NORTHERN PLANNER

You may have watched Finding Nemo, you may have liked it (your kids will if you have them). It's one of the most successful animated movies of all time.

It nearly flopped. 

Previously, Pixar relentlessly put in an open feedback loop,  on all elements of the script development of all projects. That's right, one of the most successful creative company of our times have more in common with Team Sky than you might think. Marginal gains, relentless, little improvements of all tiny aspects leading to a game changing whole. Think about it, all aspects of the creative process open to honest criticism. In fact, with it built in.

They tried to streamline the process for Nemo, and it bombed in every audience pre-test. It was only when they went back to the constructive criticism that the genius movie began to take shape.

Compare that to most agencies, creative, media or whatever…the worship of the creative types or the grand strategists, the obsession with the proposition, the simplified comms strategy or the purity of the game changing creative idea. 

The worship of the beginning, the leap of insight (or the re-hashing of the obvious in many cases). 

Another comparison, Lord Dyson and his game changing new hoover. He wasn't the only one to have the insight about bagless vacuums. He was just the only one who could get it to market, could get it to work. After the insight, he relentlessly prototyped until the game changing machine evolved, emerged if you like. Flashes of insight are fine, brilliant ideas that word in the real word seem to require lots of hard an failure built into the system. 

The Japanese have a phrase for this, Kaizen…graduallist. Everyone in a Nissan factory is tasked with spotting little ways they can improve the whole.

You could say that proper brilliance is a little like Pointillism, a fantastic piece of work is actually made of of lots of little dots that gradually make up the bigger picture. 

So, thinking about marketing services agencies that tend to pride themselves on great ideas, originality and obsession with the best work. Perhaps the truth is that they obsess with great initial ideas, but miss a trick in making them truly the best work, because they're not stress tested enough. Also, once campaigns are signed off and they get made, it could well be that they should still have room to develop…..rather than 'don't fuck with the idea'.

Maybe the lead agency, who tends to define the core strategy and creative, should welcome early feedback from partner agencies and clients alike.

God help us, maybe the tissue session in actually a good thing.

Now before you object and tell me about the magic of true creativity, I give you the myth of great poets, the romantic legends of yore. Most of them took copious amount of drugs, not to alter their mind and dredge of insights from the ether. They took drugs that let them work harder, so they could chip away at okay prose and gradually transform it into the stuff of legend. 

Is your culture set up this way?