Poetry, street photography and being a nosy bugger: Chris Turner's intellectual inspirations

For me, inspiration comes from sources far and wide and I am always receptive to anything that could relate back to an audience, brand or brief. So, cheekily I’d like to start with some honourable mentions.

To the comedians of the world who can distil insights into LOLs, filmmakers whose stories have the ability to tell deeper human truths than those that come out of focus groups, and to the many curators of the internet who help filter gems from the noise (shoutout to Kottke.org and WebCurios to name a couple).

Okay, now to my three:

Street photography: Taking notice of the overlooked

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” A beautiful quotation from a fantastic photographer, Dorothea Lange, which resonates with me.

Keen observation skills are a strategist's best friend, and a camera is a great tool to hone that skill. It gives you licence to go out into the world, go down streets you would never normally go down, look up, and spend time amongst people going about their lives; all in the pursuit of a fleeting moment that perhaps reveals something about what it means to be human.

How someone may display status:

How we may show tenderness to one another:

Or a chance encounter that perhaps reveals our national obsession with dogs:

As a photographer you are analysing the vast data of life and it is up to you to decide what to frame, what to exclude, what to highlight, what is important and what is superfluous. In that way, it is very much like what we do as strategists.

Books: Finding the Universal in the Particular

James Joyce stated that “In the particular contains the universal.” I’m not going to pretend I have read James Joyce, but I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. Individual experiences often reveal universal truths more profoundly than statistics can. 87 per cent of people may be passionate about music, but it isn’t easily actionable in a meaningful way. However, books can offer a deeper peek into the human psyche and I often try to find a book that relates to a topic around a brief.

A few moons ago, I was a child-free man working for Mothercare and clueless about parenthood. At the time I read Nobody Told Me: Poetry and Parenthood by Hollie McNish, which offered an intimate perspective on the myriad challenges, highs and lows, and raw experiences that make up the journey from pregnancy to young motherhood.

That book led to the insight that when a baby is born, a parent is born too. And if we, as Mothercare, could take care of parents, then the parents would be better placed to take care of their baby. That book became my guide in navigating that account offering valuable insights into the care that parents need, which lead to work that new parents really valued.

Eavesdropping: Listening to the soundtrack of life

I’m ashamed to admit that I am a perennial curtain-twitcher and habitual eavesdropper. I always have an ear out for what is going on in other peoples' (strangers’) lives. You could say I’m a nosy bugger. I prefer to say it is a way of tapping into the unfiltered thoughts, concerns, jokes, anecdotes, and joys of everyday people.

A few months back, I was sitting opposite two women on the train. They were talking about dating. More specifically, they were assessing the compatibility of a potential match based upon how his love language interacted with her horoscope’s rising moon. They were talking fast and very fluently in a language that was alien to me.

I have previously dismissed this world as a bit cuckoo and not to be taken seriously - the Forer Effect in full action. That all may be true, but this conversation made me reappraise the notion that it shouldn't be taken seriously. Later, I discovered that horoscopes and rising moons had shifted from being fringe to much more mainstream—a shift that I found fascinating. Sometimes it pays to take the ear phones out and tune in to the soundtrack of life. You never know when a fresh perspective might come your way.