When to Trust a “Creative”
Well hello again, to the three of you who follow my tangents. As you may have been able to tell, I get my “Online Kicks” from sharing an awkward “Scientific” deconstruction of people and things, more often in the topics of “Business”. Today's topic is “The Creative”. This should be fun, relatively speaking.
So what is Creativity? Like all of my favorite topics, the nature of confusion with Creatives among themselves and how most of us see them, it's a very simple thing to deconstruct when you only really care about “Brain Function”. The very beautifully cold answer is, it's an ability to see patterns and translate that understanding of them into a solution to a problem. Factually, this is what we all do, but we generally refer to it as “Problem Solving”.
What is more specific about the “Creatives” domain of problem-solving, is those problems relate to topics that are more “Abstract” from the technical minds who typically do not pay attention to those things. The biggest thing here is, trust in the Creative can lead to either brilliant world-changing growth, or your own demise and emotional frustration with “Getting things done”. So, how can you tell what creative minds know what they are talking about?
The Culture of Creativity
We currently live in a society where creativity is being challenged, expanded upon, and even measured in various forms. My own work is more in line with what people see as “AI” today and the topics correlate 1 to 1. Creativity can too often come with Hubris in thinking their approach masked behind cute mantras and good feels or deep-rooted depression which make it VERY touchy for anyone to challenge. In general, you cannot argue with feelings and not often enough do we challenge the success of anyone who is passionate, or we risk looking like fools because a technical mind or business mind is not seen as “Creative”.
Today we can see a logical pattern between how industries treat creatives in their respective fields or industries. Some have Creative Directors lead B2B units for clients, others champion the vision of a Film or TV Series and in my industry, Games, the term is… well, let's say it’s very flexible. If the group has had success which was not understood in an inherently creative space, it's far more likely the Creative leadership is far more abstract and has more risk of failure. If its an industry which is more practical and driven by numbers, a creative typically has more focus and insights on where Creativity should be applied.
However as with all fields in any industry, if you don't have a proper understanding of what a Creative does, or how they work, too much power can turn your company inside out. I have seen this happen FAR too often, impacting design clearly through to Data Architecture. This leads to Creativity being more of a Disease than a Salve, which you won't see coming until its too late.
Impactful Creativity
It's true that anyone COULD be a Creative Director in some form, but in a group that is growing, its an important topic of Culture and Practicality. The Creative, in fact, should always be exploring all things that are not understood, but the catch to keeping them impactful is being sure they are always striving to understand the nature of their creative thinking and how it impacts things.
If you tell a Creative to think like a Scientist they will likely have their own creative answers as to why they do. However, if you ask them to articulate or document their process they will more than likely push back with a challenge on you fighting their creative process and never want to work with you for curbing their creativity. Or, they may be confused altogether as it may show a lack of trust. Generally speaking depending on the kind of creative you work with, or that you are now (assuming a creative didn't already read this and disregard it as nonsense), you have some work to do.
The best way to approach solving the issue is ironically the most obvious. Communication. And not just mandates, but an actual meaningful interaction and a call to action which tries to make everyone grow. The reality is, if you’re a business leader and you have a creative in your company now, they are a fit for you in some way, or they wouldn’t be there. And instead of facing that pain of broken communication, just talk about a mutual objective and acknowledge an appreciation from both sides, assuming you understand the value on both sides. I hope you do.
Find Your Creative
You know the saying in Business and even in Engineering or Sciences, often the best leaders will never be aware they are or will have never want to be one. There is a good reason for that as to how we create companies with roles in leadership, but that is another post. Specifically to this topic assume the more “Creative” the more “Uncertain”. It's not to say it's not worth the risk of having a chat, because brilliance in Creativity is hard to understand, and assuredly their brains are more calculators than people realize.
For me, my FAVORITE creatives in any field I have ever worked with had very diverse backgrounds that started in one area and rapidly moved to another. Sadly business culture looks at a lot of people like this as “Unstable”, but the reality of those minds is too often “Unstable” in jobs because they are obsessed with understanding and applying knowledge in orthogonal ways. This is, in fact, the essence of creativity. Sometimes, those creatives also are in a very specific field but have diverse interests in them. Most “Specialists” would discard them, but if you have a group doing “R & D”, with a bit of tuning that person your core engineering team overlooked could be perfect for this role.
How to Validate Creative Thinking
This little trick is so obvious it makes me grin every time someone sees it working for the first time. In fact, this is something I’ll ask anyone in any role for any group I'm building a team for, Games, Tech, or Academic focusses. Ask them what they learned when they SUCCEEDED. Failure is easy to learn from, frankly, I am not all that impressed when someone tells me why they failed, their own bias on the topic and the bias of the culture of the group asking will too often align.
Knowing when you SUCCEED is magic. That kind of discipline, awareness, systemic thinking and all potential outcomes of success. That is absolutely something worth exploring. If a person can articulate this in ANY form, dig deeper. What are they interested in today? What would they have done differently to succeed in a new way? Were they satisfied with that? I can guarantee the discussion will leave both sides with a smile and an amazing relationship in all forms. Well, unless you’re that sour grape and its contagious.
Talking about failure is easy, but understanding success is the hardest thing to do. We built our entire culture around “Fail Fast”, which is glorious. But the very topic of us forgetting about why we succeeded, and what the ACTUAL impact of our success was, will fundamentally change how you operate. And all of it comes down to “The Creative”.
