by Todd Henry
Similarly, whenever we choose to ignore the warning signs that we are violating the natural rhythms of the creative process, either by choice or because of our work environment, there will be unhealthy side effects. We can often go for weeks at a time without feeling them, but we will eventually begin to experience these drawbacks: apathy, discontent, boredom, exhaustion, frustration, a general lack of ideas. Working in the create-on-demand world, expected to be constantly on, you probably experience each of these side effects on a regular basis. Just like your car may continue to run for a while in disrepair, you can be very effective in short bursts, even violating your natural rhythms for a time, but eventually the negative side effects will catch up to you in the form of these symptoms.
While creative workplaces are very complex and there are many dynamics at play, there are three damaging side effects that serve as broad categories for all the others. I like to call them the “assassins” of the creative process, because they are stealthy and they effectively neutralize our creative capacity. They can creep into a work environment almost unseen and begin to undo our capacity to perform at our best. Once you understand these assassins and can spot their effects, you can begin to systematically weed them out.
The three assassins of the creative process are dissonance, fear, and expectation escalation. While each of these dynamics is present in varying degrees in every organization, for some teams and creatives they have become a way of life. The net result is a workplace in which rationalization and mediocrity become the norm. Innovation is often the rallying cry, but bunting for singles is the everyday ethic.
So let’s meet the enemies.
DISSONANCE: IT JUST DOESN’T ADD UP
While watching a movie, have you ever had a sense that something bad is about to happen to the character on screen? Often this sense of impending doom has little to do with the visual cues of the film and more to do with the soundtrack. The subtle music playing throughout the scene sends cues that something isn’t right. One of the tools that film composers use to create this effect is dissonance. Dissonance is a musical term used to describe two notes played simultaneously that seem as if they don’t belong together and don’t resolve. This creates a kind of musical tension, and because the human mind craves resolution of unresolved patterns, it waits expectantly for that resolution, which never comes. If used effectively, dissonance can make an absolutely benign scene of a woman walking down a hallway into an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride.
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
—Dr. Seuss
Resolving dissonance is one of the main functions of creative thought. We are quick to notice when things don’t add up. But while it’s usually helpful when used to solve the creative problems in your life and work, this ability to recognize and resolve patterns can also provide unwanted distractions to your creative process. You have only so much capacity to process data, and when there is a high amount of dissonance in your environment, it can rob you of some of that capacity. You can spend a lot of time spinning your wheels trying to resolve things that are ultimately unresolvable.
Organizational dissonance is rampant within many creative workplaces. The most significant dissonance within organizations exists when the “why” of our work isn’t lining up with the “what” of our day-to-day activity. When this happens our minds go to work to try to resolve these misalignments, and much of our creative problem-solving bandwidth is hijacked by our mind’s need to resolve these environmental incongruities. These points of dissonance cause us to feel perpetually uneasy and make it difficult for us to know how to engage in our work. For example:
“We deliver innovative solutions to clients!” (But just give the clients whatever they ask for.)
“We value team and collaboration!” (But really, just do what we tell you and don’t ask questions.)
“We value our people!” (But we’re going to have to ask you to work again this weekend.)
In his book How the Mighty Fall, author and researcher Jim Collins claims that one of the first signs of the decline of many great companies is when they fail to recognize the “why” behind their day-to-day activities. Once an organization has lost sight of this important connection, it inevitably gravitates toward mediocrity. He says, “When institutions fail to distinguish between current practices and the enduring principles of their success, and mistakenly fossilize around their practices, they’ve set themselves up for decline.”
One of the most important responsibilities of a creative leader is to eliminate these little areas of dissonance as often as possible. They need to ensure that the “why” and the “what” are lining up for people on their team by consistently reminding team members of the overall strategy and how it aligns with their current day-to-day work. Doing this helps creative workers stay focused and energized, and eases the subterranean dissonance that can quickly emerge when doing complex work.
So where do you find this dissonance? There are three major sources. By monitoring each of these we can effectively reduce the degree to which dissonance zaps creative effectiveness.
Unnecessary Complexity
Hello, my name is Todd, and I am a recovering complexity junkie. I tend to complicate things when I feel uncomfortable or insecure. It’s a defensive measure; I’ll do anything to avoid being seen as uncertain. A few years ago, a coworker called me out on my complexity addiction, and ever since then I have kept a printout of the following on my office door:
1 + 1 = [ [ (9 × 3) / 3 ] / 3 ] – 1
You’ll notice that the formula balances, but that the right side of the equation adds a lot of steps and unnecessary complexity. It’s there to remind me that the simplest approach is always the best place to start, and it’s the first thing I see when I arrive at work each day.
Unnecessary complexity is an unfortunate, but natural, result of organizational growth. Things are very simple in the early stages of a business. There are few people involved, and everyone has to be a generalist. It’s very entrepreneurial, and everyone is very close to the “main thing” for the company. It’s easy to see how individual efforts contribute to the overall objectives of the company. It may be challenging to keep up, but the rules are pretty simple: Do your job, whatever it takes.
As the company grows, however, there is more and more demand for specialization. Divisions are created and silos are established to manage different areas of business. Each division has its main thing, which is a subset of the overall main thing. People are hired within these divisions, and they also have their individual objectives and responsibilities. Systems are established, goals and quotas are implemented, and workers dive deeply into their highly specialized work. Some of these workers are now three, or four, or five steps away from the central objectives of the company. There are objectives upon objectives, and systems upon systems. It can get very complex. It becomes easy to grow confused about how we should prioritize our work and even what we’re really trying to do when we have to navigate a matrix of priorities just to develop a simple task list.
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
—Charles Mingus
But this kind of unnecessary complexity isn’t limited to companies and teams. Inventing chaos is a common defense mechanism early in the creative process, especially when we’re uncertain about what we’re trying to do. Even worse, sometimes we introduce complexity into the later stages of the project by adopting new ideas or strategies that create undue stress. We make things very complex in order to mask the reality that, deep down, we’re confused about our true objectives. Some of us (myself included) use unnecessary complexity as a mask for insecurity. (If we aren’t certain we can nail the project, we’ll at least confuse the heck out of them and show them how smart we are.) This is a waste of creative brainpower and does nothing to get us closer to our objectives.
Several years ago I was leading an or
ganizational restructure that involved bringing other departments onto my team. Because of the new people on the team, it was a perfect time to revisit our workflow and to develop new systems for getting our work done, but I was uncertain about exactly what that should look like. It was my first time leading this kind of effort, and I was nervous about what failure might mean for everyone involved. As a result, I subconsciously created problems where none existed—and solved them—so that I could feel like I was making progress. All I was doing was creating busywork where none existed in order to avoid making the hard decisions necessary to finish the reorganization. This made the entire process much more difficult for everyone involved, and especially for me.
But unnecessary complexity is not always the result of insecurity or uncertainty. Sometimes it’s simply a function of growth. As organizations grow, new systems are needed to move the work forward. Over time, these systems can become antiquated, but because they’ve been around for so long, no one thinks to ask the question. Is this really the best way? Systems pile upon systems, and soon people within the organization develop compensatory behaviors in order to get around these unnecessarily complex systems. This means a lot of wasted creative energy goes toward figuring out the system rather than toward the actual work of the organization.
You need to be diligent about asking yourself, “Can I make this process more simple?” Because there will always be a lot of complexity that is beyond your control, you must ensure that those places where you have influence are streamlined and aligned. You must also get comfortable with eliminating things in your life that are getting in the way of clarity and focus. (I will give you some strategies for how to do this in the chapter on focus.)
Question: Are there unnecessarily complex systems in your life and work right now? Are there ways you can simplify them?
Unclear Objectives
There is an area outside one of our favorite restaurants where our children love to run around and play. After dinner we will often give them time to burn off their excess energy before bed by playing games. Our two young boys love to race each other, and our daughter always wants to get in on the action. Unfortunately for the boys, she is not content to simply be a participant; she needs to referee, too. She will run around in circles, with the boys following her lead, until she stops, throws her hands in the air, and shouts, “I win!” Our older son is a strict rule follower and—of course—finds this totally unacceptable. After all, how can she declare herself the winner when there were no established rules? After many arguments and near brawls, we had to explain to the kids that it might be a good idea to clarify the rules of the game before they start playing. If they don’t, how will they know what “winning” even looks like?
You must get comfortable with eliminating things in your life that are getting in the way of clarity and focus.
In principle this sounds obvious, but this same dynamic plays out every day in the workplace, and it’s a common source of organizational dissonance. Even though we’ve talked about a project extensively, the objectives are still unclear, and we’re uncertain about what we’re really trying to do. It’s astounding to me how often I encounter people who are stuck on a creative problem and can’t articulate what they’re trying to accomplish. They have no idea what a “win” will look like. They’re just running around in circles and waiting for someone to declare that the game is over.
This problem stems from our difficulty parsing project strategy from creative strategy. Project strategy boils down to the five W’s: Why? Who? What? When? Where? The creative strategy lies in how we plan to accomplish these objectives. Often, when we’re trying to solve a creative problem, we jump straight to how we’re going to do it, the creative strategy, before we’ve even settled on a concrete set of objectives, a project strategy.
When we do this, we are significantly handicapping our ability to effectively solve the problem. If we want to set ourselves up for success and eliminate dissonance, we must learn to set project objectives by answering the five W’s. The more comprehensively we define our objectives, the more likely we are to experience creative insight. We are giving our minds a set of constraints to work within.
For every project, answer the following questions to determine the project strategy:Why? Why are we undertaking this work? What purpose does it serve?
Who? Whose approval is required? Who needs to be involved in the work? Who are we reaching?
What? What are we really trying to accomplish with this project? (No consultant-speak. Be very concrete.)
When? What are the hard (and soft) deadlines for the work? When will it be implemented?
Where? Where will the work be done? Where will the results of work appear?
Finally, once—and only once—we’ve established the project strategy we can work on the creative strategy:
How? How will we accomplish these objectives? What is the most appropriate way to solve these problems?
Because so many teams begin with execution (creative strategy) and skip over the objectives (project strategy), dissonance creeps into the work. We must make certain that the why (project strategy) and the how (creative strategy) line up.
A web-design firm I encountered said that one complexity of their work is that many clients come to them with specific executions—“Build us a website that . . .” or “We want an app that does . . .”—rather than objectives. As a result, they frequently have to adjust the clients’ ingoing expectations enough to have a clear conversation about what their objectives truly are. This often changes the entire direction of their work, because once the objectives are clear, it becomes obvious that there are solutions available that the clients would never have thought of on their own. Overall, though they’re initially suspicious about this objectives-clarifying process, clients are typically thrilled with the results.
Challenge: Think of a problem you’re currently working on, or one on which you are currently stuck creatively. Can you effectively and concretely answer the five W’s: Why? Who? What? When? Where? Or are you starting with execution: How?
Opacity
A third source of dissonance in creative teams is opacity, the result of key strategy and creative decisions being made in a “secret chamber,” and then handed down to the rest of the organization for execution with little or no explanation of why. The more opaque the decision-making process, the more likely that misinterpretation and misalignment will follow.
In the physical world, a vacuum wants to be filled. In the same way, when there is a lack of explanation of why things are a certain way, we will often fill in that vacuum with whatever makes the most sense to us. That doesn’t mean, however, that our understanding of why we are doing something lines up with our manager’s why. As a result, we can spin our wheels trying to solve a problem without a true understanding of what we’re really being asked to do. These little incongruities affect our creating, clouding our thinking.
The more opaque the decision-making process, the more likely that misinterpretation and misalignment will follow.
One design firm had concentrated much of its client interactions in the hands of very few people. This isn’t atypical, but in this case the firm’s creative leaders were not very good about communicating client expectations, or key decisions about the direction of the project, to those actually doing the design work. Rather than explaining the reasoning behind the decisions, there would often be vague and unsupported requests to “clean this up” or “make that element slightly more dominant.” This created a lot of dissonance for the junior designers as they attempted to do the work without understanding why they were being asked for specific changes. I helped these leaders understand that being more specific about the reason for their direction—for example, “The client thinks the design is too busy” or “The client wants this to draw more attention to itself”—would help clarify the objectives and allow their designers to introduce other potential solutions.
While there are certainly reasons to
keep sensitive information under wraps, the clearer the organization can be about why decisions are made, the better.
Challenge: Take a minute to look at your organization’s current priorities. Can you explain why these priorities are currently the most important, or is there a lack of alignment between the why and the how of the work you’re doing?
Although the examples we described above are largely organizational, the principle of dissonance as a creativity assassin plays out in every area of our life. If you can better align the why and the how in your life, you will experience more creative accidents.
For example, there may be many activities that you continue to engage in long after they have ceased to be effective to your current work. They are artifacts from old goals, projects, or relationships, but they have nothing to do with what’s currently important to you. You are simply doing them as a matter of habit. The result is that your daily activity isn’t aligned with what is really important to you right now, and it creates complexity that you must navigate in order to do your work. We will be addressing how to eliminate these misalignments and ensure that your efforts match your objectives in the next chapter.