Creativity at a distance.
Working remotely as a creative isn’t perfect. But creativity has always been remarkably resistant to perfection.
Creativity is a social business. It’s surprising and encouraging to see how much is still happening, and how much is still being made, given the current constraints. The work is finding a way, and every new piece we see out there is a reminder of what’s still possible.
But that doesn’t mean we’re not missing something.
The problem is this: ideas thrive on other people. It’s not the buildings or the routine we’re hungry for. What we’ve lost is informal communication. Swinging by someone’s desk. Bumping into someone in a corridor. Seeing work on a wall, or over someone’s shoulders. Nonsense talk about some random thing we saw. Raising an eyebrow at a suggestion. And arguments. I never thought I’d miss the arguments, but here we are.
For now, our communication is fractured. All these tiny pieces of information are being lost. And if we’re not careful, this can hurt the work.
Months before COVID hit, I was working on pitches with remote teams spread across timezones and continents. We would have loved to get everybody in the same room to crack the brief — but that wasn’t on the cards. So we had to find a way to make it work.
And so we did.
Some of the things we learned back then have come in handy in this new reality. Some of them are obvious, and some are just things I need to keep reminding myself. But if you work on creative ideas as a team, at any scale, in any capacity, my hope is you’ll find something here that can help.
One of the first things we did was to find a way to give everyone in the team space to speak. This can be tricky to manage in a room, but it’s even harder remotely. Even when we’re connected via video we don’t get the same cues that tell us that someone has something to say, so we’re often left talking on top of each other. Giving people turns to speak or asking them directly for their input may feel awkward or artificial, but it can give you valuable inputs you might otherwise miss. You don’t have to be formal, just aware. This is a good rule of thumb for the whole team, too: make drawing ideas out of other people as valued as being the author of them. Build a culture that wants to get the best out of everybody.
Another thing that quickly became clear was the need for absolute clarity. When shifting timezones means you get one moment in a day to communicate with someone, you have to make that moment count. You need to keep saying: This is where we are. This is where we’re going. This is what we need to do. This is what we need from you to get there.
The beauty of stating the bleeding obvious is that sometimes it’s not as obvious as you think it is.
But clarity isn’t just about what you say. It’s also giving everyone a clear view of whatever you’re working on. You can’t pin it up to a wall or scrawl on a whiteboard, so you need another way that people can follow the progress. There’s no end of online collaboration tools that people use for this purpose, and some are better suited for different types of collaboration than others — but the tool you use is less important than making sure everyone can see the work, understand where you are, what’s needed, and how to move forward.
Making the process and the work this transparent helps everyone. At the same time, transparency doesn’t mean dumping all the information on everyone — it’s making that information meaningful. Overloading people’s brains can create huge amounts of swirl, and hamper clarity. Do what you can to reduce the cognitive load.
Feedback has to be clear, simple, and actionable. This isn’t new — but once again, your feedback has to rise above the limits of your communication. This can take a ton of focus, and can sometimes feel like you’re spending more time on things that are wrong than things that are moving in the right direction. But people’s brains aren’t linear, and the gap between work that’s not landing and work that’s brilliant could be a single word. Feedback isn’t the QA of ideas, it’s about shaping them.
You need feedback of your own, too. The first time I set up a remote pitch I followed up with an anonymous survey to get a sense of what was working, what was frustrating people, and what was getting in the way of the ideas. It doesn’t need to be that formal a process — it could be a one-to-one check-in, especially if you’re working with a smaller team. But don’t assume that your way of working is working for everyone. And if it’s not, you’ve got the perfect chance to make it better.
Of course, there are other things that are new to this situation. The fact that we’re not all just remote, but working from home, has changed things, too. One of the rare upsides of working from home is that it’s given people a chance to discover their natural creative states — when they work best, when they need to bounce something off someone, when they need deep thinking time. Others have built schedules that help them spend time with their family or connect with their partners. Talk about this stuff with your team, and learn how they work. These different ways of working aren’t ‘preferences’ — they’re your team giving you instructions of how to get the best ideas and thinking out of them. Time is all any of us have to work with — you need to make the most of it.
But above all, the biggest risk of a new normal situation like this is the word “normal”. What felt extraordinary one week can easily be taken for granted the next. People are doing extraordinary things under extraordinary pressure in an extraordinary time. As these things become normal, we have to make sure that we’re not losing our appreciation for what people are doing, or our respect for their work or their thinking.
Creativity has always been a messy, imperfect process. We now all probably have more imperfection than we ever bargained for — but we need to remember the joy that can exist in this chaos. A big part of that joy comes from other people. And remembering what you need to bring to the table to make this work: Space. Clarity. Direction. Understanding.
Because if the current situation has made this kind of collaboration more challenging, it’s only made it more valuable, too.
