Communication is the big idea nobody can own…

Back in my ad agency days as a copywriter, we “creative” types tended to defy the shackles of any sort of creative process. Barely tolerant of management’s insistence on our reading creative briefs, we drew the line at this, feeling it was a constraint to the creative process to make it an actual, well, process. After all, our clients didn’t in the main hire us for marketing insights, or for such organizational needs as sales and marketing alignment. They hired agencies much as they do today, for big ideas, and as any marcom manager would tell you, imposing a process on the birthing of big ideas just wouldn’t be, well, creative.

After all, David Ogilvy had taught us long ago, that from the creative individual’s subconscious, once filled with the facts on any matter, fresh new ideas would reliably spring forth. So too, wrote Leo Burnett, who counseled us to listen to the “wee small voice” within each of us when it came cultivating the big ideas that would change the fortunes of clients – the same clients who were quite willing to pay a lot of money (and still do) for a lot of ideas and not a lot of “process”.

And yet, in recent years, studies have shown that creative actions in business are almost never left to the singular genius of a single individual. It is a collaborative process, incremental, building on the exchange of information and ideas, fueled by discussions of what-if scenarios.

You know, communication.

If only such a process were followed by more business leaders, or for that matter by our nation’s leaders. But then, in the case of our government, such process management would require a skill most of them seem to lack, which is the ability to communicate. Instead of following a process for honest discovery and collaborative problem solving, the people we have elected worship the singular genius of their singular parties; and so they vote on unilaterally conceived big ideas ahead of shared insights and communicated analyses, and at length their failure is the same failure of any organization that worships ideas ahead of insights.

There is no effective leadership, nor can there be effective followers, when there is no process for effective communication.

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com