Everybody’s saying creativity is the currency of the future, but who is really building the infrastructure for it? The companies who indulge the ‘crazy thinkers’ are talked about, but still not the norm. The value of creativity itself, how to harness it, and the possibilities it holds – none of this is taken seriously enough. Which is odd, when you think of all the proof, the studies, the research we have amassed testifying to the upside of creative cultures. Google’s 20 percent rule seems innovative on one hand, which offers their resources to employees 20% of their time to develop ideas they personally feel are ‘the next big thing’.
Mainstream workday activity is all about low-cost, low-risk, and fear of failure. In other words, zero tolerance for the dreamers. In fact, even engineers at Google are now saying that the 20% rule is really the 120% rule — while engineers have the opportunity to pursue their own projects, it’s only on top of their existing (often quite demanding) schedules. Still, compared to most, Google, Apple and a few others are leading the way. Sadly, instead of creating rich and rewarding environments for creativity, most organizations either ignore the whole issue, or have a vague tolerance for it, which communicates, ‘go ahead and pursue your creative ideas after you’ve done your time, your over-time, and have that report on my desk by 9 am.’
Two words: Side Projects
At an ad agency where I worked, the CEO was unhappily musing over why we weren’t invited to pitch more often. The truth was we weren’t known for our creative work. That was supposedly the reason they hired me. I recommended creative ‘side projects’ on businesses we wanted to pitch. It seemed like a win-win situation. It would motivate my teams internally, by giving them the bandwidth to work on something every day which they were personally invested in, and get some good work exposed in the categories we were targeting. The CEO refused to allow this, and in his words ‘ if anyone wants to work on this after 6 pm and on weekends, great’. That was the culture of the place – creative hours were meted out project by project, to deliver a satisfactory solution. Trouble is, ‘satisfactory’ doesn’t get you on the good pitch lists, doesn’t attract top talent, doesn’t retain the best people, and doesn’t crush the competition.
In later years when I was in a position to make that call myself, I did. As CCO in a major ad agency in Tokyo, we were working on a big project to reinvigorate a very profitable hair care brand. As is fairly typical, the client wanted something new, but at the same time, tied our hands with a crippling list of formulaic mandatories. I introduced the notion of a ‘side project’ — allowing us to pursue a completely different brief in tandem to working on the original one.
The creative teams were a little hesitant, and some even skeptical. But as days flew by and their ideas took shape, they became more and more passionate and enthusiastic about the new directions and possibilities they were ‘allowed’ to explore. Did it mean more work and more sweat? Yes. But the Client loved the unexpected ideas so much that they agreed to test two of them. One of the new directions was wildly successful, and within 3 months it became the mainstream campaign.
When side projects become game-changers
Evan Williams co-founded Twitter as a side project within Odeo, a pod-casting company he launched with Noah Glass. Jack Dorsey was an engineer at Odeo, and worked in the courier and dispatch field, which is where he got the idea for Twitter as he envisioned it — a social network for sending short messages to friends over cellphones and the Internet. So Williams made him C.E.O. of Twitter. The rest is history as they say, and as Twitter grew, Dorsey took over as the single leader of day-to-day operations in the role of Chairman.
Products like Gmail, Adsense, Craigslist, and even Post-Its can trace their roots back to work that was developed on the side. About 50 percent of Google’s new projects were born from that 20% time rule. And as time has proven, the ROI on that 20% is above reproach.
Side projects live in a parallel universe where no one is looking, watching, counting, or measuring.
It can be a beautiful place free of expectations, where there is real freedom to let creativity breathe new life into old and tired thinking.
Tobias van Schneider designs and builds new products for Spotify in New York. He seems to have lived his life as one big side project, which he believes is a mindset more than anything else. “The only way a side project will work is if people give themselves permission to think simple, to change their minds, to fail–basically, to not take them too seriously,” says van Schneider. “When you treat something like it’s stupid, you have fun with it, you don’t put too much structure around it. You can enjoy different types of success.”
Making room for creativity is going to pay off if you’re in it for the long game. The ideas which will surface from the investment of resources and time can do more than just put a company on the map — it can change the map. It’s the power of blue-ocean strategic thinking that only comes when the dreamers are invited into the boardroom.
Visionaries may have to leave before their ideas see the light of day
Creative minds are always firing on many cylinders. In a work environment that contains instead of liberates, the situation will become intolerable for the employee who needs some room to experiment and see where the unconventional ideas can take them, and the company. But few organizations are ready to relinquish any time to work that isn’t sanctioned and on the books.
The really nutty thing is that companies recruit and hire the people they think are ‘out-of-the-box’ and then reward others internally who play the safe game.
Van Schneider points to the team that created FiftyThree, makers of the Pencil stylus and Paper iPad app. “Many of them came out of Microsoft tired of what they were working on and they didn’t have the freedom to take their products to the next level,” he says. “You have to tell people so that they will believe you: ‘You know what, you can do this thing exactly the way you want to at our company. Give them the trust and responsibility and remove their fears.”
