Two years ago, I decided it was time to do something really big with my career. My daughter was growing up, my consultancy business had also grown nicely but reached its limit in terms of my own capacity. It was time the whole consultancy team needed a new challenge.
So I awarded myself a month to be as imaginative as possible. This involved clearing whole days in the diary and challenging myself to think of a brand new idea for a business with social purpose. This is the top motivation for all my work.
Whenever on my own I thought about what I knew about, what I was good at, what I didn't like and then took the sum of those thoughts and forced myself to imagine possibilities. It was mentally exhausting and until then I had never considered myself to be a creative person.
However giving myself permission to be as mad and wild in my thoughts as I liked gave me many exciting ideas. As it turned out, walking my dog was my most successful creative space. I then sounded the ideas out with my wonderful colleague Alex and she became a key part of the process. Without her unstinting and positive support – no matter how mad the idea seemed – I doubt they would have ever left my head. She gave me courage to think my ideas might come to something.
The result of this painful but exciting month was that I came up with around six big ideas. Four were ditched, one was parked (still a good idea but not just yet) and one was marked as our future. One idea. Huge potential for all the team.
Something so simple, utterly relevant to all our work, something I knew a lot about. This was the start of something big for us.
Why organisation with social purpose?
For many years our work has reflected my own personal interests and voluntary help in the community. I work with youth services, education, charities and social enterprises and although this generates less income, it feels crucial to reflect my own desire to help improve public and community services. It is also essential that anyone joining our team must have that same ethos. We all need to earn to look after our families, but I think it sits much more comfortably if there is genuinely good purpose behind those earnings.
It was clear to me that the new Big Project needed to be community focused, but also to operate effectively enough to create income to feed into the separate charitable arm that I wanted to benefit from our work. As someone who has brought in millions of pounds of funding to schools, youth clubs and so on, I desperately wanted to be on the other side of the table – dishing out the money to smaller groups – particularly youth groups – who don't often even have the expertise to apply for grants, but do have the drive to run a youth club. I want to explore ways of giving, with less emphasis on "academic" bid contributions.
How do you find the space to be creative?
I think it's challenging for any of us, all hectic in our busy bubbles, to become engrossed in the minutiae of the day. We are ground down by endless emails, demanding families and hectic commutes. When was the last time you really gave yourself permission to think? Once I opened the creative floodgates, it hasn't really stopped. I have become far better at finding solutions to problems, because I allow myself to think creatively – to imagine "what ifs" and let my imagination run wild.
It had been an amazing journey for me – and I think for the core team I work very closely with as well.
It's essential to find that space to think and that can be tricky. However, if you are serious about making a big change in your life, then even half an hour out of your work schedule will help, as long as you have no means of communication – no phone or email or Twitter. Just you and something to write on. I would also suggest you write down any idea at all that comes to mind – however silly it may seem.
To prepare your brain to focus start some lists with these questions:
• What am I good at doing?
• What do I like doing?
• What am I experienced at (either in personal life or in work)?
• What do I not like doing, or not good at (then make sure you avoid these)?
If you can, find someone who is positive about your plan to help you. This isn't the time to be modest! Be honest about your skills and also your dislikes.
Don't cross anything off your list yet. This process is just to get your thoughts flowing and focusing you on yourself – after all, the ideas need to come from you!
What else do you need?
• Space
• Time
• Blank page
• Someone open-minded to bounce ideas off (you don't want someone immediately dismissing your big ideas – even the rubbish ones)
• To be less orderly and organised than you might normally be
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries," wrote AA Milne in Winnie-the-Pooh.
Useful material I used
• Marketing for entrepreneurs by Jurgen Wolff (this paperback had some simple tips that I found really easy to follow)
• An empty page on my smartphone to write down new ideas
That's it for now – good luck with the creative thinking. I'll be back in a couple of weeks, but please do let me know how you get on.
Sally Higham is the director of Higham Consultancy Services Ltd
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