by Todd Henry
The tension to continually improve weighs on individual creatives as well. Because most of us are managing multiple projects simultaneously, there is always something we could be doing right now to move our work forward. It takes an incredible amount of willpower not to work when we are technically off the clock. Additionally, many of us love the work we do and would probably rather be working than doing any of the many other things we could be doing. We’re actually choosing to work perpetually! We’ve adopted a working lifestyle. It’s as natural to us as blinking and breathing.
In his masterwork Creativity, in which he profiles the life and work of brilliant creatives across a broad spectrum of fields, researcher and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, “One thing about creative work is that it’s never done. In different words, every person we interviewed said that it was equally true that they had worked every minute of their careers, and that they had never worked a day in all their lives. They experienced even the most focused immersion in extremely difficult tasks as a lark, an exhilarating and playful adventure.”
It’s true that there is often such an affinity for our work that we would choose it over other activities, even recreational ones. But in our pursuit of value creation it’s possible to overwork our minds without obvious signs of distress. We don’t have the same aches and pains that may accompany a day spent running a marathon or chopping wood. As a result, being aware of how mental overexertion is affecting us is often difficult, until we suddenly realize that we’re not creating at the level we once did or that we’re just not as excited about our work as we used to be.
You’ll learn some ways to mitigate this time-versus-value tension in the chapters on focus, energy, and hours.
The Predictable-Versus-Rhythmic Tension
In a smaller organization, each worker wears multiple hats, and the order of the day is all about getting things done, regardless of how. But as the organization grows, some degree of predictability becomes necessary—to allocate resources, hire appropriately, and make reasonable promises to clients or customers. Consistent and predictable production makes it possible to analyze how efficiently individuals and systems are performing across the organization—as the company gets bigger, there is more to protect, and the pressure to not screw it up only grows over time.
But this need for predictability can begin to take a toll on those responsible for doing the work. While it’s possible, even necessary, to measure the relationship of resources to output in highly systemized, repeatable work, like sales or manufacturing, it’s nearly impossible to do so reliably for creative work. After all, how can we predict when business-changing insights will occur? How do you create a system that ensures that only the best ideas are executed, and that the not-so-good ones fade away? Because these problems depend on the discretion and insights of individuals, tension is inevitable.
This push toward systemized and predictable creativity can sometimes cause creatives to feel like we’re expected to perform like machines. As a result, though we resent it, we often begin to behave that way. (No worries—we’ll learn how to mitigate this in later chapters.)
Every organization begins as an advance force and ends up as an occupying force.
Despite the negative effects on creative output, the organizational tendency is to gravitate toward predictable but still profitable productivity. One CEO told me that he calls this “bunting for singles”: It’s better to get on base consistently than to swing for the fence. Sure, swinging for the fence may yield a few home runs, but it’s also going to result in a lot of strikeouts. In many organizations, victory is won and measured over decades, even if this is never outwardly expressed. Ultimately, the organization’s instinct is to protect the ground that’s already been taken rather than take new ground. Every organization begins as an advance force and ends up as an occupying force.
This is fine, as long as the expectations are consistent. But then we hear a mandate to be “innovative” and “shake things up.” We feel the pressure to do something brilliant. To change the game. These mandates require unpredictability, risk, and unbalanced effort. They are directly contradictory to the systems the organization has set up, and we ultimately begin to feel the tension.
A highly productive creative process isn’t at all predictable and is directly opposed to the “bunting for singles” ethic. In effective creating there are peaks and troughs. There are seasons of incredible productivity and there are seasons in between. But over the long term, a healthy, rhythmic creative process is capable of creating an exponential return on resources. The problem is that we often don’t experience these exponential returns because we—or the organization—are not comfortable with the sometimes less productive times in the short term. In other words, in the effort to cut off the troughs we inadvertently cut off the peaks as well.
The rhythmic nature of a healthy creative process can be very uncomfortable for managers because of the constant pressure from the organization to be efficient. Efficiency doesn’t allow for peaks and troughs, so managers sometimes try to ensure that there is at least the appearance of productivity at all times.
▶ SNAPSHOT PRODUCTIVITY
Imagine that, at some point in the next week, I show up randomly at your workplace and take a photo of you working. You don’t know when I will appear, but I am going to base your salary and next promotion on the content of that snapshot. If I catch you at a time when you are especially productive, things will work out well for you. If I happen to catch you on a coffee break, you might want to start packing your things.
Does this sound a little silly and arbitrary? Of course. But a very similar thing happens within organizations. Because of the drive toward predictability and efficiency, there is a constant and worried eye toward the productivity of employees. But the way many organizations measure the productivity of creative workers often has more in common with how they would measure the productivity of a copier than of a person.
As I was standing in the back of the room after speaking at a conference, a design manager for a software company spotted me, got up from his seat, and made a beeline in my direction. From the look on his face, my first reaction was that he was angry about something I’d said. As he got closer I could see that he wasn’t angry, just emotional. He expressed that this “machinelike” expectation was the norm within his organization but that he hadn’t previously been able to put words to it. He had felt many times that the appearance of busyness was much more important than the actual work that was getting done. Preservation and predictability had become the norm, and expectations were set upon very recent performance versus contribution over time. He was excited to apply the practices I’d just taught in my keynote as a way to mitigate these pressures.
His experience is not unique. Many managers subconsciously take a snapshot of how someone is doing right now and use that as the metric for the worker’s overall performance. What is potentially devastating is when the organization catches the creative at a peak of productivity. From that point forward there is an unspoken expectation that he will predictably produce at this high level of output. Everything he does in the future will be compared to this high point, and if he doesn’t hit this mark he is deemed to be in a slump. For organizations, managers, or individual creatives to expect these kinds of peaks continually is to violate the very dynamics that allowed for this kind of high-level productivity to begin with!
▶ THE EFFECTS OF THE PREDICTABLE-VERSUS-RHYTHMIC TENSION
Because of the predictable-versus-rhythmic tension, expectations continue to rise. In the effort to make productivity predictable to the organization, our current work is benchmarked against our previous work. Over time, as a matter of self-protection, creatives begin to conserve their energy and take their shots where they seem most effective rather than pour themselves fully into their work, because they don’t want to have to sustain such a high level of output over time. As a result, they plug along, meeting their objectives, but knowing deep down that they
could do better work. This can cause them to feel disconnected from the work, from their coworkers, and from the organizational mission. They may even begin to feel contempt for the organization and feel used or entitled. (A word of caution: this is not the organization’s fault. Organizations are made of people, and the people involved are typically doing what they think is the right thing for the overall organization. It’s not personal, though it can feel intensely so.) The solution to all this is to regain a sense of mastery over time and focus, as we’ll discuss in later chapters.
For leaders, expectation escalation can happen without our even realizing it. A key solution is to have regular conversations about expectations in order to ensure that everyone really understands what’s expected. A few questions to include in these conversations are the following:• Do you know what’s expected of you right now? Tell me what you think are your top three priorities.
• What expectations do you have of me, and am I meeting them?
It takes guts to ask for the truth, but simply having these short, scheduled conversations can help teams avoid many of the pitfalls of the predictable-versus-rhythmic tension and can allow all members of the team to feel free to engage fully and creatively in their work.
The Product-Versus-Process Tension
The organization is primarily concerned with the finished product, but 99 percent of what we do as creatives is process. In fact, many creative jobs are fundamentally oriented around perpetuating processes rather than generating products. There are rarely times when we can hold something in our hands at the end of the day and say, “If I hadn’t been here, this wouldn’t exist.” Instead, we are often one of many value-add laborers who contribute layers of creative work to a given project. Responsibility and accountability for our projects, especially in larger organizations, are often spread quite thin.
What’s more, the final result of our creative work is typically judged subjectively, and by someone other than us. As a result, being able to gauge in the middle of the process whether what we’re working on will please our “judge” can often be difficult. We frequently engage in the entire creative process and emerge on the other side with a finished product only to hear our client or manager say, “Yeah . . . I kind of get what you’re going for here, but it’s just not quite there yet.” It can be difficult to understand what to do with this kind of input, and chances are that the manager is probably struggling just as much as we are for a direction on what to do next.
Yes, this is to be expected. We’re being paid to do a job. But over time this dynamic can tempt us to gravitate toward doing whatever will get approved rather than taking risks and exploring as we’re creating. We do less than we’re capable of because we don’t want to deal with the consequences of disapproval at the end of the process.
One editor described this as “never knowing what’s over the next hill.” She said that she’s more than willing to work hard, but that it’s difficult to fully expend herself creatively when she’s not certain that her work will result in approval, especially when objectives are less than clear. As a result, she tended to ignore her own creative discretion and would instead just do whatever she thought was likely to “make the cut.” I was able to help her build specific conversations about objectives with her manager into her weekly rituals to ensure that the manager was staying in touch with her process, rather than just checking in at the beginning and the end of a project. These simple checkpoints helped her engage more fully and in confidence, knowing that project milestones and objectives were clear.
In many ways, this process of developing ideas is similar to the childbirth process. First there is a brief and ecstatic moment of “conception.” We have a flash of insight when two or more idea fragments combine to form a new and better one: the “creative accident.” Although this is typically the most attractive part of the process, it is only the very beginning. The idea hasn’t really taken form yet; it’s still just an impression in our mind. Many ideas never get past the moment of conception because they aren’t acted upon.
Assuming that we decide to move forward with our idea, there will next be a period of gestation in which the idea takes form. This is the real work of creating. We gradually develop the idea, building on the initial inspiration, refining it through multiple iterations. We will often collaborate with others. This can be a very challenging time. There will be highs and lows. We may go through periods of alternating excitement and loathing for our work. Success depends on our persistence and our willingness to keep refining and iterating even when we feel like moving on to something new. Many teams fail because they are unable to persist.
Commitment to the process is critical in this gestation period. While many organizations treat it like a linear progression toward the end product, great creative work requires risk and experimentation, which means some degree of unpredictability. For example, when an advertising agency lands a new client, the project is thrown into a pipeline with defined steps and a specific time frame for accomplishing certain tasks. It’s a very linear process: establish objectives, set the scope, generate ideas, develop concepts, pitch concepts to the client, go through approvals, production, et cetera. Because of the organization’s need for a degree of predictability, these pipelines must be in place. But the tension is that each of these stages of the pipeline is filled with experimentation, risk, and trial and error. While to the organization “develop concept for ABC campaign” is a two-day process, the artificial establishment of a time line doesn’t account for the unpredictability of what happens during this time. In other words, it doesn’t account for the true dynamics of process, and thus the creatives feel the tension to be brilliant, but to be so within the arbitrarily imposed deadline.
The “conception” and “birth” of our ideas are small bookends to the real work of creating—the process.
Eventually, if we stick with it, we will have a finished product. The “birth” of our idea as a finished product is the end result of a very long process and, as with a newborn, rarely looks like what we imagined it would. The process often takes us to new and unexpected places in our work. The “conception” and “birth” of our ideas are small bookends to the real work of creating—the process.
Why is this important? Because many organizations spend a lot of energy both on generating ideas and vetting the finished product, but very little time and effort creating healthy systems and expectations around the bulk of the work, which is the long process between idea and product. This is why Accidental Creative spends so much time working with creative teams to help them establish an “idea culture,” meaning a culture that values the process of perpetual idea generation and development, rather than one that’s driven solely by the end product.
▶ THE EFFECTS OF THE PRODUCT-VERSUS-PROCESS TENSION
It can be very challenging to spend days or weeks in a process only to have your finished work judged in a thirty-minute client review or a sit-down meeting with your manager’s manager. There are many decisions you had to make in order to arrive at the finished product, but most of those decisions are invisible to your judge. The only results they experience are the finished product and whatever words you can use to justify why it ended up the way it is. This is, of course, what you’re being paid for, but the experience of having weeks of work judged in a matter of minutes is de-motivating to say the least.
One friend relayed to me that the internal creatives in his company call the decision makers “vampires,” because they tend to suck all the creative energy out of the room. In a project-review session there is a defined review process—from juniormost to seniormost, in rank order—when offering opinions on the finished product. By the end of these sessions, creatives are often left with a lot of feedback on their finished product but little understanding of the mind-set that led to the feedback. In other words, the conversation focuses more on product than on process, which contributes significantly to the tension between the two in this particular organization.
There are a few side effects that result from working in the three tensions discussed in this chapter. In order to do your most effective work, you must understand how these side effects derail your creative process and how to spot them before they take root. That’s the subject of the next chapter.
3.
THE SIDE EFFECTS: DEALING WITH THE ASSASSINS OF CREATIVITY
Imagine that one day you hear a knocking in your car’s engine. Even though it’s annoying, there seems to be nothing mechanically wrong with your car—it still drives, stops, and turns just fine—so you choose to ignore it. But one day, while on a busy highway, your car suddenly breaks down in the fast lane, and there’s no median to navigate to for safety. You’re unexpectedly in a very precarious situation. Though it seems to have happened all of a sudden, it all began when you chose to ignore the obvious warning signs several weeks before.