do. They speak about working passionately and extensively with what they care about. As hinted earlier, Peter’s story also has echoes of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of what it is like to be a swan born among ducks. Peter sought out and found his identity. How might we understand this in a more general sense?

Another researcher to have written about creativity on the basis of interviews with people who are acknowledged for their creativity is the Czech-American Professor of Psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His 1996 book Creativity, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention is among the first systematic attempts to clarify creativity in practice. Those interviewed for the book (91 people in total) are all recognized as creative within their respective fields of art, literature, and research. In other words, it is very much a retrospective investigation inasmuch as the interview subjects are already recognized. This is also the case for our book as well as for much other research into creativity. It is, quite simply, difficult to study that which does not yet exist; hence we often base our accounts of creativity on that which has already entered the world.

Csikszentmihalyi’s studies show that it is characteristic that the interview subjects enjoy their work. They say that they work neither for money nor for acclaim but solely because they gain satisfaction from what they do. They have invested themselves in what they do; they are not self-serving, although they may be a bit difficult to reach when they are really working.

Csikszentmihalyi has previously worked with the concept of “flow” (of being fully occupied with something and losing consciousness of oneself), and it may be the experience of flow that creative people note when they immerse themselves in their work. The interview subjects have also typically managed to be in the right place at the right time. They have been good at seeking and nurturing networks, and they are quite aware that they never could have achieved recognition without the help and support of others. Many of his interview subjects explain that they managed to end up in a place where others had already done the groundwork in terms of creating the fundamental knowledge and where the zeitgeist had been on their side. This is also something that Peter Stenbæk stresses. He received support at the right time as well as freedom and room to play – in addition, there can be no doubt that he fits into the zeitgeist.

Csikszentmihalyi’s interview project suggests that, according to the interview subjects, a prerequisite for being creative is familiarity with existing knowledge in the field in which one works. The creative individuals have worked with other masters in their fields, offering them a large amount of luck and a desire to transform their fields and perhaps even rebel against them. One must manage to be in the right place at the right time with a suitable idea – timing or practical reason thus play decisive roles in creativity. Creativity does not truly manifest itself unless others recognize the new idea. This means that efforts to win recognition can be arduous. The Danish designer Louise Campbell, whose name has entered the design canon in the Danske Designere book series at the age of just 37, does not attempt to understate the harshness of it in an interview with the Jyllands-Posten newspaper: “People don’t give a damn when you’ve finished Design School – there’s no need for you at all. And a max of only one out of ten design ideas ever makes it. The market is tough, ice-cold, and cynical, and you get beaten up so many times that a lot of people, understandably, just quit.”

Few ideas win broad recognition as being creative, and those who work to achieve this need to be able to weather the resistance, defeats, and potential financial uncertainty that will sometimes confront them.

But it is not just about an individual’s ability to resist. Peter Stenbæk explains that he had to escape the village in the south of Fyn and make it to the big city – make it to a place where he had room to breathe, figuratively speaking. Csikszentmihalyi also discusses this association with what he calls “creative places”. He does this because he is working on the basis of a systematic understanding of creativity as a relational concept. In a slightly more technical manner of speaking, this means that he regards creativity more as grounded in associations between people, areas, and places than as a matter of intra-psychological qualities within individuals.

He discusses, for example, Florence in the period of 1400–1425 as a creative place. There was a desire or urge to surpass all others, the Roman architectural techniques had been rediscovered, and huge quantities of money were in circulation due to the power of the Medici family and a profusion of banks. The Medici family attracted a range of artists, authors, and creative personalities in tandem with the emergence of a highly industrious business community. Everyone breached boundaries, exchanged ideas, and allowed inspiration to come from any and every source, leading to what later came to be described as the Medici effect. The period and the town of Florence itself were also later regarded as incubators of the Renaissance. One of the most famous individuals to benefit from this environment was Leonardo da Vinci – artist, scientist, inventor, and philosopher. Csikszentmihalyi’s hypothesis is that the most creative companies or institutions are those in which knowledge is best organized, most accessible, and easiest to exchange. This could, for instance, involve various professional groups being permitted to work in close association. As we shall see later in the present book, this point is raised in the cases of the LEGO toy company and the hummel sporting goods company. This can enhance the accessibility of knowledge and ensure broad support for the products that are being developed. According to Csikszentmihalyi, many businesses today are investing substantially in getting employees to be creative and come up with a wide range of new ideas, yet this work risks being wasted if one does not also invest effort in converting the ideas and employing workers who are good at doing this. This can result in tension between the company’s opposing rationales, where it is not always possible to commit time to that which is truly promising because customers may be difficult to convince or because the state of the market minimizes investments.

Csikszentmihalyi also defines a number of general attributes of what he calls “creative personalities”. This seems to us to be a case of describing specific ways of acting. We will conclude this chapter by listing them. We can not only learn from the list but also use it to summarize what has been key to Peter Stenbæk’s enormous effectiveness and creative ability.

1. The interview subjects have a great deal of energy and are prepared to work hard, for long periods of time, and in a focused manner.

2. The interview subjects possess great cognitive ability but also a sort of naivety in the sense that they wish to work with things over a long period of time and tend to question things that others might take for granted. They are, according to Csikszentmihalyi, characterized by divergent thinking, although some such people eventually lose their curiosity because they always succeed.

3. All the interview subjects have good intuition and evaluative abilities. In other words, they can distinguish a good idea from a bad one.

4. The interview subjects explain that they often swing between play and serious work, between responsibility and irresponsibility. They have fun much of the time, and they take chances that could tend toward the irresponsible.

5. The interview subjects have excellent imaginations or senses for fantasy, combined with strong understandings of reality. They can create new realities because they know where there is a need for something new.

6. The interview subjects are apparently both extroverts and introverts. They can seek out networks, and they can work in isolation.

7. The interview subjects seem both humble and proud. They know that they are standing on other people’s shoulders, but they also know that they have contributed something special and that others are following their work and perhaps even further developing it. If they were only occupied with themselves, they would be unable to work hard on anything else.

8. The interview subjects are androgynous. That is, they are both masculine and feminine simultaneously, or their ways of life involve both masculine and feminine characteristics.

9. The interview subjects have been both rebellious and dependent. They assert both that one must draw inspiration from others and that one needs to be sufficiently rebellious to break away from traditions to establish one’s own style.

10. The interview subjects manage to be both passionate and objective. In other words, they are deeply engaged in their work yet can be critical of themselves and know their own limits.

11. The interview subjects speak of great sensitivity and fragility, for instance in terms of criticism, while also taking great joy from their work. The archetype of the abusive artist is an expression of this means of relating to the world, with an artist attempting to cope with this sensitivity by limiting it or perhaps even expanding it through the use of drugs or alcohol.

Next, we will take a closer look at these issues by considering Bjarke Ingels’ account of what drives him.