Creativity hates meetings.
Lackluster creative isn't due to a lack of talent. It's due to a surplus of meetings.
Years ago, my business coach had me do an experiment with miraculous results. For a few weeks, she had me rate my happiness at the end of every workday.
As we looked over my happy meter, something became clear. On days when 2 things happened, I was happy. When they didn’t, I was less happy. Sometimes miserable.
What were those 2 things?
physical movement
originating something creative: writing, ideating
It is the second item on the list that had the biggest impact. Being a creative who’s too busy to create sucks. Going from meeting to meeting, responding to email after email, zaps your creative firepower. And if you’re an introverted creative, it’s even worse. Being a super noticer takes a lot of juice. Giving away your gold on transactional, mundane, often unnecessary busywork leaves nothing left for the good stuff.
Enter remote work.
Now that we’re working in a variety of settings, people are quick to judge the impact on output. Are we as productive? Is the work as good?
According to Advertising Age, the answer is no and no. Super Bowl spots were disappointing. Award shows are lacking. And many leaders are pointing the finger at your house, where you’re currently working. If you were at the office, things would be better.
Half truths aren’t helping.
To blame the newest factor — remote work — and assume a causal relationship is lazy thinking. Here was my response to AdAge’s Brian Bonilla, who emailed me for a quote.
Yes, I believe that agencies are likely producing lackluster work right now. But the answer isn’t running back to the last permutation of office life. We’re in the messy middle, the trial mode, of seeing – perhaps for the first time ever – where creative magic happens, and how. I see so few agencies giving open-ended permission to their people to operate as grown-ups and identify when face-time delivers. Ideation is a process of trust, collaboration and vulnerability. There is value to crafting an idea in real time with eye contact, immediate reactions, and moving visuals about in a physical space.
The real creative work, as I see it, is to remove all the “joyless urgency” of meetings and email threads that kill the creative muse and fetishize productivity culture. The more breathing room creatives have in their schedules, the more empowered they are to decide when to prioritize in-person, that's where our pitches and brainstorms will not just return to old heights, but soar beyond them.
Can we accept that creative work doesn’t need to happen in one place or another, but needs larger expanses of uninterrupted time to take shape? Can we trust our people to make the call — maybe the day of — whether what they need to accomplish will be best done in the office or outside of it? Can we stop trying to war game the workplace?
Until next time, remember that culture is the new creativity.
This, all day, Kat. I think in our attempt to keep everyone more connected (regardless of whether teams are at home or the office), we've overcorrected with TOO much communication that constantly interrupts our states of flow. Between meetings, emails, slacks, asana, and countless other messaging or project management platforms, there's hardly any room to do the actual work, much less give our brains the space they need to really think and ideate freely. It's tough. A lot of my creative colleagues prefer to work early in the morning or late at night because those are the only times for uninterrupted flow. It's not a sustainable solution, though, because there's still the expectation that they're "on" during normal business hours, as well. It's a systemic and self-perpetuating cycle. thing. We definitely need to shift what we practice, and what we value, in order to get back to great creative...and ensure the humans who make that great creative don't burn out of the industry entirely.
Great piece. And great visual!