The need for wolf pack creativity in politically divisive times
No, this isn’t an article about the current state of global politics. The very image of BoJo and Trump rising up from their sewers of recrimination and human disregard sours any attempt to say something constructive. This is about the people trying to make smart ideas happen in a politicised industry. I have been having way too many conversations with embattled talent lately, disenchanted by the large organisations who pay them, mostly for putting too many silos, hierarchies, political complexity and downright propaganda in the way of them doing great work. It makes me overwhelmingly frustrated for them and the people they could be solving problems for. At a time when the business community needs differentiated ideas more than ever, commercial creativity still appears to be dominated by the people who manage the big business of creativity, instead of the people who conceive of and make creative solutions daily.
In fact, this is about global politics. In the same way that most of our nations’ political squabbling is about who gets to be right (when most of the perpetrators on both sides are typically utterly self-obsessed bullshit-mongers), the citizens who put them there in the first place are getting very little focus. Likewise, while disconnected debates are happening in conference rooms and offsites around the world, what the hell are industry leaders and holding companies actually doing to make spaces where talented people genuinely want to work? Unless they can retain the talent that they sell as their key product, it’s all utterly meaningless chatter.
So, in June 2019 I really started investigating creative EX, specifically how employee experience and the workplace itself will need to change to accommodate new creative thinking. By this I mean combined teams of different variations of technologists, creatives, designers and strategists that we will call the ‘creative makers’, where no one person delivers the ‘big idea’ alone because some of the thinking is in the doing, and innovating experiences is now too complex to handle solo. This is the real secret to contemporary innovative thinking; multidisciplinary people who can both think and do together as a small team. Many organisational themes have been building to this new talent configuration: agile at scale, design thinking, in-house innovation labs and the emphasis on the experience economy. My research partner Barry Mowszowski and I had been watching it unfold for a few years, so we kicked off The Future of Doing project and added many of the resulting insights to a weekly podcast, which covers different aspects of the creative making employee experience. There have been many awesome conversations with wonderful people across the world from a multitude of organisations, from Silicon Valley to Berlin to Melbourne and beyond. What struck me the most, when talking to people about the best work they’ve done, is that it largely came down to the people they worked with and how well they worked together, including the great clients who enabled them to do their job well.
This is what I’ve come to think of as wolf pack creativity; a smaller team of equally talented, multidisciplinary and high functioning people, focussed on the same goal and backing each other to achieve it. No-one ‘managing’, only people thinking and doing. Design and innovation sprints are happening everywhere, and people are starting to rethink their limits, awakening to the creative power of the small pack. It’s the magic of the work that we forget when we spend our time drowning in the political dysfunction of silo and hierarchy, largely created from the sidelines by those watching and counting. Then there are the great clients, who don’t choose their creative partners based on who will take them to expensive conferences or manage their political dysfunction for them; they increasingly want to work directly with talented people who can help them get important things done well for the benefit of their organisation. These wonderful people need and can enable a wolf pack. They don’t pretend things aren’t tough or that problems aren’t stubborn; they just know that smart people, thinking and making happily together in a small team with both a critical and constructive eye, can move mountains fast, and it’s their job to enable that magic with both tolerance and expediency.
And it is magic, because magic is largely about a type of chemistry that is sometimes invisible to the human eye. Sadly, in a model that assigns roles to people instead of understanding what they bring to the table as individuals, that chemistry is transient. You can have an experienced designer with a smart engineer and a skilled product strategist, and they can produce utter mediocrity. You could have the same problem, the same project and the same level and type of skills, but the ability of those individuals to deliver excellence is often down to how they mesh and balance one another out. For many of those who don’t do the work and don’t understand the nuance of connection amongst thinker-makers, the instinct is to reimpose division and rinse and repeat the magic right out of great thinking by trying to template something they can’t fathom. The instinct to force everyone back into a soulless production line is a powerful one.
But for many people who are commissioning this work, the penny has actually dropped. This is why clients who use agencies always want to see the people they will be working with in the pitch presentation itself and why they will request specific individuals to work on their business, which is not tenable for any agencies that are still built like production lines. Clients know that excellence and chemistry is a rarity and have seen what that magic can do for their business. They also may not know exactly how to recreate it (again, this is something only the creative making individuals truly know), but they do know its value.
So, what are the options for businesses that offer ‘creative making’ services in the coming years? I believe it could go 1 of 3 ways.
1. Keep producing digital landfill at a premium
Keep doing the work that no creative maker truly cares about, much of which will be replaced by automation eventually. Keep overcharging clients for your foosball-enabled production lines that you resource based on whoever happens to be available, dividing people by discipline. Keep letting politicians and diplomats run your business and keep the real practitioners out of the decision-making process. Keep selling snake oil to people who think the mantras you sell must be true because everyone else is saying the same things at conferences they pay a premium for. God knows, there is a market for all of this, but for how long? And who is going to do the work when the resulting mediocrity only attracts the mediocre and the mediocre is something clients don’t want to pay for anymore?
2. Be valued for creative making again
Offer teams a brilliant place to be their best. Slow down those crazy growth targets so you can go after interesting work that isn’t just about covering the cost of a production line. Pay talent well with complete transparency and equality. Don’t over index on people who are not creative makers in your management team. Get rid of divisive targets and titles that encourage people to compete internally. Understand neurodiversity and get rid of the cult of personality in your evaluation process. Value proper thinking in smaller teams and let people work how (when and where) they want in order to do their work happily. Be a learning organisation, developing talent continuously. Don’t force a small group of brilliant people to support a large pool of mediocre people, while paying them the same amount. Make people accountable to their pack. Don’t tolerate abuse or bias, do encourage critical thinking and debate. Step back from endless cookie cutter work that nobody seeking real problem-solving ever wants to do (there are other businesses who do this, ones that don’t claim to be creative). Attract and enable the wolf packs your clients need but don’t ring-fence them on one account forever, against their wishes. Be the organisation that reintroduces packs of wolves to benefit our languishing ecosystem.
3. Die out
For creative agencies in particular to potentially go the same way as all other middleman businesses, all that needs to happen is for an awesome, self-serve infrastructure to really hit its stride and for clients to start seeking their talent there instead, mostly because they can’t find the wolf packs they want in agencies. Imagine a service that chases invoices, provides financial/legal cover, project manages and sells, allowing self-employed creative makers to organise themselves into their own wolf packs without needing an agency infrastructure to get to work. When it becomes more sustainable and profitable for teams of advanced, self-employed creative problem solvers to come together to work on a complex project (without having to create yet another new agency), shit is going to get very real very quickly for businesses that make money from the infrastructure of creative making, but not the enjoyment and standard of the contribution. Clients could get access to the exact team that bids for the work while paying less, and the individuals who do the work could get a bigger cut than they ever did before. This future is not implausible, even if there is some way to go to make it a real threat. It’s what many people are starting to hope for and groundswell can be a powerful thing.
So, what will it be: 1, 2 or 3?
Please say 2, then go ahead and make it happen now. Wolf packs are already looking for new territories to make their own and all you will be left with is a wasteland of digital landfill, while purporting to be a creative business that nobody will believe in.
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