Deh Bastos, partner and executive creative director at Map Brasil, took the Share stage at Gramado Summit to teach about creativity
Curated by Share, the 2024 Gramado Summit has a stage to talk exclusively about communication and marketing, titled the Share stage and, this Friday (12), the space welcomed Deh Bastos, partner and executive creative director at Map Brazil.
During the panel “How to be creative in practice”, the executive gave her views on creativity and gave some tips to those present on how to exercise the skill. “I talk about creativity as a business, because we create to sell something but, in addition, it must be useful to everyone, all day long,” she said.
With a professional life based on the act of being creative and currently being one of the main names in the advertising market, the executive also drew a parallel between creativity and childhood.
For her, children are a source of creativity and people lose their skills due to the standards imposed by adult life. Despite this, Deh Bastos believes that this can be restored.
“The most creative being in the world is the child, so everyone who has ever been a child has the technical capacity to be creative. Children are creative because they have three essential factors, which are curiosity, plenitude and energy. We grow up and lose these capabilities due to some standards that adult life imposes on us”, he explained.
Furthermore, the executive also warned that tiredness is the main impediment to a creative mind and that the famous “creative block” is the result of several things that are learned throughout life and that cause people to lose their repertoires. .
In this regard, Deh Bastos compared these lessons to the barnacles on a boat, which accumulate on the vessel’s hull over time and impair navigation speed.
“There is a profession as a barnacle cleaner to revamp this boat so that it can reach speed again. We need to do this exercise of understanding what happened to make us less creatively productive, like fear and the capitalist model of life which doesn’t give us space and time to make mistakes, causing us to always have the same behaviors”, highlighted the executive.
Creativity in practice
One of the panel’s objectives was to provide some creativity tips for the participants in the conversation and, to this end, Deh Bastos used the space to point out some possible techniques for creativity to begin to be practiced.
Among the suggestions was a traditional term in the marketing market, brainstorm, or as the executive likes to call it, “brainstorm”. In this case, she suggests that people brainstorm in writing.
“For 10 minutes, choose to diverge from people. Take a piece of paper and write without thinking and without filtering your ideas. After that, it will be time to converge, that is, start reducing the possibilities until you reach a point”, suggested Deh Bastos.
Another suggestion was that people should have a “waiver” of generic references, that is, use things that people like outside of work, such as sports, cinema and other things, as inspiration for the solutions that need to be found. “I need you to keep in mind the things you like and don’t use in your daily work. Collect references, save them and leave them available when you need to use them”, added the executive.
Finally, the third technique was “feedback”, composed of a chain of cause and effect where information about the past influences the same phenomenon in the present, that is, for Deh Bastos, feedback is a place for those who have already gone through that situation and that concept meets the creative process.
“It doesn’t matter what idea you have. What makes it great is the fact that it has become practical. If this idea didn’t make it to the streets, it’s not good and, often, they don’t make it to the streets. street because people listen to opinions as if they were feedback”, he stated.
The executive also highlighted the importance of feeling in the creation process, pointing out that creativity comes from a place of feeling that needs to be worked on. “I believe that creativity is muscular, so it hurts. It’s not pleasant and it’s not an Excel table because there’s no way to create without feeling it,” she added.
Creation manual
Deh Bastos also adds the role of teacher to her CV and took to Gramado Summit 2024 a kind of practical manual for exercising creativity consisting of five steps: defining an idea, questioning, understanding, adapting and testing.
At that moment, the executive counted on audience participation to try to find a solution to a common challenge among companies, which is people management. Using the techniques presented previously, ideas were debated based on the steps mentioned above.
Regarding the ideas presented, Deh Bastos warned that creativity is not about invention, but about solutions and that, to reach this moment, it is necessary to look around and look for answers that have already been given to similar situations.
“Has something similar already been done somewhere to solve a problem similar to ours? Stop trying to invent the wheel. Things are given, look to the side, broaden your perspective to see how this issue was solved elsewhere”, concluded the executive.
