Don't Cut the Heads Off Your Creatives 

By: Obaid Durrani

It's difficult to harness creativity, to tap into it whenever needed. Creativity is a fleeting moment, it comes and it goes.

At least, this is what it's like until you learn how to build the mental guardrails that make creativity a constant. Many marketers (especially creative marketers and the leaders that manage them) try to force creativity. They seem to treat creativity as the instant answer, rather than one part of the solution.

Marketers that are meant to lead with creativity are expected to whip up magic out of thin air.  As if you can flip a switch and solve any problem with creativity.

And what's worse is that creative marketers go hard on themselves when they can't answer with creativity and find themselves stuck. And this is because creativity isn't the first step in the process.

To enable yourself or your marketers to constantly tap into their creativity, you have to lay the groundwork for it. Everything should start with a goal. And because we know there's no one thing we could do to accomplish an entire goal, we break each goal down into objectives.

Your objectives are the things you will need to accomplish to achieve your goals. Once you've listed out your goals and broken them down into objectives, you break your objectives down into tactics.

1. Goals

2. Objectives

3. Tactics <----- and this is where creativity comes in.

When you give a creative person goals, and then the things they'd need to accomplish to achieve those goals, they can then tap into their endless creativity.

Creativity comes in later in the process. Without establishing your goals and your objectives, you're throwing someone a blank canvas. A blank canvas is great for art, but in a business context, you're essentially asking someone to do random things.

That's when things become chaos.

This is how creatives end up burnt out. When you're constantly thinking and doing, and using so much mental effort to make sense of it all in your head.

When I've found myself expected to "be creative" without a strategy in place, or a purpose to achieve, the frustration creeps in.

I see myself doing things, but not getting us anywhere. It's like I'm a headless horseman.

I'm riding around, but I can't see anything. I lack vision, because I lack vision.

Don't cut the heads off your creatives.