Creative teams face two conflicting pressures: to produce timely and consistent work, and to produce unique and brilliant work. The pull between these two expectations creates a tension like that from two people pulling on a rope. When this pull—between possibilities and pragmatics—becomes too strong, the rope is taut, eliminating the peaks and troughs of productivity required do our best creative work.
We are constantly forced to choose between striving to improve the quality of our work and driving it to completion. This dynamic manifests itself in three tensions: the time-versus-value tension, the predictable-versus-rhythmic tension, and the product-versus-process tension.
The Time-Versus-Value Tension
As a creative worker, you’re not really paid for your time, you’re paid for the value you create. Just showing up and doing a set of tasks every day doesn’t cut it. You are required to perpetually create new value in order to prove your worth to your employer, your peers, and even to yourself. And though many creatives have more flexibility than ever regarding how and where they do their work, this flexibility than ever regarding how and where they do their work, this flexibility introduces a new kind of performance pressure: completion anxiety. Because we’re capable of working at all times—our mind goes with us everywhere, after all—we continue working on our projects for as long as we possibly can. We’re never really certain when we’ve done enough.
It’s true that there is often such an affinity for our work that we would choose it over other activities, even recreational ones. But in our pursuit of value creation, it’s possible to overwork our minds without obvious signs of distress. We don’t have the same aches and pains that may accompany a day spent running a marathon or chopping wood. As a result, being aware of how mental overexertion is affecting us is often difficult, until we suddenly realize that we’re not creating at the level we once did or that we’re just not as excited about our work as we used to be.
You’ll learn some ways to mitigate this time-versus-value tension in the chapters on focus, energy, and hours.
The Predictable-Versus-Rhythmic Tension
In a smaller organization, each worker wears multiple hats, and the order of the day is all about getting things done, regardless of how. But as the organization grows, some degree of predictability becomes necessary—to allocate resources, hire appropriately, and make reasonable promises to clients or customers. Consistent and predictable production makes it possible to analyze how efficiently individuals and systems are performing across the organization—as the company gets bigger, there is more to protect, and the pressure to not screw it up only grows over time.
But this need for predictability can begin to take a toll on those responsible for doing the work. While it’s possible, even necessary, to measure the relationship of resources to output in highly systemized, repeatable work, like sales or manufacturing, it’s nearly impossible to do so reliably for creative work. After all, how can we predict when business-changing insights will occur? How do you create a system that ensures that only the best ideas are executed, and that the not-so-good ones fade away? Because these problems depend on the discretion and insights of individuals, tension is inevitable.
The rhythmic nature of a healthy creative process can be very uncomfortable for managers because of the constant pressure from the organization to be efficient. Efficiency doesn’t allow for peaks and troughs, so managers sometimes try to ensure that there is at least the appearance of productivity at all times. The solution to all this is to regain a sense of mastery over time and focus, as we’ll discuss in later chapters.
The Product-Versus-Process Tension
The organization is primarily concerned with the finished product, but 99 percent of what we do as creatives is process. In fact, many creative jobs are fundamentally oriented around perpetuating process rather than generating process. There are rarely times when we can hold something in our hands at the end of the day and say, “If I hadn’t been here, this wouldn’t exist.” Instead, we are often one of many value-add laborers who contribute layers of creative work to a given project. Responsibility and accountability for our projects, especially in larger organizations are often spread quite thin.
What’s more, the final result of our creative work is typically judged subjectively, and by someone other than us. As a result, being able to gauge in the middle of the process whether what we’re working on will please our “judge” can often be difficult. We frequently engage in the entire creative process and emerge on the other side with a finished product only to hear our client or manager say, “Yeah… I kind of get what you’re going for here, but it’s just not quite there yet.” It can be difficult to understand what to do with this kind of input, and chances are that the manager is probably struggling just as much as we are for a direction on what to do next.
Yes, this is to be expected. We’re being paid to do a job. But over time this dynamic can tempt us to gravitate toward doing whatever will get approved rather than taking risks and exploring as we’re creating. We do less than we’re capable of because we don’t want to deal with the consequences of disapproval at the end of the process.
The tension between product and process is a natural tension within any kind of organized creative work, so we can’t ignore its effects. We can, however, learn to mitigate them by applying principles related to time, focus, and relationships, which we’ll discuss in later chapters.
* Source: The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry