New Ideas
I remember being at art college and a peer turning around and saying “well, it’s all been done before anyway – there’s nothing new”. I remember being in conflict with the statement – I get the same pang when I hear bartenders say that we should learn from chefs as they’re more advanced than the bartending world, or that it’ll always be more important as “people need to eat, they don’t need to drink”. Or when people rank and compare personal issues. Often I feel a visceral retraction from these statements – and not just because I enjoy playing devil’s advocate, but because I fundamentally disagree with them.
What is it to create something new, and in fact, is it still possible? I’ll dispense with the tautology that every event is new – each nuanced detail of a complete picture dictates that any event – however small – is never repeated. That seems juvenile when talking about a creative world. I believe not only is there plenty of scope to create something new, it is something we need as creatures – and as industries. But I mainly want to challenge the fact that creating something new is something that belongs to “creatives” who go into isolated rooms and turn a blank canvas into Guernica. It is something you need to build structures around – and systems for – to enable everyone to be creative.
There’s a growing propensity across industry, society and politics to fetishise the past and believe in the good ol’ days. Not only is this an ostrich-like reaction to change that will only leave you behind, it is not reflective of what we need as a species. We get bored of monotony, and it’s the reason we develop office pests, pranksters and destructive habits – every human needs diversity and stimulus that’s not saccharine and on repeat. But we also see through falsity very quickly, and again with a tautology, it’s not new if it’s not authentic and honest. Nostalgia was originally identified as a psychological defect – a sanitised yearning for a false history and faux forgotten happier time. Of course it can be used to create common ground and reference shared perspective – especially in our world; the sense of smell, our primary tool in consumable stuffs, is the most powerful driver for memory association.
Risk, self-awareness, empathy, confidence, sensitivity all play roles in innovation and the choice to create something new. But frustration, boredom, fear, necessity all have spurned their own shunts; war has led to many of humankind’s most bold innovations. But most don’t channel each of these tools, or don’t take the time to become aware of our personal prejudices. I used to talk about fear and failure (instead of fear of failure) being important learning tools, but they are part of a suite of things we can use to create new perspectives when we take the opportunity to take stock of our own shortcomings.
So where does this leave things? Well just as putting a wig on your cat does not make a new (yet hilarious) creature, making your Negroni with mezcal doesn’t create a “new classic” – but neither should it stop the path of new creations. Using nature’s genetic creative tools (addition, deletion, substitution, etc) does give you variety, but we should be engaging much more cognitively not just throwing shit at the wall.
The part I wished people copied from Dandelyan and Lyaness was the creative process. We didn’t have fancy equipment, we didn’t have a crazy set of ingredients no one else could get – we just put in a framework to aim to do something different. The choice to not navel gaze, and the choice to empower the team and use their personal and shared perspectives gave us a whole new suite of ideas to look at, and each was different to what Iain, Alex, James and I – or whoever – would have come up with ourselves. It gave us scope to create something new as we chose to take that path, and because we used ideas not from within the common, repeated sphere. It’s a methodology I am immensely proud of.
So newness isn’t a fallacy. And neither is it mythical and unattainable, nor something to dismiss, undermine and bury – it is something that is fundamental to not only our industry, but us as creatures. Putting in structure to explore it more fully, by taking stock of your hangups personally and as a business, and by empowering your staff to have a voice, this will all lead to a wave of newness. It will help your business, and your staff retention, but it will also help us give stability to our industry by forcing us not to keep looking back from a world that’s changed. It will stop us from believing the hype and creating things for our guests’ needs, not for an insular audience in amongst our slice of our peer group.