Organised chaos; Why AI mustn't smooth out creativity's rough edges

I’ve got plenty of time to screw up Belief Studio. But I’m hoping the blueprints I’ve inherited from those who taught me might help me avoid this. 

A creative company with an uncreative output usually has its anatomy wrong. I’ve always thought great creative companies have a rather octopus-like shape. Starting at the top, the head feels neat, clean and grown up. Things here are orderly, rational, and reassuring, even if you suspect something wilder lurks beneath.

A creative company with an uncreative output usually has its anatomy wrong. 

You meet the leadership and see something calm, composed and almost minimalist. But below, it's all arms (not tentacles, I’ve learned). Arms that reach, probe and experiment. The arms can look dysfunctional. They can make people nervous, truly creative ideas usually do. But the head of the octopus should know: this is creative intelligence at work.

Above: Creative companies should be composed on top and probing and creatively dysfunctional underneath, says Starr.

Real problem solving rarely resembles a Gantt chart. We can wrap structure around the edges of creative operations, in fact we should, and not just for peace of mind, but we have to accept that a form of chaos needs to occur within those neat little blocks.

To solve problems, people need to lock in. More importantly, they need to do so in a space that feels psychologically safe. These individuals need to be able to make jokes and have bad ideas. If you want great work, people can't feel like they are in an environment where they can only say that which feels agreeable.

A funny thing happens when you share a terrible idea. Usually, someone spots something inside it, or realises the opposite of it would be great. Then there are the jokes and off-the-cuff remarks: they’re scaffolding. I’ve lost track of the great ideas I’ve seen realised over the years that started life as little more than a sarcastic quip.

A funny thing happens when you share a terrible idea.

Importantly, those locking in need to do so with others who have a similar calibre of reference points. For example, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck collaborate on a lot of movies together. If Damon were to substitute Affleck for someone he met at a bus stop, who had only seen The Meg, and refused to watch anything else, Damon would soon find himself having a lot of frustrating conversations. If creative people with high IQ and low ego play together, they tend to not only solve problems, but also solve them in a way you’d never expect.

Above: Damon and Affleck have similar reference points and play well together creatively. 

The trouble often starts when companies flip the octopus upside down, or when the visible layer becomes chaotic energy masquerading as vision while the underside becomes a conveyor belt of approvals, sign-offs and creative sterilisation. It starts when the people hired for their minds are asked instead for their compliance, or when questioning the critical is reviled, while over-intellectualising the trivial is revered. It starts when every decision requires validation from someone who isn’t in the arena, but insists on adjusting the lighting.

That’s when the arms are cut off, because creativity requires structural discipline at the edges and structural freedom at the core, not the other way around. Your clients don’t need to see the arms, they need to see clarity and leadership, and be infected with belief.

If we try to make creativity look tidy at the point of inception, we make it smaller, not safer.

But, if you replace the arms with process, or worse, with AI-enabled workflow software, and call it ‘efficiency’, you create mediocrity delivered against a timeline. You create a way of working that feels harder than it should be, only to manufacture an outcome that’s significantly weaker. The mess and mild chaos are how the whole thing moves. If we try to make creativity look tidy at the point of inception, we make it smaller, not safer.

Above: James Webb Young's book stated that "An idea is a new combination of old elements”.

This is where AI becomes dangerous. Businesses the world over are looking at enterprise AI adoption in a bid to find efficiencies in their model and day-to-day operations. Creative companies will do this, too. In fact, it's already happening.

Back in 1939, in A Technique for Producing Ideas, author James Webb Young put it plainly: "An idea is a new combination of old elements.” Of course, the more ‘old elements’ you have, and the more diverse they are, the more potential you have for interesting ideas. 

When was the last time anyone received a creative brief that said, 'List all the alternative ways customers could use our gravy granules’?

I'm all for using AI to increase the number of - and diversity of - the elements I have to work with in the creative process, but the next bit, the actual solving of the brief, that's a human task. Sure, AI is already outperforming humans on the Brick Test (also known as the Alternative Uses Test), but when was the last time anyone received a creative brief that said, 'List all the alternative ways customers could use our gravy granules’?

What creative companies do is rarely a case of infinite lateral thought. It's about sitting amongst all the stimuli and making a call. It's about asking questions like:

'Given everything we know about our customer, and our competitors, what is the right thing to do?'

Or, more pertinently:

'What is the right thing to do that our competitors would not do, and that looks nothing like the things they have done?'