Monotony kills creativity, so invest the time to shake things up.
I don’t want to take our designer off that project, because she knows it better than anyone else. Who cares that she is bored to tears working on it? When the team operates efficiently, we’ll see greater returns.
— Some Stooge Somewhere
Very few people can tolerate monotony in their personal lives. We quickly abandon monotonous gym routines, diets, hobbies, and relationships in favor of something more exciting and fulfilling. Yet we regularly tolerate monotony at work. Many organizational roles are designed to get people performing the same set of tasks over and over, year after year, because the company’s bottom line loves an efficient team.
What few realize is that the highly productive, highly efficient team is only a short-term solution for your company’s long-term need to continue delivering a quality product.
Repeating the same task has diminishing returns. You’ve probably had the following experience: You’re assigned a new task. At first, you’re frustrated because it feels slow and awkward. Once you start to get the hang of things, you feel more confident and start to enjoy the challenge. Each time you repeat the task, you get faster and faster. You feel a sense of satisfaction when you master it, and you enjoy that feeling for a short while. Then, the monotony sets in. You dread the task and want to get it over with as quickly as possible. You start taking shortcuts and the quality of the outcome slowly starts to deteriorate.
Many managers will tolerate this situation because they believe it is better to have an efficient employee who takes a few shortcuts than an inefficient employee who slows down the entire team. That’s why we see so many creative teams set up like manufacturing lines. What worked for Henry Ford does not work for the development of creative ideas.
Giving “workers” or “doers” opportunities to innovate and create is necessary for maintaining the engagement and motivation they require to do quality work.
An agriculture company hired a junior graphic designer for its marketing team. The designer had grown up on a farm and understood that audience. She also had a great college portfolio, a farm-girl work ethic, and a keen desire to contribute to a team.
Impressed by her zest, the director of marketing gave the designer one of the department’s most tired projects — the annual report. This project hadn’t seen a stitch of creativity for ten years. “What can you do to refresh this project?” the director asked the designer.
The designer accepted the challenge and set to work. She developed a fresh concept, updated the design, and applied a more vibrant voice to the content. The director was impressed and assigned all of the company report projects to the junior graphic designer. The director’s hope was that the designer would maintain her high level of creativity while getting faster and faster at churning out reports. What actually happened was very different: the quality and creativity of the reports deteriorated as the designer lost motivation and engagement in the repetitive work.
Some staff in the agriculture company valued a stable, predictable work day. The graphic designer was not one of those people. It was the opportunity to continually tackle new challenges in innovative ways that refilled her creative tank. When the tank ran dry, she lost motivation, her work quality suffered, and her boss’s plan backfired.
To be efficient is to able to accomplish a task in a way that uses the lowest amount of time and effort possible. It’s when you focus only on the essential tasks that you reach an objective quickly and with low effort. Good, right? Not if you care about the quality of your creative output. Efficiency increases your proximity to the issue. It will cause you to lose sight of the larger objective and other, more creative ways to achieve it.
An efficiency focus also doesn’t leave room for the mistakes that can lead to something novel. Scott Adams, the creator of the famous Dilbert comic and a man who describes himself as a hapless office worker and serial failure, writes extensively about this process in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:
Over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug the shit out of it. Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value. I have a long history of profiting from failure. My cartooning career, for example, is a direct result of failing to succeed in the corporate environment.27
Artists know the value of failure. The lowest times reveal the most authentic and universal human experiences, the kind of experiences that inspire their work and make it relatable. Artists also know the danger of efficiency. They cannot continually produce the same caliber of piece and expect their audience to continue receiving it with the same enthusiasm. Audiences want to see evolution — they want more heart, more poignancy, more truth, more craftsmanship, or more artistry. No one hails their favorite playwright for being efficient.
Typically, an ad agency’s creative department is set up in a way that gets a group of people working consistently on the same client accounts. There’s a creative director, art director, copywriter, graphic designer, and production designer assigned to each client. Each of those professionals learns the intricacies of the client’s products and services, and they work to continually improve the quality of the marketing materials they deliver to the client each month.
This system works very well a lot of the time. The creative team gets familiar with the client’s business and its budget, objectives, product pipeline, audiences, stakeholders, and regulations. They also form close relationships with the folks on the client’s team. They learn what they like, what they dislike, their working habits, schedules, and interests. When the relationship is harmonious, the two teams — agency and client — feel respected and valued. They can develop great working partnerships.
Another benefit of this setup, and perhaps the most important one from a business standpoint, is that the creative team gets very efficient. They conquered the learning curve a year ago. Now, they can jump into the client’s projects very quickly and produce good, consistent work that gives their agency a nice profit margin. But this model can backfire and create a Proximity Paradox when highly efficient team members burn out.
At some point, the agency creative team gets too close to the client. The client’s fears become their fears, the client’s limitations become their limitations. They can lose the outsider’s perspective that originally made them effective at coming up with new, big-picture marketing ideas. We’ll unpack this Proximity Paradox effect further in Chapter Nine.
Burnout can happen as a result of stress, but it can also happen from repetitive work. A person working on an assembly line suffers the physical wear and tear that comes from repeating the same movements over and over again. The creative people you find in agencies suffer a cognitive wear and tear. They originally pursued the agency life for the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects and subjects, and that kind of work keeps them energized and feeling fulfilled. When they work on the same client account day in and day out, their creative brains take a beating.
It is possible to lose your creativity. Fortunately, according to author and neuroscientist Dr. Mandy Wintink, you can also get it back:
Many more neurons exist in our brains when we are born than are believed to be necessary. But after birth, a lot of pruning goes on, by virtue of a ‘use it or lose it’ phenomenon. More neurons, and connections among those neurons, exist initially but many of those connections are lost when they are not supported or used. It’s like having more than one road or path between points. With infrequent use, a city council might decide to no longer service the road less travelled. As a result, those roads get less and less use. Once out of commission, those paths are more difficult to resurrect. Difficult, but not impossible.28
We’ll share some strategies for resurrecting your brain’s creative paths later in this chapter.
When I began to see the signs of burnout on my team, I knew I needed to act fast if I wanted to maintain our high standards for quality and creativity. At the same time, I needed to balance a number of agency and client expectations, and that list wasn’t exactly short.
I had to think about productivity. Keeping the same people on the same accounts improves productivity in the short run, but long term, people get bored and start to slow down. How could I strike a balance and keep the overall team productive and maintain our profitably and margin?
I had to balance client expectations. I had a person on my team whom my client loved. They trusted her and appreciated how well she knew their brand, and for that reason, they often referred our agency to other businesses. How could I pull this person off the account without upsetting the client?
I had to make sure we maintained our quality of work. It’s not easy to jump in with a new client and figure out the details of their marketing or design. Every good piece of marketing has two sides. One is the technical standards side. Remembering the right legalese, keeping the product trademarks up to date, following the client’s writing conventions, choosing appropriate photography, and properly incorporating the brand colors and patterns is no small feat and takes time to master. When putting new team members on an account, you risk botching the client’s brand standards.
The second is the ideas side. You need to strike a balance between what your client is willing to do and what your client should do. You want to constantly push the creative envelope, but you need to recognize that some brands are more conservative than others. If you push the client too far outside of their comfort zone, they can feel misunderstood and may take their business elsewhere.
I also had to make staff engagement and development a priority. Creative professionals feel affirmed when they do good work and gain the respect of a client. It feels really good. But there is another thing that contributes to their well-being, and that is development in their craft.
Ultimately, creatives are craftspeople. They want to continue to develop their skills and improve what they’re able to create. If they can’t do that in their jobs, they quickly lose confidence and motivation. You must strike a balance between keeping them engaged in the work and giving them the freedom to develop their craft.
You may not lead a team of advertising agency creatives, but since you’re reading this book, you probably work with a team that needs to innovate and also appease different stakeholder groups. How do you help your team continuously generate new ideas while remaining efficient and reliable?
Some organizations have helped efficient employees avoid monotony by offering opportunities for personal growth experiences. For example, ad agency Iris offered a Life Swap program, where their staff traded everything from working at each other’s desks to living in each other’s apartments. It helped the agency recruit and retain top talent because their staff members valued the variety of work and working environments they could get from a career at Iris, and they felt that variety contributed to their creativity.
Professional services firm EY is another example. Since 2005, EY has dedicated its best resources — talented, experienced people — to improving the success of promising entrepreneurs in Latin America. The EY professionals have a chance to test their skills in a new industry and country, and the entrepreneurs get new ideas and strategies to grow their businesses in a way that positively affects the local economy.
EY works with the not-for-profit organization Endeavor to pair what they call EY Vantage Advisors with high-impact entrepreneurs. The advisors work with the entrepreneurs on projects that are designed to improve the integrity and effectiveness of their key business processes. The program has a significant impact — both on the EY advisors (by offering them a world-class professional growth opportunity) and on the Latin American entrepreneurs and their communities (by helping to stimulate economic growth).29
Havas is a multinational advertising and public relations company with offices in more than 100 countries around the world. In 2014, it introduced a program called Havas Lofts. This program gives the company’s staff the opportunity to work in one of its agencies in a different international city for a month. Participants in the program can experience both living and working in a different culture.
Havas Lofts was developed by Patti Clifford (now Patti Clarke). She joined the company as its global chief talent officer after running her own consultancy business as well as spending twenty years in the credit reporting/debt collection industry. Not having an ad industry background, she came into Havas with a fresh set of eyes.
One of the first things Clifford noticed when she joined Havas was that talent wasn’t being nurtured. “Advertising has a robust pipeline on the front end of recruitment. But once you are in, it falls off a cliff,” she said. “Nurturing talent wasn’t happening in a meaningful way.”30
A creative or innovative business can’t afford to have its talented staff getting bored or burning out. Retaining star employees and keeping them motivated is just as important as recruiting them in the first place.
Havas developed a job-swap program to create a new professional development opportunity for staff and to transfer knowledge, intellectual property, and experience between staff in different locations based on demand.
Candidates for the Havas Lofts program were nominated by their managers and then matched with suitable international agencies of the company. They were each also assigned a local coach to help mentor them during their job swaps. The coaches were responsible for immersing the job swappers into their agencies’ culture, processes, and tools. The job swappers identified the learning outcomes they wanted to achieve from their experiences, and the coaches helped to facilitate those objectives.
Participants shared their experiences on a dedicated company blog and on social media sites for the program.
Because Havas Lofts was a training program, there were fewer international logistical issues to overcome. For example, visas aren’t necessary and there generally aren’t labor law restrictions. Of course, depending on where a job swap happens, there can be some language or cultural hurdles to overcome. But that was all part of the immersive experience that the Havas Lofts program created.
In the first phase of the program in late 2014, twenty Havas staff members took up the job-swap opportunity. Swaps were arranged between the company’s New York, Paris, and London offices. In just four weeks, the Havas Lofts social media sites had more than 7,000 internal and external views, demonstrating the interest in the program.31 In 2015, the program was expanded to include Latin America and Asia.32
By 2017, the program had 152 participants spending time across sixty-six Havas agencies in nineteen cities, including Madrid, Dusseldorf, Mexico, Sydney, Frankfurt, Prague, Buenos Aires, Milan, Shanghai, São Paulo, and San José. The program now runs twice each year.33
Patti Clifford reflected on the reasons for the success and popularity of the program:
Havas Lofts is our mobility program. We’re a big global network and we kind of broke the paradigm that you have to go live in one place for a year . . . Research shows that millennials are less interested in length of time associated with it so much as frequency.34
The participants in these programs tell us over and over again that they gain so much by spending time with others from the network. We also hear a lot of great stories about how what they learn in these programs gets leveraged when they are back in their home offices — whether it be a tool, a process, or a connection to someone with a unique skill. These programs are creating a more global and connected workforce at Havas, which certainly benefits our clients.35
Other multinational marketing, advertising, and media agencies, such as Maxus, Iris, and The Marketing Store have implemented similar swap programs. Like Havas, they have found that it gives their staff valuable experience to develop their skills and outlook, which also helps each company with staff retention.36 It’s win/win, as these testimonials from both job swappers and employers indicate:
Our average employee age is twenty-eight. Our employees are Gen Y and they have a real desire to be global citizens and work abroad. We previously didn’t have a structured way of doing this. We’ve not solved it, but Maxus introduced a program last year where seventy people from forty-five different offices around the world, spend two weeks on exchange in another office.
— Lindsay Pattison, CEO, Maxus37
It’s human nature to feel like there’s something bigger and better out there, and employees these days are getting bombarded with calls from recruiters pitching the next big agency or brand opportunities . . . As agencies, we need to make sure that we understand our employees’ career needs and are able to work with them to develop career paths that are nourishing and benefit the agency and client.
— Sarah Aitken, former managing director, Iris38
The experience here has accelerated my growth, both personally and professionally. I worked with some great people and gained a wealth of knowledge here, which I will carry with me throughout the rest of my career.
— Josh Cornish, former senior design engineer, The Marketing Store39
The job swapping concept has even extended beyond intra-company arrangements for some smaller, independent advertising agencies. One example is the recent temporary job swap by creative directors of Australian agency DDI and the German-based Grabarz & Partner. The Australian creative director involved in the swap, Chris D’Arbon, reflected on the benefits both he and his company received from the experience:
For me, a creative exchange represents something more than a ‘work trip’ for two creatives. It’s about bringing down walls between players in the same game to discover the richness in each other’s story. There no one way to do this thing we call creativity, so let’s take Paul Arden’s advice against coveting ideas.40
Paul Arden, who D’Arbon mentioned, was the creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi for many years and a best-selling author on advertising and motivation. In his book It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be, he said that creatives should give away everything they know if they want more knowledge to come back to them.41
Other companies and industries are also experimenting with local job swapping, viewing it as a way to foster innovation within their organizations to gain competitive advantage. One example is Intuit, a financial software company. This company believes that the industrial-era notion of job specialization is no longer valid in the digital media world. Many job roles in contemporary organizations now regularly overlap.
This environment requires a flexible organizational structure. Intuit facilitates that via encouraging its staff to temporarily swap positions with people in other departments. The goal is to bring a fresh perspective to organizational projects. For example, a person involved with product development can swap roles with a person on the marketing team. The length of the swap is at the discretion of management.
An added benefit is that the people involved in the job swap gain a better understanding of how different roles within the organization can collaborate to drive success.
Intuit does not believe that an employee’s career trajectory is in one area. Just because you are awesome at finance, does not mean you can’t be awesome at marketing . . . We don’t want talent in a specific area of expertise for a long time. Instead, Intuit is placing its talent pool in uncomfortable situations. That’s how you get innovation.
— Cézanne Huq, former online acquisition leader at Intuit42
Technology multinational Cisco is another to have embraced the local job-swap philosophy. Cisco staff can apply for either a time or job-swap program. Both programs facilitate talent rotation and agility. The time-swap program allows staff to swap twenty percent of their time with another individual in the company for a defined period. The job-swap program allows for a complete role swap, either temporarily or permanently. The company believes that both programs encourage staff skill development and innovation.43
Another variation on the theme involves job swapping between customers and suppliers. Tesco and Coca-Cola recently implemented a job-swap initiative to foster collaboration in their supply-chain relationship.44 Selected distribution and logistics staff in the two companies traded places for a year. The swap program brought fresh insights and understanding of the issues and challenges that both companies face in distributing their products. The companies gained insights from both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) perspectives.
Our teams already worked closely together and had a strong relationship, but we knew we could never fully appreciate the challenges each other face without experiencing it firsthand. We wanted to do something radically different that would give us greater insight and have a lasting impact on the way we work as a team and with our suppliers.
— Tony Mitchell, Tesco supply chain director45
Can you introduce a job-swap program in your organization? If you can, take a page from Havas and the other companies we profiled. If you can’t, try these smaller initiatives instead.
Break up the monotony by getting people to switch roles, introducing creative activities to your routine, and carving out time for people to experiment with new skills. It may be less efficient in the short term, but it will snap people out of their proximity to efficient tasks and create an environment that supports the development of creative talent.
Earlier in this chapter, I shared my dilemma as the Creative Director of my team. My solution to balancing the expectations of the agency and clients, while also keeping the creatives happy and fulfilled, was to introduce two new responsibilities: brand champions and vision champions.
A brand champion is the person (or people) on a project who understands exactly what the brand can and can’t do. They know the legalese, colors, fonts, lingo, trademarks, and approval process. They are responsible for staying connected to the client and making sure its marketing initiatives are successful.
A vision champion is the person (or people) who is responsible for the creative vision of the campaign. They have to innovate and look outside of the client’s organization and industry for new trends and ideas. They are responsible for developing outstanding, boundary-pushing creative.
At the start of a project, assemble your team and assign vision champions and brand champions. Task the brand champions with understanding your needs and concerns and the overall direction of your organization. Task the vision champions with finding the most creative way to achieve the project goals. Set a date to bring everyone back together and get the vision champions to pitch their ideas to the brand champions. Choose the most innovative idea that will both fulfill the client’s needs and achieve the project objectives, and then work together to execute it.
After every project is completed, acknowledge the success of the brand champions for delivering a successful project and keeping you on strategy. Acknowledge the vision champions for challenging the team’s thinking and developing their creative craft.
Then, get the brand and vision champions to switch roles. The team that was responsible for brand intimacy can now have a chance to get inspired and develop its craft, and the former vision champions can take a turn safe-guarding the needs of the organization.
Switching roles gives everyone some freedom within an environment that is typically constraining. It challenges your team members to think creatively, develop their craft, and find new sources of inspiration, which will reduce burnout.
Efficiency becomes a Proximity Paradox when we continually solve a challenge the same way. One example is car advertising, where manufacturers solve the challenge of promoting their vehicles in the same templated way, year after year, model after model. They show the vehicle driving through a moody landscape that appeals to the target audience, and they pair it with a trendy song from an emerging artist.
It’s an efficient way to solve the advertising challenge, but it’s not creative. The ad won’t stand out in the sea of competitors using a similar template for their own advertising.
Earlier, we touched on Dr. Mandy Wintink’s research on the many different connections in the brain, and how we can lose some of the connections if we don’t use them. Psychologists believe the connections in our frontal cortices are responsible for creativity. Dr. Wintink says we can maintain or rebuild the creative connections with divergent thinking.46
If you took a marketing or advertising program in school, you’re probably familiar with the paper clip exercise. The goal is to come up with fifty different things you can do with a paper clip besides holding paper together. Hold a divergent-thinking brainstorm with your team on a monthly or quarterly basis. Over drinks or snacks at the office or at a laid-back location off-site, meet for an hour and come up with 100 different uses for a small, insignificant item.
Creative ideas can flow easily when we turn off the inner voice that says, “That’s a stupid idea.” Set a timer and challenge participants to fill a whiteboard in ten minutes or come up with a new use for the object every fifteen seconds. The inner voice won’t have a chance to chime in when a timer is counting down. At the end of the session, run through all the ideas and celebrate the most unexpected and unusual uses for the item.
This exercise will help unleash the creativity of anyone tasked with innovation or problem solving because it forces us to make new connections between two ideas. If you can come up with 100 unusual connections between the idea of a paper clip and the idea of usefulness, you can come up with a novel way to promote your company’s brand or products.
Most marketing departments have a set of time-honored projects that they work on every year: it could be an annual report, a product catalog, a scholarship awards banquet, or a sales summit. These projects are tedious for your in-house team, but they could be fresh fodder for an outside creative.
Find an organization in a completely different industry with a similar marketing cycle to your own. When the annual projects roll around, swap teams. For example, get the partner’s designer to create your annual report, while your designer creates the partner organization’s product catalog.
Project swaps are an easy way to keep team members fresh by giving them a chance to work with a different industry, medium, or set of brand standards.
Here are a few tips to set up your project swap for success:
Designathon Works is an organization that designs education programs for children. One of its most popular events is a Global Children’s Designathon event. Children from all over the world converge in various cities for a day of creative thinking where they develop ideas to solve real-world problems. When you really want to blow the doors off creativity and innovation, Designathon’s founder, Emer Beamer, recommends giving the challenge to children. We interviewed her to find out more.
Why are children in a good position to brainstorm solutions to big challenges?
Children are more engaged than most people take them to be. The motivation is there, and they are unencumbered by knowledge of things that don’t work. They have the mindset of “Let’s find a solution,” and are not hampered by cynicism. They can make unusual and unexpected connections with the information and knowledge they have, and they can come up with ideas that work.
How does the brainstorming process work?
Our goal is to invite kids into their creative space. That way, they know they have permission to think as big and as crazy as they like, which is usually not invited in school.
I spent a lot of 2014 working out how kids can bottle their imaginations. I found that if a question is too open, they get demotivated and don’t know where to start. If the question is too closed, it’s not exciting for them.
To invite kids into their creative space, we developed a design canvas with a series of questions. It is set up like a board game that is playful and big enough that three or four kids can collaborate around the same canvas.
The first question to answer is, “What problem around water do you want to solve?” The theme for the 2017 Global Children’s Designathon was “Water Issues.” There are four main categories of water problems globally: too little water, too much water, habitats that are being lost for fish and animals, and water pollution. The kids started by agreeing on which of these issues they were most concerned about.
The second question is, “Who is affected by this problem?” This question gets kids thinking about human- or animal-centered design. It provides context and helps the kids relate to the person or animal that is suffering.
There are eight more questions that lead the children through associations, like, “What else does the problem make you think of?” And then, “What could you invent to solve this problem?”
We facilitate the brainstorms, because sometimes the children in a group can’t agree. They might get excited about two different problems, and they need to focus on one. Sometimes the two problems are closely related, like water solutions for animals and floods. We ask them, “In what environment is that happening?” or “What are you seeing?” These prompts give kids triggers to talk about the problems further, and then they often see the connections themselves.
We’ve taught this process to teachers around the world, so when we have an event, we put out an open call to their schools. Teachers see it as a future education style, where kids use their creativity to solve global challenges.
Any child can do a Designathon brainstorm; the format works every time. We’ve held brainstorms with children in England, with children from disadvantaged backgrounds in Nairobi, with high-IQ children in Singapore, and with everyone in between. The children get super excited, get onto it, have a great time, and come up with interesting things.
What are some of the ideas that stood out to you?
In Dubai for our Global Children’s Designathon event, some kids considered shooting rockets at meteorites to see if there is water there that we can mine. In Florida, the children were worried about floods following Hurricane Irma. They came up with a house with telescopic stilts. You can make the stilts longer or shorter depending on what’s needed. Houses can go higher as the water gets higher.
We see a lot of children using smart technologies, and they presume it will offer a lot of capabilities in the future. In the Netherlands, children were concerned that dams would prevent fish from returning to the spawning areas where they needed to lay eggs. Dams are a good idea because they provide hydroelectricity, but they also make it difficult for fish to return to their natural habitats.
The children came up with an idea for a smart tube that would give fish a pathway through the dam. The tube was connected to a camera that would recognize fish as they approached and then open the doors to the tube. They imagined that the camera could also record data on fish populations, species, and migratory patterns, and therefore be used as a remote research area, too.
How is the brainstorming process different from adults?
Children are a little different from adults. The process itself isn’t too different, but the rhythm is different. They come to our workshop and say, “I already have loads of ideas and just want to make them.” We need to facilitate their attention and focus, which is different from adults. With adults, you supply them with coffee to get them going. With children, you have to calm them down and get them to focus.
Do you ever work with private companies?
We recently worked with the Water Authority in Amsterdam to come up with two solutions for the city, which tends to have too much water.
The children came up with a pavement tile for streets and paths. It acts like a sponge to take extra water away rapidly. After a heavy rain, a tile section of the path collects the water. It seeps through several layers of filtration as gravity pulls it below ground. Then, a pump under the paths pumps the clean water to an above-ground faucet that pedestrians can use to access clean drinking water.
The Water Authority is going to prototype this idea and one other at scale in Amsterdam.
Are the collaborating organizations surprised by the ideas children come up with?
It’s still quite hard for some adults to take children seriously. They think children are there to be educated, or they think it’s cute. But once we start the process, they change their perspective.
We’ve done some research and asked adults questions like, “Did you have any preconceived ideas of what the children could come up with?” or “Did the children surprise you?” Across the board, they are surprised how much children know and how good their ideas are. And it’s really fun, of course.