Circular Thinking: Feeling Mode ① (Material for Ideas)

In the late 1960s, when I was a child, my favorite food was "tagliatelle." I often ate it at the Italian restaurant "MIKI※1," located on the second floor up a staircase, past an ice cream shop and a furniture store with giant chairs, at the entrance to Yokohama's Motomachi district. The flat pasta in a white cream sauce with mushrooms, sprinkled with parsley, was so delicious, so delicious. The menu name like a spell, the rice croquettes I ate alongside it, the kind lady owner, and the dimly lit interior. I think I was a cheeky little kid saying things like "My favorite food is tagliatelle," but my five-year-old memory remains vivid to this day.

 

 

I even tried recreating it myself using canned mushrooms...
Hmm, it just wasn't the same.

 

 

Our home cooking was unusual from the start. My mother, born in 1934, often made "moussaka." It wasn't made with lamb like the authentic Greek dish, but it was a gratin layered with eggplant, white sauce, and meat sauce. We ate this with plain white rice, but my school friends didn't understand this "moussaka." Even when I asked my mother to make more ordinary dishes, she couldn't understand me. I was a returnee child whose grandfather's work took me to kindergarten in Switzerland and university in America. My lunchbox sandwiches were peanut butter with jam and banana. Dessert was trifle. Our meals remained strangely unconventional.

 

 

 

My mother made our family's moussaka for me again after a long time.

 

 

 

 

I used to complain quite a bit back then, but now I'm grateful for that experience. I believe I'm good at food-related work (at least I think so), and that's surely thanks to the accumulated experiences from my childhood.

As my senior at Dentsu Inc., Kotaro Sugiyama, said: "Ideas are things you recall" and "Your ideas are things you thought of because you are you." Diverse experiences are indeed powerful allies in idea generation.

The ingredients for ideas are specialized knowledge (about products and targets) and general knowledge (all of life's experiences). Specialized knowledge can be absorbed as needed, but general knowledge can't be acquired overnight.

"Circular Thinking," a model of the unique thought process passed down in advertising agencies, is a methodology for creating "new perspectives (= ideas) that solve problems toward a goal." The purpose of its first stage, "Feeling Mode," is to prepare these two types of knowledge.

Then comes "Scatter Mode," where every possible scenario is thoroughly considered. In "Discovery Mode," the idea is obtained. "Polish Mode" reconstructs the whole based on this new perspective. As concrete measures are released to the world, the absorption of new knowledge begins—meaning "Feel Mode" starts again. "Guruguru Thinking" occurs as these four modes form a continuous spiral... but this probably doesn't make much sense, right?

 

 

For details, please refer to the textbook on 〈Ideas〉

 

 

 

Anyway, starting this time and for a while, I'll be talking about this methodology for generating ideas. It's a bit of a tough subject, so it might sometimes be hard to swallow, but I'll do my best to make it as easy and enjoyable to read as possible.

Enjoy!

※1 Unfortunately, MIKI closed down quite a while ago... probably about 30 years ago.
※2 From Kotaro Sugiyama, Creative Mind, Impress Japan, 2011.
※3 Detailed in my book, The Textbook of Ideas. Developed as a personal idea generation model based on Professor Ikujiro Nonaka's SECI.