108: How to React to Creativity, Part 1
[After] Thinking about humans, feedback, taste, and profitability
MCAD is on Spring Break this week, which opens the door for rumination on Creativity at large. I’ve been thinking about how humans can reply to ideas, concepts, headlines, design, and execution—and have a useful, nurturing and profitable impact. Did anyone teach you how?
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Ideas are fragile, critical, essential things.
And they live in an unending relationship with feedback.
Two elements in a primordial dance: An idea. A reaction. A revision. A reply. Rinse and repeat.
Done well the dance is effortless, appreciated and additive. It can change the world.
How often do we do it well?
Knowing how to react to creativity, to provide feedback which enhances and nurtures ideas so its creators can act effectively on your behalf is really hard.
Companies, brands and careers stumble and fail at it.
Let’s figure out how to fix that.
First and foremost, feedback needn’t be emotional
We learned terrible habits when we were young. Emotions got linked with ideas. Self worth got tied up in ink, pixels, words, performances and creative expression. But wait—don’t we need ego and emotion to unearth brilliance? We certainly do. But the process does not require us to weld our creations to ourselves. Unless you want to become the lead character in a tragic biopic.
We are not our ideas. (And yet, we are.) The ideas are not the people who created them. (And yet, they are.) Such is the conundrum.
Learned detachment is critical for idea people.
I’m remembering an ad agency conference room early in my career. We were reviewing campaigns. The intemperate Creative Director dismissed the work of my partner and I with a gesture, then clarified, “you suck.” A finger pointed unmistakably in my direction. A senior art director interjected—surely the CD didn’t mean this personally? The work sucks, not the person? “I do mean him!” our leader exclaimed. “He sucks!” (Years earlier, my mentor, Bill Miller, had taught me a prescient lesson: The business of creativity is learning to survive rejection.)
Learned detachment is also critical for those tasked to react. They soaked up the same unfortunate lessons, and lug the same unnecessary baggage. A suggestion:
Professionals avoid prefacing—Never begin a creative review with “I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” or versions of “I know everyone put a lot of hard work into this…” Here’s the truth: You don’t have that much power or insight. No one does. Initiating a creative review with faux attempts to protect what you imagine are the emotions of others is a waste of time. Get to the work—that’s hard enough.
Thank goodness for books including Crucial Conversations, Creativity, Inc., Thanks for the Feedback and Radical Candor which provide valuable instruction for emotional objectivity in the realm of business. Books like these map out healthy process for evaluating the emotional qualities of creativity while remaining detached from our own emotions and the emotions of those who created it.
The 10x Attitude: “What an idea can be” is 10x more valuable and efficient than “What it is”
Let’s say it’s early days in a creative journey. If you look at a headline, layout, edit, or concept and see potential you’re on the right track. If, however, you look and see mistakes—watch out, there’s a trap.
It all starts at the beginning, long before we briefed the assignment to create. Before strategy was defined. Before a business issue was identified. It starts with a mindset—do you embrace potential, or fear? It really is that simple. Carol Dweck’s “Two Mindsets” frames this challenge as Fixed vs Growth (her book is invaluable). If we set out on a path towards gaining the most advantage possible from creativity, we must assert a Growth (or “potential”) frame of mind early, and remind ourselves often.
If we seek creativity’s advantage, we must preserve “the oxygen of optimism” detailed in chapter four of Adam Morgan and Mark Barden’s A Beautiful Constraint. In early days of creative problem solving it is too easy to look literally, to not see past Photoshop comps or loosely formed attempts at expression. It’s far too easy to miss the point entirely, and therefore miss the potential. Morgan and Barden offer a solution: “CAN-IF.” When reacting to creativity in early stages, always frame input this way: “We CAN do this/make this work/embrace this concept…IF we [and here’s the hard part—now you have to think creativity to maintain enthusiasm].”
We all spent entirely too much time as children focused on a kind of accuracy that was meant to prepare us to work on a factory floor. We were trained to follow precise rules, the better to keep the factory humming. Large swaths of modern business benefit from the literal approach. But not creativity. A literal environment fails to set up or nurture success when our roles and our deliverables are to find, polish and evangelize ideas no one has seen or heard before.
Okay, I see your hand raised. Thank you for your patience. Yes, but what about accuracy and brand guidelines and craft? Excellent points, all—but for much, much, much later in the creative process. A keen, discerning eye is invaluable once we’ve entertained concepts, and focused on a singular direction. Uncapped too early in a creative process, the red pen will quite literally (and quite easily) destroy economic value.
Ideas which outperform the status quo (and become the new status quo) come from the realm of the potential, not the literal.
Everyone has taste—some just have more practice using theirs
If you find yourself in a role with creative feedback responsibilities, you’re in luck. Now you’ve got the best excuse to visit art museums, eat at new restaurants, attend concerts, subscribe to Communication Arts, and watch all those Oscar nominations. And you get to talk with others who love those subjects, too. Because part of your job description, written or implied, is to have taste.
Do a search for “good taste quotes” and you might decide taste is unnecessary, foolish, or as Edith Sitwell put it, “the worst vice ever created.” It is also a wildly efficient skill we don’t teach or evaluate enough. It’s a skill of increasing value in the age of AI.
Fortunately, you were born with taste. We all were. But it’s ridiculously easy to unlearn. Just mindlessly embrace the status quo.
In the context of business, and the task of reacting to creativity, Taste can be defined as containing:
Experience in Art and Design 🎨 (i.e. their histories, periods, styles, the elements which define one type versus another, and perhaps most important—a point of view on what leads to cultural impact). The creative components of successful business—brand standards, cultural relevance, photography, film, writing, et al—have roots. You need to know where they come from. You don’t need a degree, just curiosity. You can’t sit on the sidelines.
Taste is also about being:
Operational and Action-Oriented ✅ In the context of business, taste is also translation and the operationalizing of ideas. It’s about recognizing concepts don’t magically come to life in all the nooks and crannies of a corporation. Taste is the ability to inspire and educate, to bring teams along for the journey, to convey benefits of potential—despite the allure of the status quo.
Part 2 in a few days…
I’ve got more pragmatic advice on cultivating and guiding creativity towards effective outcomes coming soon.
Creativity+AI Update
🤖 Canva has rolled out an integration with ChatGPT. Here’s Roland’s quick tutorial via Instagram. I liken this to the “endless interns” function of generative AI. All you need to do is type, and the design intern (i.e. Canva + GPT) attempts to meet your objectives. Remember, this is the worst these technologies will perform.
👷🏽♀️ Cognition AI launches. Multi-modal, multi-task solutions appear more possible. Again, this is the worst version we’ll experience.
🧑🏼🦰🧑🏼🦰 Consistency, they name might become Midjourney. The Verge reports on tests to empower consistent elements (i.e. the same face and clothing) across multiple generations (i.e. different backgrounds). Would be hugely useful!
💣 Andrew Marantz spent a lot of time documenting the perspectives of AI doomsayers for The New Yorker. A worthy read.
✅ John Maeda’s annual Design in Tech Report is out. Here’s the “rapid” video version, and the stately full version.