Give yourself headaches
It’s approaching midnight on a freezing April night in 1912 and here we are… rearranging deckchairs.
We could just as easily be picking up the fiddle while the Great Fire rages. Either way – we’re busying ourselves with nothing important.
The idioms would have you believe we only do this sort of ‘busywork’ to distract ourselves from disaster. A coping device in a crisis. But in today’s corporate culture “busyness has become a status symbol”. It’s eked into our everyday.
We need to fight it though, because it’s definitely not good for our brands.
It’s all too easy for creatives and clients alike to sink time into the trivial. To micromanage the details – fixating on font weights, swapping out adjectives, and playing spot the difference with colour swatches. These details matter. But only after we’ve nailed a killer idea. And even then, it shouldn’t take ten of us to get them right.
Most projects include rounds of minor changes to this sort of detail – taking on feedback from every member of the choir. But how many projects really challenge us to make something new happen?
How many force us to have to pick up the phone and figure out who can help us make something we’ve never seen before? To have to forge new partnerships. Negotiate production challenges. Convince our colleagues in the R&D department to try doing something in a new way?
As James Dyson puts it, “the more original your idea, the more resistance you will meet”.
Life is much easier if we stick ourselves on autopilot and avoid the tricky flight paths. Resistance is difficult. It’s time consuming. It’s frustrating. But it’s where the great work is.
Efficiency thinks the best idea is the one that doesn’t require any extraordinary effort to produce.
But effectiveness knows that isn’t true. The most effective work almost always involves someone having to ask ‘how on earth do we actually make this happen?’. It gets messy. Sometimes it gets ugly. But in the end memorable ideas are like memorable nights out.
Always worth the headache.
Who The LR We?
StudioLR is the gutsy creative agency. We’ve been grabbing people’s insides and making them interesting since 2004. If you liked this blog, you might like this one about not getting lost in the details.
