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EPIGRAPH

‘I am a Woman Phenomenally.

Phenomenal Woman, that’s me.’

MAYA ANGELOU

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

THIS IS FLEX

FLEX YOUR MIND

FLEX YOUR WORK

FLEX YOUR HOME

FLEX & THE BODY

FLEX YOUR FUTURE

AFTERWORD

References

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

THIS IS FLEX

Flex is a manifesto for living and working on your terms. It means looking at the established, rigid ways of doing things and asking: ‘Is this really working for me?’ If the answer to that question is ‘No’ then read on, because this book is for you.

When we learn how to flex we gain a superpower that allows us to challenge what is holding us back and reinvent the rules for a smarter, happier life. Because things are changing for women across the globe. We are getting married and having children later, if at all. Dual-income families have replaced the traditional template of man as breadwinner and woman as homemaker. Technology allows us to work differently and understand ourselves better.

But the old systems still persist. We’re continually bashing up against inflexible structures that were built by, and for, men. We are trying to do everything, but following a rulebook we didn’t write.

Cartoons of working women depict us as harassed multitaskers with eight octopus arms, juggling food, lipstick, laptop and wine. Who actually wants to live their lives like this? Who wants to be a jittery octopus lady constantly time-pressed and on the verge of meltdown? Not me.

I’ve been thinking about flex for a long time. I’ve worked flexibly for 20 years in many different guises – part-time, remote working, through a portfolio career and freelancing. I am now 40, I run my own business and I have two daughters under 10, a husband and a small snappy dog – so I am right in the eye of the storm.

In 2016, I founded a cultural insights agency called Starling with my business partner, Adam. At Starling, we help brands understand how society is changing, so they can be more relevant. We speak to the smartest academics and the most radical thinkers. We ask ‘why?’; we listen out for what’s being ignored; we help our clients build better futures. And so I decided to use this approach to look at the old structures that are restricting us, and come up with shiny new solutions. Researching how women are working and living today turned out to be an awakening for me.

I have encountered a huge number of people who have found different ways to flex. These pioneers of flexible working may have initially been motivated by the need to manage childcare and responsibilities at home as well as progressing in their careers, but they are also unrecognized revolutionaries who have been chipping away at the systems that society has outgrown. They refuse to accept the status quo, they challenge handed-down wisdom and they change the game for the rest of us. Quite simply, they are phenomenal, and we need to learn from them. In each chapter, I’ve featured a story from one of these pioneering flexers.

I wrote this book because I’m inspired by them, and I think the image of stressed, juggling womanhood is past its sell-by date. I don’t want to join the army of knackered octopus women, desperately hashtagging #wineoclock and marching under the banner of ‘having it all’. I don’t want to be told I have to be good at everything, all of the time. Friendship, leadership, parenting, Pilates, make-up, public speaking, cake baking, sodding tennis. It’s exhausting, it’s not cool and I’m over it.

More and more businesses in different sectors are recognizing the fundamental importance of creativity in their employees, whatever their role, yet we seem to be funnelling ourselves into tighter and more restrictive routines and thinking patterns. When we prioritize the wrong things – like long working hours over friendships; exams over mental agility; climbing the established career ladder over cutting our own paths – we diminish and inhibit ourselves and our possibilities. Similarly, when we ignore our bodies’ moods and cycles, going against the grain of how we feel or what we really want, then we can only really feel like we’re failing, living half-lives.

Flex is a creative, rebellious, badass way to live, because it means looking at routines like the nine-to-five, and social norms like women bearing the brunt of the emotional load at home, and bending and re-shaping them. When you flex, you invent your own template, according to your own ambitions and your family’s needs, often without precedent on a truly blank slate.

So to flex we need to be brave. We need to take a long look within and ask, ‘How can I work to the best of my abilities at work, while being the mum or partner or friend I want to be at home?’ And once we’ve figured out what exactly flex means for us as individuals, we have to find the confidence go out there and ask for it. Even when it goes against our current climate of pointless meetings, presenteeism, the strictures of nine-to-five and even society’s expectations on us as women. And I want to show you how. The five chapters of this book ask what the concept of flex looks like through different lenses: work, yes, but also our minds, our homes, our bodies and finally our futures.

We know that the world is changing fast. Rigidity in a world of change means something is going to break, and that thing could be you. And think about it: many of the jobs we were trained for in school won’t exist in a decade. The more robotic our behaviour, the more vulnerable we are to the robots taking our place. So flex has to be, for all of us, a movement built on creativity, bravery, anti-convention and innovation.

When we learn to flex, we reinvent the rules for a new future, and it’s one in which we can all thrive.

‘Think left and think right, and think low and think high. Oh, the Thinks you can think up if only you try.’

DR SEUSS

FLEX YOUR MIND

My day job is coming up with fresh thinking and new ideas for brands. I love ideas. I love the first sniff of one, the gut feeling we’re onto something. The hunt for more evidence and the inevitable period of doubt and being ‘lost in the forest’. The joy of getting it down on paper. I love all of it.

Flex is about inventing new answers to old problems and picking at the threads of handed-down wisdom to see what unravels. It means having a low boredom threshold for the ‘same old, same old’. It makes us challenge the status quo and ask difficult questions, like: is this the way we should be living and working? Are the norms we’ve all bought into making us happy? This is opposite of dogma and rigidity. It is a sort of cognitive yoga; an exercise for the mind that stretches our horizons and challenges our biases. It requires bravery, leaps of faith and empathy. And, annoyingly, it’s not easy . . .

SKILL OF THE FUTURE

The World Economic Forum predicts that creativity is one of the top three skills workers will need in the future. The other two are complex problem-solving and critical-thinking. The more we flex our creativity muscles, they say, the more we future-proof our skills.

Some days at work, my partner Adam and I are creative ninjas. Other days, we talk about last night’s telly and what we’re going to have for lunch. Creativity isn’t effortless, there’s no app for it, but it’s vital if we are to find new and exciting ways to change the things that are restricting us. In this chapter, I’ll dig into the key ingredients for creativity, so that we can unlock it in ourselves. I will look at how our environments have conspired against us to make us inflexible and I’ll show how we can foster the right conditions for creativity to thrive.

Today, whether you’re a coffee barista or a CEO, everyone hungers to be creative. The New Yorker dubs it ‘Creativity Creep’ saying: ‘Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative – how else, we think, can we become fully realized people?’¹

Part of this is because we have more time to spend on being creative. As Walter Pitkin observed back in 1932, thanks to medical breakthroughs and time-saving devices like washing machines, ‘Men and women alike turn from the ancient task of making a living to the strange new task of living.’ And living these days is a creative endeavour. Social media has fetishized visually beautiful lives. Even if we’re making a packed lunch for our children, it’s got to be inventive, stylish, Instagrammable.

Instagram is full of creativity quotes from smart people. ‘Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.’ ‘Creativity is intelligence having fun!’ ‘You can mimic a result. But not the creativity.’ These all sound nice and inspiring. You can imagine the fist pumps, the head nods.

But what does creative thinking actually mean?

EVOLUTION & DAD JOKES: WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

I want to start by looking at a classic case of creativity, a leap in thinking which for ever changed the conversation for humankind: the Theory of Evolution. The fascinating thing about this idea is that it occurred to two different people, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, independently. For two separate thinkers to reach the same place at the same time is a real rarity.

So what did they do in order to get to their big idea? In an essay published in 1959, American sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov looked at what their creative processes had in common to try to find the key to creativity.²

Firstly, they travelled. Darwin took a five-year, round-the-world trip aboard HMS Beagle in 1831. Wallace went to the Amazon and Rio Negro river basins in 1848, and then, in 1854, to the Malay Archipelago.

Secondly, both observed unfamiliar species of plants and animals and how they varied from place to place. Darwin famously went to the Galápagos Islands to study finches, tortoises and mockingbirds. During his travels in what is modern-day Indonesia, Wallace collected more than 100,000 insect, bird and animal specimens, which he donated to British museums.

Thirdly, both read Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, which predicted that the human population would grow faster than its ability to feed itself. This proved to unlock the puzzle for both men. Reading about overpopulation in human beings sparked their ideas on evolution by natural selection. That’s how Wallace and Darwin made their creative leap: by connecting two seemingly unconnected concepts.

Cross-connection may be the key to creativity. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of creativity is ‘the use of imagination or original ideas to create something’, but this seems like quite a stretch. Is there really such a thing as pure originality, an idea that has never been thought of before? But smashing together two existing ideas which have never been connected – that is a breakthrough. That is what makes creative friction and sparks something fresh.

‘Smashing together two existing ideas which have never been connected – that is a breakthrough.

That is what makes creative friction and sparks something fresh.’

As the psychologist Steven Pinker has observed, that is how jokes work. In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler says we laugh when one idea, or frame of reference, sits next to a second, which doesn’t initially seem to make sense in the context of the first. So here’s a joke: Lady Astor supposedly said to Winston Churchill, ‘If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your tea.’ He replied, ‘If you were my wife, I’d drink it.’

Why is this funny? Well, clearly no one wants to be murdered. But when we gear-shift to suicide as a welcome escape from poor old Lady Astor, it becomes funny.

This slamming together of two unexpected frames, where the latter is surprising and causes you to reconsider the former, is called a paraprosdokian (from the Greek ‘against expectation’). Paraprosdokians are what the rest of us might call ‘dad jokes’. Like Stephen Colbert’s: ‘If I am reading this graph correctly – I’d be very surprised.’ And Groucho Marx’s: ‘I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.’

Koestler’s The Act of Creation looks beyond comedy to art and science. Creativity in these disciplines, he thought, is also about exploring the relationship between two unrelated ideas. He calls this ‘bisociation’. For him, creativity is the bisociation of two self-contained but incompatible frames of reference. In short, a dad joke.

IT’S HARDER THAN EVER TO BE CREATIVE TODAY

But it is not as simple as that. We’ve become really bad at bisociation. Creativity may be higher on the cultural agenda, and it might be a key skill for the future, but the truth is, it is now harder to be creative.

Why is this? Today, we simply don’t have the bandwidth to be creative. Our technology both overwhelms and distracts us. Every 24 hours people are bombarded with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information – that amount would overload a laptop within a week.³ We can’t calmly absorb all this information and metabolize it into beautiful creative thought.

Digital overload is making us act like Dug, the talking dog in Pixar’s movie Up. Every few moments, he interrupts himself mid-speech, ears pricked, nose quivering and shouts, ‘SQUIRREL!’ Dug is all of us, except our squirrels are tweet storms; siren calls from abandoned, half-filled online shopping carts; the jerk of the leash when we are tagged in a photo.

So we’re too distracted to be creative. But even if we manage to focus, our own creativity – our ability to bisociate – is under threat from algorithms. When Amazon nudges us to buy a similar book to the one we’ve just clicked on, when Netflix cues up yet another film ‘with a strong female lead’, when social media echo chambers only feed us news that is palatable to us, we’re being pigeon-holed. We’re being funnelled down a narrow path. Instead of the quirky, interesting people we imagine ourselves to be, we’re becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, living in a bland monoculture. All of this amounts to a navel-gazing outlook (or in-look) which keeps us thinking in the ways we have always thought. We are stuck in a monotonous spin-cycle of our own experience, which is a profoundly uncreative place to be.

THE STATE OF PERMA-DISTRACTION

Gloria Mark studies digital distraction at the University of California. She has found that it takes about 23 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. So that quick minute spent on Twitter or Facebook isn’t just 60 seconds. It’s 24 minutes down the drain.⁴

‘Everyone thinks they are right all the time about everything,’ innovation strategist Faris Yakob told me. ‘We can’t see anyone else’s point of view with clarity. We assume they are idiots and racists. It’s got to the point where I can’t emotionally understand a position that is different from mine. I tend to like reading books about history and politics, but I’m forcing myself to read more fiction. Reading fiction helps you develop empathy and understand better where people you disagree with are coming from.’

We also bristle at any opinion that differs from our own. Ian Martin, writer on political comedy The Thick of It, called Twitter a ‘shrieking tunnel of fuck’. In the midst of this polarized battleground it is harder than ever to find common ground, to flex our positions and move forward. Without respect for another’s perspectives or empathy for their experiences, we can’t make connections, bisociate and progress our thinking. Remember, the dictionary definition tells us creativity is: ‘the use of imagination or original ideas to create something’. Ouch. Cultural zombies can’t be creative, can they? Shrieking trolls won’t open their imagination, will they? How can we escape our ‘tunnel of fuck’ and find the fuel for empathy and inventiveness?

STEREOTYPING + CREATIVITY

Evidence suggests that lack of empathy for others is indeed a block to creativity. A 2012 study by Tel Aviv University found that people who ‘believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences’ did not do as well in creative tests as those who saw racial categories as ‘arbitrary and malleable’. So those who pigeonhole racial groups have ‘a habitual closed-mindedness that . . . hampers creativity’, the study authors wrote.⁵

BECOMING T-SHAPED

The creative industries are always on the hunt for what they call ‘T-shaped’ people. The vertical bit of the T – the I – is depth of experience in a specific subject. The horizontal bit of the T is a broader range of experience across subjects, which encompasses the capacity to peek over the top of parapets, to collaborate, to find links between different disciplines. Essentially, the horizontal bit of the T is the knack of Koestler’s bisociation. So this magical T-shaped human combines the vertical skill of rigour and the horizontal skill of empathy.

But it’s really hard to be T-shaped these days. The vertical is being fuelled, meaning we are being made more I-shaped by the algorithms that feed us more and more of what we already know. But the horizontal – empathy – needs our active attention. Cross-pollination requires us to break out of our echo chambers, broaden our horizons and open our hearts and minds to the new.

‘Notice things, be curious, talk to people, figure out new ways of doing things.’

Travel is one way to do this. Remember both Darwin and Wallace were committed explorers. Faris Yakob and his wife Rosie are nomadic creatives who travel around the world working for their consultancy Genius Steals. Travel is very important to them. Faris told me: ‘Habituation makes you blind. It turns your brain off.’ Rosie says travel turns it back on again. ‘There’s a discomfort to being in new places,’ she explains. ‘It means you need to notice and be curious. The more you travel and the stranger the situations you are in, the more likely you are to expand your surface area and serendipitous things might happen.’

It’s not enough to simply go on holiday. Two weeks on a sun lounger in Majorca won’t cut the creative mustard. You have to do what Rosie talked about: notice things, be curious, talk to people, figure out new ways of doing things.

Not all of us can afford the luxury of travelling in order to boost creativity, of course. But many of us can at the very least get out of the workplace and go for a walk. Research from Creative Equals, an organization that champions diversity in the creative industries, shows that just 9 per cent of people have their best ideas in the office. Fans of the walking meeting include Arianna Huffington, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama.

The first reason to go for a walk is that we need to move more. We’re living in sedentary times, sitting on average, for 9.3 hours per day, longer than we are sleeping.⁶ The second reason is to boost our creativity. Researchers at Stanford University asked people to think up new uses for common objects while sitting at a desk or walking. Over three-quarters came up with more ideas while walking than sitting.⁷

At Starling, Adam and I walk to client meetings rather than taking the Tube. It means we leave in good time and don’t rush. We use the journey to discuss the meeting ahead, or just chat. Some of our best ideas and conversations happen on walks – a time which otherwise would be a deadzone of getting from A to B.

Walking is second nature. It doesn’t require concentration. It allows the mind to wander. The state of the wandering mind has been shown to be fertile for creative ideas and flashes of insight. When we don’t try hard to have an idea – sod’s law – it comes to us.

HOW TO BE T-SHAPED

1. Travel. And if you can’t travel, be open to new influences wherever they might be – notice things, be curious, ask why. Take a new route to work or school. This will force you to see things slightly differently and confront you with new inputs.

2. Go for a walk on your own, and let ideas sneak up on you. Or with someone else and talk them through.

3. Take a photo each day. This will nudge you to observe, to look harder at everyday things you may otherwise ignore and find new perspectives.

4. Break your echo chamber. I have scrutinized who I follow on Twitter and my aim now is to follow diverse, challenging voices and avoid the loud, obvious ones.

5. Be empathetic. Try to think flexibly and openly about ideas that feel odd and jarring to you.

6. Clash these ideas together, make connections, join dots. Tell dad jokes.

7. Read books. Fiction, non-fiction, anything. Just keep reading.

8. And read things you wouldn’t automatically choose. Take inspiration from Stack. Stack is a subscription service that delivers a different specialist magazine each month, on anything from art to tennis.

9. Be OK with having creative droughts. Don’t panic. When this happens, see points 2 and 7.

10. Take the pressure off yourself, be in the moment, don’t force it. That’s when the magi will happen.

PINNY GRYLLS’ FLEX STORY

Pinny Grylls is a documentary filmmaker and children’s author

‘My worst ideas come from sitting on the internet and researching things. You are at a computer, your eyeballs are staring at the screen, there’s a digital wall between you and a real story, which has already been mediated several times. I want to get to a new story, a new perspective, not one already told by someone else.

You need to get off your arse and actually physically meet people. Ordinary day-to-day conversations and events can be doors into new ideas and films. An example of this: I was buying a second-hand car and had to pick it up from Stoke-on-Trent. It was going to be a boring task – collecting the car, signing documents and whatnot. But I was sitting in this guy’s living room, and he told me he works as a hypnotist, specializing in doing past-life regression with traumatized people who work in the fire service. These people had ordinary lives, they were not novelists or professional creatives. Yet, under his care, they pop into another realm and become someone else. They tell stories of being a nineteenth-century farmer committing a murder, or a priest in Tibet. I was inspired to make a film about it and it became a Channel 4 documentary.

I try not to impose a story on the world. The way I work is a collaboration between me and the person who wants their story to be told, who wants it to be witnessed. That’s why you need to meet people, to get the magic, the intimacy. You don’t get it from a screen. You have to be with them physically.

My tip is to give yourself permission not to work. Go on a road trip to buy that second-hand car. It may be a more interesting day than you thought. Don’t force yourself to sit at a screen and come up with ideas. Do the washing up. Read a story to your kid. Do ordinary things, and your brain will go somewhere else. Take pressure off those moments and let ‘being’ in your life be enough. When you take pressure off, that’s when you find things.

I was diagnosed with a two-centimetre wide benign brain tumour which was right between my eyes. I had radiation therapy and they had to scan it every six months. We took time off work and school and went on a family campervan road trip around Europe. We thought, ‘We don’t know what the future is, so we want do this now.’ Recently, I had a scan to see whether the radiation had worked. If it hadn’t, I needed a dangerous operation to remove it. It had shrunk by 25 per cent, I was given the all-clear and it was like being given my life back.

Until that point, I didn’t realize I had been in stasis, not being able to plan anything. But ironically, this had allowed me to be more in the moment and to live! We cram so much into our days; we pressure ourselves. We’re a culture that is geared up for quantifiable achievement and status. It’s hard to get out of that way of thinking. We need to be patient, to give ourselves permission to dream and not fill every moment of downtime. We need to ‘be’ and believe it doesn’t matter if nothing creative comes out of it. It’s enough being alive. That is the ultimate creative act.

LIBERTY & RESTRAINT

It’s tempting to see creativity as relying on complete freedom and expansiveness. Many have found that the opposite is true. Creativity can thrive when there are restrictions and barriers in place. It is these roadblocks which can force breakthroughs. David Ogilvy, the advertising guru known as the original Mad Man, once said, ‘Give me the freedom of a tight brief’. What did he mean by this?

Limits give you clarity, focus and purpose. They also give you a feeling of safety, and safety gives you the confidence to explore.

BEAUTIFUL CONSTRAINTS

Adam Morgan and Mark Barden’s book, A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages, refers to a study of children’s playground habits. In a playground in a wide open field where they could run anywhere, children tended to stay in the middle. When faced with complete freedom, it feels more reassuring to be near the other kids, to keep the status quo. However, if you build a fence around the field, children will explore right to the edge and use the whole space. Ironically, in a contained, safe space, you can roam free.

So think about fences for your creativity. Put in some ‘beautiful constraints’ and you might push yourself beyond the status quo. When Olivia Laing wrote her novel Crudo, her ‘fences’ were that she would write every day and she wasn’t allowed to go back and edit. She finished it in seven weeks. She said: ‘Because there was no intention or plan, I wasn’t self-conscious and I wasn’t worried about trying to get perfect sentences, it was just smashing them down as fast as I could.’

If you are a procrastinator, your ‘fence’ could be a strict time limit on the task ahead. If you are the sort of person who makes long lists about what you need to get done, reduce them to one bullet point. This is your creative objective for the day.

Constraints also make you work harder to be creative and push you to excel. Jerry Seinfeld bans himself from jokes containing sex or swearing – it’s just too easy to get a laugh. These limits raised his game and upped his comic creativity. He says: ‘A person who can defend themselves with a gun is just not very interesting. But a person who defends themselves through aikido or tai chi? Very interesting.’⁸ He treats his stand-up sessions as scientific experiments, analysing the type and length of laugh he gets for each joke and using that analysis to shave off a word, honing his routine until it is pitch perfect. For him, the creativity lies in what’s left out.

If you have creative paralysis, write a list of everything this is NOT. So if, say, you are planning a hen party for a friend, write down everything she would hate first of all. These are your guardrails – and you can create freely within them.