Trucking Toward a Better Future
Is creativity just a joke? We’re all more creative than we think.
Who likes a good joke? Imagine sitting in a hall as the community grapples with a curly problem that demands an innovative solution. Say the water supply has failed and will take months to fix.
“Okay!” says the facilitator. “Who likes a good joke?”
Wow. That wasn’t expected, but we like jokes and raise our hands.
“Wonderful,” she enthuses. “Now, who’s creative?”
Uh oh. Creative? Me? Cringe. No hands go up.
“Great!” She’s even more enthusiastic. “Have I got news for you, and it’s all good. If you have a sense of humour, you’re creative. Simple as.” Really? Why?
Well, creativity and jokes both exploit unusual connections between things. Think slapstick comedy: pie meets face. Think pun: two different meanings of one word, etc.
There’s a quirky expression for this: “AHAHAHA!” = “AHA!” (an idea), plus “HAHA!” (a joke).
And something funny will often spark creativity. Many people (myself included) laugh on first seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and for some it sparks creativity and more humour.
Cool eh?
(What are the “unusual connections”? Google ‘leaning tower of pisa ice cream cone’ to find out.)
So, let’s not cringe at the idea of being creative.
Serious fun: Needing creativity like never before
Solving unfamiliar problems requires innovation to find new solutions, and the higher the stakes, the more we need to crank up those creative juices. The climate crisis has both in spades: we’ve never tried to cool a planet before, and the stakes don’t get higher than ‘life as we know it’.
In 2018, NZ’s Productivity Commission identified innovation as “the nearest thing to a silver bullet” for tackling the climate crisis.
Add to that that fossil-fuelled transport equals dairy as
New Zealand’s greatest emissions challenge, and that mainstream hydrogen and battery trucks are still a way off, and we need to take every chance to lower our emissions.
Enter “Trucking Toward a Better Future”. If you read the introduction to the competition in the March issue or saw it on New Zealand Trucking’s social media or YouTube channels, you’ll know Dave McCoid and I are huge fans of people on the job, at the coal face, driving trucks. With 20,000 truckies on New Zealand’s road at any moment, you will have mountains of humour between you, mountains of insights, and mountains of creative ideas that deserve to see the light of day.
Feeling the fear and being creative anyway
Ideas don’t need to be worldshaking or pointy-headed to be worthwhile. Every day, truckies witness zillions of problems, each awaiting a remedy. And remedies that might reduce emissions are potential entries in the competition. Whenever I mention the comp, someone flags a related issue – such as trucks waiting on building sites keep their engines running just to keep the cab cool.
People are full of ideas waiting to happen, and a major obstacle is the fear of failure.
‘It might not work’, ‘someone smarter must have tried it’, etc. The great Kiwi Clobbering Machine is better at dumping on ideas than helping them flourish. But that’s another problem waiting to become an opportunity: let’s develop the habit of encouraging new ideas, and of not being too afraid to express our own.
Naturally, there’s always uncertainty over an innovative idea (otherwise, it wouldn’t be innovative), and so there’s a chance it won’t work. But imagine all the great ideas that might never have happened if they were canned before being tried. Imagine being on the design team of the fastest-ever airliner (2100kph Concorde), and being too scared to suggest dropping the nose so the pilots could see the runway as they landed.
Google understands this fear, and its innovation hub
“X” celebrates failure. If you haven’t already, check out Astro Teller on the TED stage.
So, give it a go! You have a sense of humour, so you also have good ideas, and you see countless things the rest of us don’t know exist. There’s no such thing as a bad idea, but there are millions of good ones waiting to see the light of day. Show us some.