Turning Up the Heat: Why Choosing Creative Concepts Burns Out Teams
The creative process – it's a bit like team-cooking, isn’t it? Everyone brings their own ingredients. When it’s time to decide what goes into the pot, things can get heated. Without care, the pot can boil over, leading to hurt feelings and dissatisfaction among team members. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Why do choosing and refining ideas heat up the kitchen?
Bring On the Cooks: In a diverse creative team, there’s a good mix of tastes and ideas. Everyone brings their own unique problem-solving lenses, also known as unconscious biases. Many bring their personal secret sauce, perfected over many years. But when it comes to choosing the recipe, not everyone's ingredients make the final cut. If the pot is not carefully stirred, it becomes a dish full of disappointment sprinkled with a dash of resentment.
Beloved Family Recipes: We all have that one dish we’re proud of, right? We’ve carried it through the generations, and it has personal meaning. We get just as emotionally attached to our creative ideas – our delicious desserts we know will be devoured. But when someone doesn’t love our recipe as much as we do, it can feel like a critique of the person, not just the idea. Pride of authorship is an undeniable part of the process and can be hard to let go. But it often makes the process taste a little off, to the people involved.
Fear of Blandness: Sometimes, the biggest challenge is simply the uncertainty of trying something new. Will this new ingredient really enhance the stew, or not? Fear of making the wrong choice is a major source of conflict. Everyone has a different appetite for risk.
Personal Taste: Usually, choosing an idea is subjective. We lean on our personal tastes, experiences, and biases. We project “what the consumer wants” but we can’t avoid choosing based on “what I would want” and “what the client said they wanted.” Ever have a client say “I bounced this off my daughter, and she liked Concept A the best?” Subjectivity leads to a delicious soup for some, but a sour taste for others.
Three Pinches of Structure for a Zesty Creative Stew
1) Frameworks like DVF from the world of Design Thinking can provide much-needed structure. DVF stands for Desirability (“does it taste good to our customers?”), Viability (“can we afford these ingredients?”), and Feasibility (“do we have what it takes to cook this up?”). With a proven framework, we can interrogate the work in a more objective way, get past personal taste, and reduce friction with the team.
2) In my old school advertising days, we’d say “let’s ask the consumer” – and then go spend $100k on focus groups. This creates cost and time pressure in the “Viability” column. Unfortunatley sometimes it still doesn’t get us past the baked-in subjectivity. Sadly, I’ve heard “these people are idiots” more than once, after the groups. Luckily today it’s so much easier to prototype a static social object, test it on a shoestring budget, and use real data to determine which recipe resonates, before making a full pot.
3) My first major in college was music. Sadly, I didn’t have the talent to achieve the rock stardom I aspired to. But I learned about performing for a jury, which did not include my own instructors. In other words, an independent third-party panel were the ones to evaluate my creative product. So why not shop our everyday creative ideas with other colleagues who haven’t seen the brief, and ask them to help us choose? That certainly helps remove pride of authorship. And if they’re using an objective framework, even better.
Stirring the Pot Together
A sprinkle of structure and a dash of objectivity can turn conflict into collaboration. It sets the stage for a more satisfying situation, for everyone involved. So, let’s bring our teams closer together. Let’s turn the heat down in the kitchen, and simmer-up creative success instead. The work, and your team, will thank you for it.
