My favourite creativity ‘model’ is Walt Disney’s Three Chairs. I say it’s my favourite because it’s directive enough to be useful but leaves plenty of room for flexibility, because it sits well in my head, and lastly because if you’ve ever worked with me you’ll know I can find a way to work it into pretty much any conversation.
Simply put, it takes the process of creative innovation, or ‘imagineering’ as Disney would call it, and proposes that mastery comes when three different, but complementary, mindsets are brought together: the dreamer, the realist, and the spoiler. The visionary creates worlds with their imagination, before the pragmatist stress tests whether these dreams can be built in practice. The critic then interrogates them looking for the tiniest hairline fracture that if exploited could cause the whole thing to come crumbling down.
Each of us may gravitate towards one of these roles over another, but we can also stretch ourselves to switch position or adopt multiple different stances. Whichever chair we are most naturally inclined to (for me, it’s the pragmatist) we mustn’t feel irked or affronted by the input of the other two, because it’s the balance they bring that stop us overindulging our own tendencies.
As always, there’s a point to this retelling (and not just to prove that I can work Disney’s model into any context). When I first joined a creative agency in 2016, I was used to being self-sufficient at work. Of course, I had a team and worked with them, but it was more like the early twentieth century Ford Model T assembly line. We each fulfilled our role as efficiently and effectively as we could, taking our cue from the person before and handing over to the next one in line. We would seek consultation when needed but there were single points of accountability for each step.
Not so in a creative agency. Heading into my interview, I arrived having been integrated marketing lead for a 179-market campaign in my previous role and ready to take on the world once again. No longer young enough to be a 2016-style digital native, I’d worked hard to keep myself up-to-date on trends, and found the online world fascinating.
Sitting in my interview, I felt confident in what I was saying about best practice in digital marketing. The interview seemed to be going well with lots of buying signs (a discussion for another time). Then my interviewer said: Of course, you know that we already have a digital marketing expert, so if you are offered and accept this role, he’ll take the lead on that.
In my head, the world started to run in slow-mo as I thought: Oh no, what a disaster. What if this guy is a complete nightmare? I’ve worked for years to get on top of this, what if he has no idea what he’s talking about? Outwardly, I paused for only seconds and replied: Oh no…worries at all! Great, in fact. Looking forward to meeting him.
Usually, I pride myself on being honest, but I also pride myself on having a growth mindset and knew I couldn’t judge a stranger before I’d even met him, so I decided to put my best foot forward, shoved my worries into a little box, and hoped a Jack didn’t spring out in due course.
This story wouldn’t really being going anywhere if the next part weren’t that I was offered the role, happily accepted and on my first day was introduced to this ‘digital marketing expert’ (also known as Mike Harland). I braced myself, determined to keep smiling and listen to what he had to say, no matter what.
Fast-forward to the end (we’re all time poor). It took about five minutes for my mind to be blown by how much more he knew than I did, 10 minutes for my imposter syndrome to be tearing through me like an adrenaline-rush and six months before I understood that he’d be the person I’d would learn the most from in my career to date. He did in fact become my creative partner, the Holy Grail for the natural ‘dreamers’ amongst us, but something that the born realists and critics (his comfort zone) don’t find so often. We even learnt to switch between all three of Disney’s Chairs – ably abetted by our visionary counterparts.
The moral? Once again, I was wrong before I was right, but being open-minded steered me through a near-miss massive error of judgement not only to safety but to a better place than where I started out. The sting in the tail is that we no longer work together, but no one, least of all me, wants a sad ending in a blog inspired by Disney. The good news is that he’s still a digital marketing expert and when I approached him to ask his opinion on how he thought COVID-19 would change the way we interact online, true to form, he agreed to share his thoughts and insights with everyone, the way he always has with me.
Our discussion focused on two subjects – the first is convenience. We’re adapting to a way of life structured around working out how to do everything we used to do out in the big wide world in our living rooms and finding that once we’ve adapted our new mode can allow more flexibility in our life routine, work-life balance and more. The second is evolution – there’s a tech surge as new apps and platforms are created and updated faster than ever to service our lockdown needs, but what does that mean for when life goes back to ‘normal’. Will ‘normal’ have been redefined?
So, convenience. In general, human beings are creatures of habit, so moving from largely office-based life, to largely working-from-home based life can be an unsettling shift both practically and culturally, but how long do we have to stay in lockdown before home office life becomes our new comfortable habit?
The facts tell two very different stories. An article in De Zeen, a large online magazine, homes in on the potential effects on culture. After all, we’re part of the “largest ever working-from-home experiment” and have “lost the immediacy of face-to-face communications” with “companies across the world…being forced to embrace remote working and the digital technology that supports it.” (https://www.dezeen.com/2020/03/25/work-from-home-coronavirus/). On the other hand, despite teething problems, we’re learning – and fast.
Right now, we won’t have a choice over where we work day-to-day, but in the future, when we do, we may find that the result is a compromise. Yes, we’ll want to head into the office to be with our team, but we, and our employers, will also know that when we don’t, we have effective ways of working from home.
In a Wired article entitled: Coronavirus could trap us with our most annoying colleagues forever (I’ll let you read it – we can all relate, because we can all blame others for being the annoying ones), Stuart Templeton, UK Head of Workplace at messaging company Slack which has seen an 80% increase in new paid customers versus the last two quarters “believes companies must shift away from religiously monitoring how many hours employees have worked and move instead to a more flexible way of managing people, which is built on prioritising their mental health” (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-annoying-colleagues).
Of course, different personalities will be affected in different ways. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. However, I do believe that the newfound convenience of, and enforced adaptation to, working from home will provide us all with an opportunity; an opportunity to reshape how and when we work. Now is our chance to prove ourselves, our productivity and show hesitant employers we can be trusted even when we can’t be seen.
This empowerment is supported by the evolution we’re seeing online and not just in our professional lives, but our private lives too. Examples of innovation driven by lockdown lifestyle range from being able to connect with a hair stylist who shows you how to cut your hair through an app pairing individuals in desperate need of a trim with world class stylists (https://www.youprobablyneedahaircut.com/) through a number of interconnected apps allowing you to learn to run the METRO Marathon Düsseldorf on your own with the support of ‘Keep Moving’ (https://www.metro-marathon.de/en/mmd-20/keep-moving/). Google Chrome extension Vemos (https://vemos.org/) and Netflix Party (www.netflixparty.com) even enable people to watch TV shows or movies together remotely with full video chat.
There’s no doubt that the digital world is racing to keep up with our enforced real-life adaptations, but the real question is, as with remote working, are these innovations lockdown limited or here to stay? When we can leave our homes again for more than essential activities or daily exercise, will we still tolerate minute-by-minute push updates on who is ‘in the house’ or will HouseParty have ridden its epic growth wave and disappear off our radars again? If it can capitalise on its exponential popularity and maintain relevance will it be a no-brainer home for brand marketing and if so, how?
Life at the moment seems to be a series of unanswerable questions, but my takeout isn’t that life is out of our control, but that there are more opportunities than ever to embrace the change around us and harness it to meet our own needs. A friend who’s a doctor recently said to me that “change is inevitable”, it’s just that this year it’s been “sped up”. His perspective was that far from being at the mercy of events around us, we get to live through more evolution than we might usually expect to see in one lifetime and that can be seen as a privilege.
There are still tricky moments and we shouldn’t be afraid of openly acknowledging that to one another. There are plenty of times when I miss my family and friends. I regularly have to dig into my boots to come out stronger, but those feelings aren’t mutually exclusive from being excited about all the new possibilities that lie all around me.
Circling back to where I started, with innovation, enforced or otherwise, there is an opportunity for creativity. If you believe in Walt Disney’s words, then that creativity will excel when we collaborate in the right way. All we need to do is find our creative partner(s).
Katie Traxton is an ESA Board Director and Chief Communications Officer at Formula-E. She was previously Managing Partner at WeAreFearless, ESA’s Pan-Europe Sponsorship Agency of the Year.