This one is in response to an e-mail from someone wanting to know how to start a new project. This is always one of the more difficult stages of a project. It is rather like me rambling off the top of my head….hope you don’t mind too much…
I’m hoping to have another episode up this weekend on creative process and creative strategy, as touched on in my previous post. (This one’s burning on me right now…)
This continues to be a struggle. Creative strategy must always be fed by organizational or client strategy. If client strategy is a moving target, then it will create frustration, chaos, tension and dissonance for the creative team trying to meet the client’s needs. It is critically important for the leaders of any creative organization to close the door on client strategy once creative strategy phase begins.
How?
Documentation.
There must be a specific and (choir singing and blinding flash of light) unchangeable (gasp) articulation of client strategy as a first step in any creative process. I know this is a tough sell to clients who often want to delve into the executional as much as the strategic, but they’ve hired YOU for a reason – YOU’RE GOOD AT WHAT YOU DO! It is important to give the creatives within your organization boundaries to operate within, and if client strategy changes consistently over time, you will frustrate and burn out your creatives and will ultimately not get their best work. (Who wants to keep trying to grab jello?)
Here’s a fun little vid the brilliant folks on my team put together a while back spoofing some of the late night leadership gurus…enjoy.
(The file is about 20mb…)
The Accidental Creative is slowing moving up the podcasts charts on iTunes. It’s at #22 in business right now….(which of course means it’s probably something like #27,567 overall….) Very cool. Thanks for your support – it’s nice to know people are listening.
Thanks too for all of the cool feedback and encouragement, as well as the ideas for future podcasts.
If you’ve not read Donald Norman’s incredible book “The Design of Everyday Things”, I highly recommend it. It’s applicable not just to industrial design freaks among us, but also to designing systems, experiences and anything with which people will interact. Phenomenal stuff, really.
…when they are people-centric. Systems only serve creativity when they have at their heart the unleashing of people toward the organizational objective. In fact, I would argue that the organizational objective is best served by putting the right people in the right roles, then simply letting them make and do and be. It is the role of the leader in this situation to establish the boundaries within which people exist, however, the real role of the leader is ensuring that the right people are in the roles to begin with.
This is a struggle. Our tendency is to start with the organization and work backwards. It’s to find ways to slot people against a pre-defined objective. One way that organizations become truly unique, however, is through ensuring that you have the right people in the right place and then allowing them to grow, develop, and truly take command of their role.
Pie in the sky? Think Google.
Google creatives spend up to 25% of their paid time working on non-organizational-determined projects. Google is smart enough to realize that most of its innovative ideas will come from unleashing its people to do what they are passionate about, even if it seems to have no organizational benefit. Middle managers hate this because “control” is their thing. “Efficiency” is their thing. But these are not the real objectives of organizations, are they? Things that are GREAT always trump things that are efficient in the end. Period.
Do you want to survive, or do you want to thrive?
