Our Head of Stragic Planning, and former government statistician (among many other talents) Stuart Smith recently took part in an IPA
study.  They used a sample of about 100 people across ‘agency
management’ in the industry. 

They are interested to see if top advertising people are both logical and lateral, against the
national average of professionals.

The survey consisted of an afternoon of tests
and exams.  An exam to test your logic, then one to test your
creativity, then a personality test.  It’s the same sort of thing that
many companies (e.g. in the City, for the government, etc.) make you
do.  It’s a standard set of tests that many thousands of people have
now taken, across many industries.

It was the first time Stuart had done exams in about 15 years.  Quite scary, actually.
He got the results back yesterday, along with a detailed feedback session.
Apparently he’s in the 89th percentile on
logic.  He thought he’d done quite badly on the logic tests, so was quite
pleased with that ranking.

Guess how he did on creativity?

Well – it turns out that he’s in the 97TH
PERCENTILE on creativity.  That means that only 3% of people in the
country are more creative than Stuart! So, he says we can’t call him Mr Logic any more. We probably will, though.

Joking aside, this rating for creativity will come as no surprise to anyone who’s worked with Stuart.