Give your boss an ideagasm

Saturday’s episode of The Thick of It gave fans of the political satire an alarming insight into how our politicians come up with their ideas — or at least how the series’ creator, Armando Iannucci, imagines they do.

The Tories packed their bags for Thought Camp and a spot of “policy jamming” with communications guru Stewart Pearson, who forces unreconstructed MP Peter Mannion to spend his Easter sitting cross-legged in a circle for a bit of “imagineering”.

Back in Whitehall, Mannion’s Lib-Dem understudy meets an attractive young economist with a mind-blowing idea to spend £2 billion of public money on a new bank. “Do you wanna have an ideagasm?” she asks the minister.

The episode had Iannucci’s creative buzzwords flying around Twitter all evening, and, judging by the new-found ubiquity among the political press given his wonderful creation “omnishambles” from a previous series, it won’t be long before “policy jamming” and “ideagasm” become part of our national vocabulary.

But is there wisdom in Iannucci’s mockery? Clive Lewis, who is CEO of Illumine Training, which specialises in teaching companies how to think creatively, says it isn’t all madness.

“We’re not interested in sitting cross-legged in darkened rooms,” he says, “but there are practical, pragmatic techniques to get people away from their normal ways of thinking.”

Can he teach a young banker how to give his boss an ideagasm, I ask? “The key for that is to know about the creative process,” he replies, “and how to disrupt how you normally think, so you get used to doing that on a day-by-day basis. The brain thinks in patterns, so we have to change those patterns either by provocation or association. That opens the mind to the breakthrough ideas.”

Lewis adds that the ideagasm shouldn’t be the holy grail of a good brainstorm or meeting, because they are a relatively rare occurrence. “Of course, once in a while someone will come up with a breakthrough idea that is a bolt from the blue. But normally good ideas come about from being developed, knocked about and refined until they are great.”

And will going to Thought Camp help with that process? Or one of the wacky meeting rooms in London such as The Future Gallery or The Window Venue, “a great imagination venue” in Islington whose catering is “fully approved by the Vegetarian Society”?

“We’ve chosen to situate ourselves a long way from the pink and fluffy end of the market,” says Lewis. “But one of the things that changes how we think is the environment we are in. Taking people off-site makes sense,” he believes, “but you need to back that up with demonstrably practical tools and techniques.”