NORTHERN PLANNER

The light in the window

It is nine o’clock on a Thursday and the agency is lit up like a Christas tree. You can see it from the street. The blue glow of laptops. A pizza box open on the boardroom table. Someone standing with one hand on the back of a chair, nodding at a screen as if it might nod back.

Nobody asked them to stay. Nobody needed to. It just is, subtle but there.  Fed by deadlines, demanding clients and managers who quietly show that leaving at six is a kind of confession. The sacrifices get worn like medals. The missed bedtime. The wedding left early. The holiday spent on hotel wifi.

But here’s the awkward part. The work done at nine o’clock on a Thursday is, on the whole, not very good.

The arithmetic

The best evidence on long hours comes from an unlikely place: the munitions factories of the First World War. The workers were paid by the piece, so every shell was counted, and their hours swung wildly with the needs of the front. A century later the Stanford economist John Pencavel went back through the records.

What he found has the shape of a hill that suddenly flattens. Up to around fifty hours a week, output climbed in step with time. Past that it climbed more slowly, and at the far end it barely moved at all. A seventy-hour week produced little more than a week of fifty-five. Fifteen hours, handed over for nothing.

Shells are not ideas. But a tired mind makes a familiar idea, and familiar is the most expensive kind of failure. It looks finished. It survives the meetings. Then it vanishes on air.

The gun

Then there is the other kind of pressure, the kind that never shows up on a timesheet.

Teresa Amabile at Harvard spent years reading the daily diaries of people paid to be creative. On the days of greatest time pressure, they were 45 per cent less likely to come up with a new idea or crack a hard problem. And the damage lingered, a sort of pressure hangover, with creativity staying low for two days or more after the deadline had gone.

The cruellest detail is this. On those same days, people believed they were being more creative. Pressure feels like inspiration. Same racing pulse, same dry mouth. It just doesn’t make the same thing.

Now walk into the creative or strategy department (because strategy is ideas too) where the pressure isn’t only the clock. It is the expectation that you, personally, will be brilliant, today, in front of the client, the ECD the CSO and whoever decides your next pay rise. We hire people for their imagination, then build them a room where imagination must perform on cue, like a seal balancing a ball at feeding time.

Amabile did find one exception. Creativity could survive pressure when people felt they were on a genuine mission and were shielded from interruptions. Not a deadline invented to keep everyone keen. A real reason, and a closed door.

The old toughness

So why do we keep doing it? Because somewhere along the way we confused suffering with seriousness.

Steve Magness, a running coach who has worked with Olympians, wrote a whole book about that confusion, Do Hard Things. His argument is that the toughness most of us were raised on, the clenched-jaw, no-pain-no-gain, never-show-weakness kind, has failed us. It looks hard. It works badly. It runs mostly on fear, and fear is a fuel that burns hot and leaves a great deal of soot.

Every agency has its own version. The creative director who sends work back at eleven at night, partly to see who is still online. The Strategy Director who makes you Powerpoint overnight. The pitch week run like an initiation. The quiet pride of the person who hasn’t taken a proper holiday in three years. And the rule nobody writes down but everybody knows: the first one to leave cares the least.

None of this is toughness. It is endurance theatre. It is the runner who refuses to ease off on the hill because someone is watching, and then walks the last three miles.

Real toughness

Magness offers something better. Real toughness, as he describes it, means feeling the discomfort, leaning towards it rather than away, paying attention to what it is telling you, and leaving yourself enough room to choose what happens next. It begins, of all places, with embracing reality. Then it asks you to listen to your body, and to respond rather than react.

One of his stories is about Alex Honnold, the climber famous for going up El Capitan without a rope. Honnold once turned back from a climb simply because he didn’t feel right that day. No drama. He walked away, and he came back when he did feel right. The man who climbs a granite wall with nothing between him and the valley floor is not short of nerve. He just listens to it.

Translate that into agency life and toughness starts to look very different. It is the creative who says the idea isn’t there yet and asks for Monday. It is the planner who tells the client, kindly, that the brief is wrong. It is the ECD who looks at a room full of grey faces on a Wednesday afternoon and sends everyone home, because tomorrow’s ideas will be better than tonight’s.

Real toughness that starts with how you actually are, not how you’d like to look.

The rest day

Every cyclist learns this eventually, usually the hard way. You don’t get stronger on the bike. You get stronger afterwards. The ride is only the damage. The legs rebuild themselves on the sofa, in the bath, in bed, and they come back a little better than they left. Magness and his co-author Brad Stulberg once boiled it down to a sum in their earlier book, Peak Performance: stress plus rest equals growth. Leave out the rest and the sum goes negative.

Ideas obey the same law, and our own trade worked this out long ago. In 1940, James Webb Young, an adman at J. Walter Thompson, published a slim book called A Technique for Producing Ideas. Gather your material, he said, chew it over properly, and then let go of it completely. Go to the theatre. Listen to some music. Let the back of your mind do the digesting. The idea will turn up when you aren’t looking for it, in the bath, or while shaving, or in that fuzzy minute before you’re properly awake.

Henri Poincaré had one of the great insights of his mathematical life as he stepped onto a bus. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever had one in the fourth hour of a video call.

A tougher agency

So what would a properly tough agency look like? Not a softer one. A tougher one, in Magness’s sense of the word.

It would measure ideas, not hours, and notice when the two start pulling in opposite directions. It would treat the nine o’clock light in the window as a warning rather than a trophy. It would save real urgency for real missions, the ones where everyone understands why the clock matters, and it would guard those teams fiercely against the drip of interruptions that Amabile found so corrosive. It would let the people who make things wander round a gallery on a Tuesday afternoon without filling in a form to justify it.

And its leaders would go home at six, visibly, with their coats on, saying goodnight. Culture is not what the handbook says. It is what the boss’s coat does.

The descent

There is a moment at the top of every climb when you stop pedalling. The road tips over, the wind arrives, and the bike starts doing the work. The descent is not a reward for the climb. It is part of the ride. Without it, you would never get home.

Ours is a trade that sells ideas. We should be the last people on earth to confuse being busy with being brilliant. The best agency of the next ten years will not be the one with the brightest windows at nine o’clock at night. It will be the one whose people arrive on Monday with their legs back, carrying something they thought of in the bath.

Be tough. Go home.