“This fucking sucks. Try again.”
I was in my mid 20s. I was cutting my teeth as a freelance tagline jockey for a small agency. And this is the first bit of feedback I received.
I froze. Took a deep breath, and frantically cranked out a hundred more mediocre lines for that therapy-averse CD to take a creative dump on for the next 3 hours.
By the end of the week, I was having panic attacks. I was questioning myself, and confidence was shot.
I carried that feeling of inadequacy with me throughout my career.
I had another CD tell me I just wasn’t creative, and never would be.
Death to aggro-bro creative leader.
Somewhere along the way, creative leaders — particularly white dudes—bought a narrative that it was OK to be shitty to young creatives. They believed that somehow this produced great work.
Here’s the thing, I produced my worst work at that time — not because I was bad at what I did or because I was not creative or never would be — but because I didn’t feel safe.
My boss became the abusive alcoholic step father that throws dishes at you when they’re not spotless. You’re just trying to make a maniac happy. He never will because he never was.
If you’re this type of creative director, it’s time to go to therapy. Talk about your dad. He was a dick. So are you. Congratulations.
If your creative environment isn’t safe, your work is going to suffer. Period.
What constitutes a creative safe space and why it matters.
In the words of Carl Jung, “The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
True creative expression is playful. For creatives, nothing is so sacred, precious, or written in stone that it can’t be totally dismantled and rebuilt in new, exciting ways.
This playfulness sparks innovation and brings fresh, new ideas to life, and simply doesn’t happen if you don’t feel safe.
There’s a lot of talk of ‘safe spaces’ in the chaotic dystopian nightmare we’re all currently living through. In many cases, what most people mean when they say ‘safe space’ is a place without conflict or discomfort. That isn’t a safe space. It’s a cocoon.
A creative safe space is simple: it’s a healthy environment where you feel completely free to share your ideas.
This means you’re not afraid to give or receive feedback.
You’re not afraid of the discomfort of healthy debate because you know your collaborators are just trying to bring out the best in you.
The Messy Room Phenomenon
Part of this means creating an environment where creatives can make messes —physically and/or virtually. A New York Times article lovingly titled, “It’s not a mess, it’s creativity” lays this out quite well in the form of a research study:
“Forty-eight research subjects came individually to a laboratory, again assigned to messy or tidy rooms. This time, we told subjects to imagine that a Ping-Pong ball factory needed to think of new uses for Ping-Pong balls, and to write down as many ideas as they could. We had independent judges rate the subjects’ answers for degree of creativity, which can be done reliably. Answers rated low in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls for beer pong (a party game that in fact uses Ping-Pong balls, hence the low rating on innovation). Answers rated high in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls as ice cube trays, and attaching them to chair legs to protect floors.
When we analyzed the responses, we found that the subjects in both types of rooms came up with about the same number of ideas, which meant they put about the same effort into the task. Nonetheless, the messy room subjects were more creative, as we expected. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, but when we analyzed the ideas that judges scored as “highly creative,” we found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room — these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.”
