Three Magic Words To Better Creative

A week ago, I had an amazing time mentoring some great students at One Club Creative Boot Camp. It gives area college students (Chicago, in my case) a chance to work with industry professionals to create a campaign for an actual client. For us, it was Wing Stop.

When I met with my team, they were on day two of developing their campaign. After they bounced their ideas off me, I helped critique their ideas more closely with three words:

"How might we...?"

Three simple words. A simple exercise. It's designed to dissect ideas to make them stronger. As a result, we scrapped their first campaign and started over.

We started with a basic question: How might we get college students to eat at Wing Stop?

One answer: We offer free samples...

Which followed up with: How might we get free samples to students?

The question took us to creating an interactive outdoor event. The great thing was seeing the gears turning and lightbulbs going off in the students' head.

How might we get student to this event?

How might we get them to participate?

How might we get students to visit Wing Stop afterward?

By challenging each step with a "how might we," they found themselves going in directions they never considered and started identifying stronger ideas, while letting go of weaker ones – even concepts they were in love with. As they discovered, learning to let go was half of the lesson.

Consider asking "how might we" as part of your creative arsenal. I do every day.

Registration is still open for Creative Boot Camps in New York (Apr. 9-11) and Miami (May 14-17).