Welcome to the show where we expose new perspectives on our ever evolving world through the lenses of various industries, cultures and backgrounds.
Our guests are disruptors, united by a common goal to bring their purpose to life.
Whether they’re from the commercial world or third sector, from the global North or the Global S, expect an inspirational journey that will transform your perspective on just what is possible.
My name is Philippa White and welcome to Thai Unearthed.
What if curiosity isn’t something organizations are missing, but something they end up training out of people?
Now we say we want it, but then we reward speed and certainty.
We reward the person who arrives with the answer, not the one still sitting with the question.
Welcome to episode 120 of Thai Unearthed.
My guest today grew up in a small town in Denmark, feeling slightly outside of things, listening to Radiohead when no one else around him was following his own interests into corners nobody seemed to even care about.
And somewhere in that, a way of seeing took shape. 1 He would go on to build an entire career around Yippee.
Fisher Morgenson is head of strategic planning at Arla Foods, and before that spent years in London at Saatchi and Saatchi and Accenture Song.
There are canned lions and a Cleo and DNA D pencils in his story.
The awards aren’t really what this conversation is about because Yeppe spent his working life protecting the one thing most organizations say they want.
And then make it almost impossible to practice.
We talk about the barrel we each see the world through and how hard it is to notice you’re inside one.
About what creativity actually runs on, and about the three hours on a train that he refuses to fill with meetings.
Not because he can’t, but because he doesn’t.
So if you ever felt the pull between staying curious and being certain, then this conversation is for you.
Yeppe, welcome to Thai UNEARTHED.
Yep, it is so great to have you with me on Tie on Earth.
I’ve been so looking forward to this after our many, many, many, many conversations.
Welcome.
Thank you for having me, I’m excited for this conversation.
I’m so excited.
As I say, we have recorded something already.
We’ve been through a journey together, the conversations that we’ve had because I just think that they’re so insightful.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Just start because I feel so lucky that I get to speak to so many people from so many different places around the world.
Where are you?
I’m sitting in Copenhagen, I’m in my little office and Irish Australian girlfriends sitting outside and I got my little 4 month old daughter is asleep.
She’s down for her afternoon nap.
It’s 4:15 in the afternoon here, sun is shining and in a little while we’re going to Ireland for a wedding and then we’re going to hover around the islands in Greece for the rest of July.
Oh, how nice.
Yeah, it’s like, I mean, Copenhagen summer’s coming, we’re going to jump around for a while.
Life’s pretty good, right?
Life is good and Copenhagen amazing.
I’m a big fan of Denmark.
I feel very fortunate to have got to have a taste of it over the years.
So let’s start somewhere personal.
When we were talking recently, you described growing up in a small town and you talked about feeling a bit outside of things, listening to things like Radiohead when no one else was, seeing the world just slightly differently to the people around you.
And just looking back.
How did that experience then shape the thinker and the creative mind that you’ve now become?
I think that there’s a certain sort of schizophrenia almost that sort of sets in within that.
First and foremost, I think there’s something very foundational in sort of being an outsider in your very formative years.
Having to sort of look in from the outside have made me feel a lot like an outsider and I still do to a certain degree today.
And it’s not an outsider like Weber without a cause, that James Dean type way, but actually just a bit odd.
When I grew up, people were sort of a few years ahead of me, so they understood more of the world than I did.
Or at least that’s how you feel when you’re a bit younger or when you sort of succumb to more esoteric or strange sort of endeavours.
Whether or not that’s listening to Radiohead as it was in my hometown says more about my hometown than it does about me, I think.
But it was still this sort of thing where I saw other people sort of walking through life with a lot more ease and naturalness than I thought I had because I couldn’t necessarily see those systems that they sort of interact in because mine was very different.
So I think I had two sort of very oppositional forces that said that the core of who I was, on the one hand, I really wanted to fit in.
So having to try to decode that system that other people were in.
And then at the same time, and I think this is more the creative side, I also wanted to cater to sort of the essence of who I was, the sort of the more nerdy and geeky side of me.
Like The thing is, I thought about this the other day.
I’m 41 years old now and I got a little daughter, as I just said, and I’m from a time and particularly a place where playing video games was looked down upon, reading books was looked down upon, listening to that kind of music was looked down upon.
So it was kind of my own secret, this sort of thing that I could go into my bedroom and close my door and then I had all these worlds that I could explore.
And I think that’s what my creative mind is good at.
I guess that’s why I became a planner on advertising is because I like exploring things.
I like to dive deep into them.
Like my curiosity was awakened sort of in a very secluded space originally, I think also good at connecting dots, as any planner would probably say that they are.
I still love an Easter egg, but I think that’s being exposed to a lot of culture like that in that space.
Was it?
But I think my curiosity was almost a guarded one.
It became something sacred because it was something that was my own little treasure drove in my own little little backyard.
And I think that put a lot more emphasis on the importance of that, of diving into culture of of sort of going into these other worlds.
There’s an old quote from a video game called Zelda where it’s like you get a sword or something and it says, take this, there are other worlds than these.
And I think about that, Yeah, it’s a great quote because you need a little help because and then you can go explore all of these things.
It reminds me a lot of when we had our last conversation and you were talking about the importance of carving out time to really properly focus on the things that you need to focus on.
Because if you don’t, you then become just really good at sending emails or getting really good at just doing the kind of mundane stuff and not giving the proper attention to the things that you actually really want to get good at.
And also, I think this feeds into people’s purpose and just what gets you excited.
Because if what you’re working in and what you’re doing is 1.
Something that you’re very good at 2, you connect to it.
And I think it’s just really interesting and so wonderful that at such a young age, you were already reading philosophy and listening to different music and, you know, stretching your brain.
But then isn’t it just amazing how you’ve been able to take all of those puzzle pieces and it’s sort of fitting into something that actually has created this incredible image now of what it is that you’re doing and clearly very good at and obviously building on constantly.
But it’s something that just lights your soul and fills your cup, but also something that you spent so much time on and now it’s turned into something that’s incredibly valuable.
It’s funny because I didn’t know, you know, when you start out, you have no idea.
And I just felt odd.
So it’s sort of retrospectively I can sort of see what how everything fit together.
But it’s an interesting thing to sort of when I finished high school, I worked in a kindergarten for two years.
It was a sort of wonderful little place and they had 45 kids or something like that.
And I wasn’t one of them as sort of a student like an assistant assistant, I guess.
And the first thing I did, because they had like an old camera, so I got an old laptop and then I drilled a hole in the wall and put up an old screen.
And I was obviously allowed to do this.
And then in a closet on the other side, I put that laptop in.
And then I would walk around this really old, you know, digital camera and I’d take pictures of the kids every day.
And then every day I’d like 3, I stick these pictures into the computer.
So whenever the parents came and they looked, they could sort of see what we’ve been doing all day and they could see pictures of the little kids.
It was one of those things that I sort of just thought, we have this dormant resource, we can use it.
And I just have these old things that I can just plug into to it.
And it was funny.
My mother also works in that industry.
She met the boss of that kindergarten years later and she said, your son’s the most creative person I know.
And it’s the first time ever my mum was told that I was creative.
And I didn’t think I was creative.
I just sort of found that this thing, I went from there, studied economics, which is not a creative endeavour at all.
Then I stopped doing that.
And then I went and studied architecture and design because I think I was aware by then that I needed some more sort of visual expressions within my life and sort of have more meaning sitting in a more visual space.
But I didn’t know it was curiosity that drove me from one thing to the other to the other, economics to try to understand the world, the other bit to try to understand the sort of the world we’re living in and the spaces we sort of move around.
And I still to this day is fascinated by it.
Sorry.
Yeah.
And no, because it’s like the power of just seeing the world through a different lens, right?
And it sounds cliche, but The thing is, is we all have our own little worlds that we have created.
And also the importance, you know, you’ve got a little child.
I’ve got two young girls, 1 actually is 15.
And oddly, in Brazil, you have to start thinking about what you’re going to do for the rest of your life in grade 10, which is just crazy.
And I just keep saying, honestly, I know that the rest of the world is putting that pressure on all their children.
And they all have to decide that I’m telling you right now, you have the permission to not know and you will not know.
And you might go into economics or law or whatever.
And then it’s all puzzle pieces and it all kind of joins together.
And I just think having that space and the trust to trust the process like what we were talking about before we pressed record.
There’s something interesting about trusting your instinct, but I think it’s twofold because instinct is not the same as interest.
I think there’s something about figuring out what you’re good at, you know, because there’s, you know, my world way into all of this world has been sort of strange and weird.
I think like everybody who ends up in advertising probably is, but it like to be honest, well, a bunch of misfits in some way, shape or form.
It’s not Don Draper, all of it, none of it actually.
But I think it’s, it’s this interesting thing of going what, what’s your instinct tell you to do and what can you monetize?
Because I think that’s the other thing that your instinct usually carries you to places where you are probably good at it, where you find out that you have the skills and the capabilities to actually solve those issues.
Or rather, and that’s my thing now that I talk to my teams about and everybody who wants to listen.
Are you thinking your teeth into a challenge you think is interesting?
Because I think that’s the thing, we’re sort of, I think we’re hardwired as people to go and solve problems, whatever those problems are.
And some people find an accounting problem interesting because it’s like a, it’s a square box and there’s rules and regulations and you can be creative within that space.
And for other people, it’s drawing or it’s solving communication problems like like I do.
And I think getting to those bits and pieces sort of going like, oh, I’m good at these things, but do I like solving that type of problem?
That gets us to an interesting place, I think.
Yeah, it’s a great segue to something else I wanted to understand, because talking about your career and obviously just how you kind of got to where you’ve got to, you’ve been very good at just asking better questions of brands and of consumers and of organizations.
But this curiosity piece I find fascinating.
And obviously that’s how we got to know each other because of the work with Arla.
And within systems, curiosity isn’t always welcomed.
So some companies are better at accepting it than others.
But the system, wherever you are, is sometimes just hard to deal with.
And I’m just wondering what happens to human curiosity when it then collides with these organizational systems that reward things like certainty and speed?
Yeah, that I like the dichotomy.
I know what Rogers and Gilmore would say.
You know, the Pink Floyd guys welcome my son, welcome to the machine as I think they think.
But I think that, you know, advertising agencies value this, consultancies, creative industries value this.
But once you get into the more sort of heavy organizations, quote UN quote, it probably Withers and dies.
We found can be a little bit dramatic to a sense.
My experience is that those that are wilfully curious in those organizations, they find a way and they get rewarded for it as well.
But there is a lot of resistance within that I think.
And it took it.
This is this weird sort of semantic, right?
Because organizational systems needs innovation, they need curiosity or its members.
And sort of the public, by the way, needs to ask questions of the organization’s perpetually.
What are you doing, how are you doing it, under what circumstances, and where are you going, by the way?
Yeah, that’s an internal question and that’s an external question, I think.
So I think there’s something like it is a necessity, this sort of, let’s call it organizational curiosity, even though it’s a, it’s a oxymoron a little bit.
But I think there’s maybe two things to this.
If I think a little bit, and I think curiosity and organizational systems must have a time and a place.
There must be a place for curiosity within any given process, but I think it has to be a purposeful 1.
Not that the outcome of curiosity always have to be net positive, but it should seek to move the goal posts forward.
And I think the the organization must cater to are we setting up processes so they’re at least a modicum of curiosity.
But then I also think that the other bit is sort of us asking questions of curiosity because I think there’s something that curiosity must come with responsibility in an organizational setting.
We all know Curious George, of course.
That’s curiosity without responsibility.
I think I have.
I have children’s books now.
It’s I was going to say, yes, we can.
We can tell you’ve got a young, a young child that you’re reading.
Stories to she points the pictures it’s great it’s a fun thing, but I think at some point discovery must also turn into something actionable.
Now, I think Johnny, I’ve or the Apple guys or the Pixar guys will probably tell me otherwise, but that’s the other extreme, right?
And I work in an in house agency right now and we just got a new boss and she’s been here a total of 17 days.
So she’s very, yeah, very good.
She will be amazing.
I can say that even though when this comes out, she’ll it’ll be a little bit further down the line.
And the reason I know that is that she asks poignant and curious questions.
And the questions she asked, curiosity is foundational to them.
But the questions she asks is also non circular.
There is an answer that sits at the end of them.
And I think that’s key.
It’s a really interesting thing.
She went into our leadership team the other end and she goes, what do you do and under what circumstances?
And that’s a brilliant question to ask as a new person because it’s a really interesting thing to sort of go, well, what are you going to say and how are you going to explain the reality in which you are operating in?
It’s a very interesting thing because it also it automatically leads to the next question.
Her organizational curiosity is very much on point.
And just sort of digging it just a little bit into that, just around having the guardians of the system supporting whatever it is that a business needs, needs to focus on.
So in this case, you know, curiosity, which, you know, curiosity requires space, Curiosity requires slowing things down.
Curiosity requires actually getting things wrong sometimes, but that’s OK.
So then that’s the sort of psychological safety part.
And I think what’s so, so, so important and what you’ve just said, you feel that who’s now just come into the role where obviously you need to be creative, you need to be curious, you need to create those spaces And it’s supported by that, the leader.
And then that filters down and then people feel safe.
And I think it’s understanding these competencies of, you know, the psychological safety of the openness of giving the space of if someone gets something wrong, you’re not afraid that you’re going to lose your job, which is a lot of what Ty work on with our clients.
It’s because the more that people kind of understand that, the freer people feel to be able to really step into this more.
It’s something I’m sort of thinking a lot about right now.
And so you got me thinking about as well.
Like what are the tenants of curiosity, of curiosity?
That works.
I go, OK, the upper level is curiosity.
That’s it on the sort of on the surface level.
Below that is trust.
So let’s say that if that’s the two sides of the coin, what’s the tenants then to hold those two elements up?
I think that’s a really interesting thing because I think once we more walk down to the more behavioral side of it, what my new boss, what she also demonstrates is also that sort of like a curiosity and honesty, a trust, maybe like the implied elements within those questions that are really interesting to ask.
It’s not about coming in and putting a flag down, but it’s actually coming with a mindset that you can sort of mirror yourself in.
I think it’s super interesting to see how other people engage with her and how she engages with other people because it’s like how she lands.
And just from sort of a macro perspective, I think it’s super interesting how you sort of enter an organization and change things and so slightly and then dramatically fast, right?
Yeah, totally.
And also because you’re running department, right?
It’s fascinating from a behavioral science kind of point of view and just sort of seeing what’s working and then just sort of seeing God, yeah, I need more of this with the people that I’m working with, what’s working, what isn’t working?
How how can you learn obviously from someone who’s coming at something differently?
And like, it’s just, it’s, it’s an exciting moment actually at Arla, I think.
It is, but also this whole, the idea of how you facilitate curiosity in processes, especially now I sit on the ad side and then I have sort of my client sitting on the corporate side, sort of quote, UN quote.
And it’s an interesting, I think is how can I as a leader create a room where there is more excitement about the curiosity, where there’s more maybe space or breathing room within the curiosity phase before we walk into the organizational system that revolves certainty and speed, which I, you know, buy into completely.
So it’s that thing of like, how do you create the room around it?
I have a funny thing right now that we’re doing with one of my guys.
We’re basically presenting territories for brains to play in in culture.
And he goes, it’s funny that we call it a workshop because it’s really just a presentation.
And then I go, yeah, but that’s because you wanted to have the veneer of participation.
And we want and we encourage participation.
But in reality, we want to go into a room where the rules are slightly different.
And then semantic starts to matter because the moment I go from presentation to workshop, people’s perception and expectation towards the session entirely changes.
And we can also, I’m sure, like once we get tired of workshop, we’ll start calling them sprints or experiments or whatever else down the line.
But it matters these things.
It matters because language shapes our reality.
And that’s like the most benign thing to say.
But using it in this example, you sort of go, Oh yeah, actually it helps us solve an issue that you’re pointing out, which is how do we get organizations to be more comfortable in curiosity?
It’s so interesting with the work that we do so that we obviously just finished this particular program with Arla, just had the final presentation.
When we kick off these programs and you have these teams working with these organizations in other parts of the world, we often say don’t do to the organization work with the organization.
But it’s so interesting what you’re talking about the difference between a presentation and a workshop when the actual in in your case, because I mean, there’s many definitions of a workshop, but in what you’re talking about, you set the expectations.
It’s not someone doing to them, which is the presentation, it’s working with them.
And that’s what the workshop is.
And it’s sort of it’s inviting people in.
And I think that that make that such a powerful action.
And as you say, the words do matter because then it sets those expectations.
Then suddenly people feel a part of something.
And so it’s like, how can we collectively kind of move forward?
And I think in leadership, those semantics matter because then people like you say they feel a part of something.
They are together going somewhere.
This isn’t coming from the top.
Down this is sort of OK.
I need your brain like, how are you seeing this?
Where are you going with this, you know?
I’m going to come with a bunch of input stuff and then we’re going to discuss it and then we’re going to agree on the output stuff together.
It’s as simple as that, you know, But obviously it’s there’s lots of tips and tricks or sort of the all the sort of on the dark arts that happens around it.
But that’s what it is.
It’s a neat trick the devil is playing.
It’s.
The same.
So back to young Yeppe reading his philosophy and getting into diogenous.
And when we did last speak, you talked about this really interesting idea that we all see the world through the barrel directly in front of us, the tools that we know and the frameworks that we trust, the instincts we reach for.
What does it take in your experience to really notice that you’re in a barrel?
Because I think that feels like the hard part.
You know, we get really blinkered.
And of course, depending on people’s experiences and backgrounds, you know, some people can see that before other people, but it’s hard.
It is hard.
I think it’s the hardest part.
We spend a lot of time getting very good at something.
We hone our skills.
That’s what a career is.
And then I think what I’m asking is that you start to look stupid again.
Because I’m very good at looking the world for a lens of communication and the world lens of sort of the advertising skills I’ve had.
And sometimes I have to step out of that and look at from a commercial reality perspective or from a what’s the reality in the Greek market perspective that I know very little about.
So I have to be in a position to be humbled a little bit.
My personal experience of this is that when you meet someone that is smarter than you or stronger than you or different to you, you gotta take that person sight because sometimes it can shake you out of the world a little bit to sort of see the other person’s worldview, hopefully in a good sense, but hopefully in a way the way you go.
I haven’t even thought about that at all.
And that’s quite an interesting thing.
I think, you know, in general, I think the world is becoming a lot more barrel eyed.
I don’t want to dwell too much on it, but we all know that sort of politically and cultural and everything else, opinions are getting more entrenched and blah, blah, blah.
I see it in my world, strategists are becoming more about strategy.
Creatives are becoming more about creatives and media is becoming more about media.
So even there it just can be a little bit hard to go across.
But the more we can look at different points of view, whether or not that’s professionally or privately, the better it is, the more holistic our perspective becomes.
And my partner is Irish descended, super left wing.
And I have sort of because I just lived our life.
I have some right wing friends as well.
See, Bloody hates being in a room with them because they’re politically not in the same space.
But for me, it’s super important that we’re with them because we need to have a bit of empathy across the aisle.
It’s just key.
We take it to the professional side.
I think when I’m six years in London, working at Saatchi is an Accenture and whatnot, and some of the things that I saw was that once you get senior enough, you find a suit that’s a brilliant strategist that might as well be a strategist.
You find a creative director that might as well be a suit, and so on and so forth.
When you get high enough up, people sort of have a grasp of the skills that sits in their category, their worldview, their whatever else, because you can’t afford to just be the one thing.
But in general, I just think that it’s very healthy to explore other people’s points of view, not to merely just seek like the differentiating or the opposing point of view, but actually understand it.
I was on a date once and we were sort of sitting in a in a place.
It was really sort of intense conversation and we were sort of, we’re watching the guy who runs the Serpentine galley.
We’re sort of talking about art during the night.
And it was very sort of interesting.
And we were sort of really getting into it first date.
And then we, we sort of got into music.
And then I was talking about like, Oh, I really love Arcade Fire at the moment.
And she goes, Oh, I absolutely hate them.
And I couldn’t understand that because Arcade Fire, who can hate Arcade Fire?
It’s amazing.
But then she sort of went, well, it’s music you shout along to.
And I thought, what do you mean?
Because for me, it’s the power and the community that sits within that music is what makes it strong.
But for her, she detested it because it wasn’t personal enough, because it was explicitly collective.
And that blew my mind because you can’t argue against that.
And this is not about arguing against it.
But some people, they go, yeah, I don’t like it, but other people can sort of explain what it was.
Because her barrel, the way she looked at the world was, of course, 100% true to her reality.
And her experiences in life, they’re just very different than mine.
And I can’t remember her face, but that’s what I remember about her.
I live in Brazil.
As you know, it’s an election year.
It’s getting very polarizing.
We’ve have the CIA over here right now trying to sway the elections.
I mean, it’s just crazy.
I remember 4 years ago when the elections were happening and I remember being at a friend’s place and they’re very left wing and the whole conversation was just around Lula and that’s all they could talk about.
And then it sort of how evil anyone who could possibly ever dream of voting for Bolton.
Adam and I probably sway more left as I’m sure people can imagine, but I absolutely adore speaking to people who see the world differently to me.
And it’s so important because there’s a reason why people are voting for the other side.
And the less we understand that, the less we can respond to where we are possibly not reaching certain groups of people or we’re not answering problems that certain people are facing.
If we just believe in a very egotistical way that whatever we’re doing is absolutely right in anyone who doesn’t believe in that is wrong or stupid, then that’s just going to isolate us even more.
And I think coming to the business world, the more that we can say, I don’t know, the more that you can show that vulnerability.
And again, the more senior you become, the less able you are to show that vulnerability.
But that vulnerability is so important because the more you can bring in like even more junior voices.
Junior voices are so powerful sometimes how you’re going to get that breakthrough idea because the world is moving so incredibly quickly.
We’re like dinosaurs in comparison to like how the younger generation is seeing things and even just sort of saying, I genuinely don’t know what what do you think?
And then suddenly you get this incredible insight.
But we need to create those spaces, right?
Completely and I.
Think that the issue is also that if we are so certain within our barrels, we very quickly become judgmental, we very quickly become righteous, and then we very quickly start belittling those that have other opinions than ourselves, not only in private and in politics, but also professionally.
And I think that’s the huge issue.
I think the enemy of progress is orthodoxy in a lot of ways, and especially in organizations with the pace with which change is occurring right now.
Someone said the transformation is not something that occurs once in a while.
It’s now the de facto state of being.
And I believe that you have to move all the time, and you can’t do that without curiosity.
Yeah, exactly.
And.
Holding on to the only thing that you’re sort of familiar with, trying to let that go, let it go and just like, and who knows?
Yeah, I think.
Creativity as a driving force across all sorts of commercial realities is key now, because we simply can’t use AI as an efficiency tool on its own.
If we have to unlock it across whatever mode you’re in, you have to think about it in the lateral sense.
Well, I’m.
Curious to know, because your work obviously is in that intersection between sort of brave creative thinking and the very real pressures of risk and budgets and timelines and stakeholders and security.
Where do you see that tension doing the most damage both to ideas and to the people trying to champion them?
1st and.
Foremost, I’d like to see the system or what you just sort of outlined, creative thinking on one side and then risk, budget, sideline stakeholders, whatever we have on the other side.
It’s almost like it’s an ecosystem in its own right because it is the reality in which the work is being born into.
Creative thinking sits at the intersection of all those elements that you just talked about.
That to me is the interesting bit, because in the short term that ecosystem can move a little.
In the long term the mountain can come to Muhammad.
But that’s the long run because it’s a replicatable format.
You sitting within these parameters and then you move them a little and then next time you move them a little and then all of a sudden you move them a lot. 1 of the things we hear a lot in advertising, you know, the Sony bowls ad, you know, like they, they threw, Sony threw 25,000 bowls down there.
Yeah, everybody knows it, everybody loves it.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve also known who claimed to be in the meetings when they sold it in, but because that’s one of those successes.
Yeah, exactly.
It’s great.
But my old boss, the global CSO of Saatchi, is a guy called David Hackworthy.
He’s a naughty guy.
He’s a brilliant, insane human being.
By the way, he was the CSO felon when they sold it in.
And if sort of the story goes that they presented the idea, it was rejected, and then they sort of went, hell no, this is a great idea.
And they presented it nine more times with other ideas into the tune that Sonia then said, if you present this idea to us one more time, we’re gonna fire you.
And then they presented it again, and then they bought it.
And that’s the story.
And it’s every single creator person in the industry will tell you the story by the way.
And in their minds, it’s obviously a story about if you believe in it, you got to push.
But I wonder what the ecosystem that they push that through in was.
Because if it’s the first time you walk into a client with all the risks and budgets and timelines and stakeholders and trust that’s turned all the way down because we just started working out, then you can’t do that trick.
You can’t do those things because I bet you that David and David Sood and the CEO of of Felon had a deep and personal relationship with everybody in the room that they were presenting to.
So they could create this reality.
They could push it, but you have to have all the conditions ready before you get into it.
So I think the intersection, as you asked me, between the creative thinking and the very real pressures, look at it as a system that can be just put together or they can be a longer standing Rd. because once you start having those longer standing relations, that’s where all the magic can happen.
Totally.
And I just.
Think in everything, not not just even creative work, I mean in teams, I mean, we felt it just now when we wrapped up this program with this team from Arla and you have this cross disciplinary team from a grander team.
They were like, Oh my goodness, this was so amazing to work with you.
And and I suddenly realized what my team members, you know, the skills that they have and look at this incredible work that we’ve just come up with and you sort of see this extraordinary enthusiasm and and happiness.
But the base of all of that is something you’ve got this trusting relationship between 7 people around a business and you’ve got those connections and absolutely those people now will call on one another when they need something from another department, when they’re dealing with something.
Oh, you know what?
I think that so and so will Will probably 100% she’s going to respond to me.
Let me just give her a quick call.
It’s so, so, so powerful.
And in these kind of situations, that’s where trust connection relationships, that’s where the magic happens.
And that then goes to show the importance of developing those things and protecting it as.
Well, like it’s a, it’s a fragile thing as well, I think.
Yeah, back to the original question, I think there’s also a sort of whichever actors that sits around the project has to also have an honest conversation and to realize what are the conditions that we’re creating this work in and who are, how well do we know the other actors?
What’s the level of trust that goes across all of this situation so as.
You know, so much of what I talk about in my work is very much related to more human ways of doing things.
And this creative process that you describe, staying in that discomfort, holding opinions lightly, being willing to be wrong in public asks of people, that goes well beyond sort of professional skill.
And when we’re thinking of this creative process, there’s a certain kind of resilience that we need from people.
And it’s a willingness to remain open when things, you know, are shut down, like your Sony examples.
So on one side of it, it’s the it’s the trust, but also it’s this ability to keep going.
No, there’s something in that from where you sit, do you think organizations understand what they’re actually asking of people when they say they want more creativity and bravery?
And what would it look like if they genuinely supported that?
I think the short answer.
Is no.
I think there’s a huge gap between what organizations that aren’t inherently creative ask for when they ask for creative and what a creative agency think that they’re being asked when they are being asked to deliver something creative.
I think that’s one side of it that the definition of and the perspective on what creativity is is slightly different.
I think we’re also in a world still where a lot of creativity hinges on sort of the curious nature of being able to say, I don’t know, I will think about it.
I’ll have to use a moment within this.
And I think in this very still masculine powered corporate world that sort of exists, I don’t know, doesn’t get you as far as this is the answer.
And if we sort of escalate that into a mindset, then what are people then looking for?
Where are they most comfortable?
They’re not comfortable with an open-ended question.
They’re comfortable perhaps with the check box that needs to be checked or with a definite answer that says, Oh yes, we’ve done that, let’s move on to the next thing.
But I truly believe, and we talked about that a little bit earlier, that process must be designed so they have space for openness and also the time for decisions because that obviously also has to be a thing.
I think that sits there, to be honest.
I think most processes have those two elements in them.
The question is balance.
Do we leave enough space for the openness and do we leave adequate time for decision making?
And I think that the question is sort of like when are we open, when do we go?
And who’s got the resilience to power through those things when the balance is?
And I keep coming down down to these two words.
One is we do most things on autopilot in life in general, but we could also choose to live more intentionally and have more intentional processes where we sort of go, what’s the actual challenge we’re trying to solve?
And are we doing that in the right way?
I think that’s the key bit.
And then I keep coming back to trust, you know, I just, I think.
Back to you trailed off a little bit when you said the Sony example, but you did put it in there how they’re said, OK, if you present this one more time, we’re going to fire you.
But then and they did and then they bought it and then it was fine that we would fire you is I think many times in this creative process, people are really worried about presenting different out there ideas because they feel like maybe people will think that they’re stupid or at the very best think that they’re stupid at the very worst.
Be like, you know what, you should not have a job here and you don’t want that of people.
You need people to feel safe to be able to come up with those out there ideas.
And then that comes to the leadership and then the systems.
You’re absolutely right.
There’s two things there’s it’s the organization ready for creativity, but then there’s also I think can creativity be articulated in such a way so it fits the organization because I think being a creative always, I think you had to have resilience because creativity is not something that you just put on the table.
It’s something that’s enforced.
It’s pushed into a space and then bought or sold, especially when it comes to the most of the quote UN quote brave part of advertising.
And I don’t like the dichotomy, by the way, that of our bravery and advertising.
And I think the reason why I don’t necessarily like it is because that it’s sort of there’s a worldview to it that makes it harder to buy.
My big wish for advertising is that we come up with the conditions where bravery feels less courageous and more like the natural step to solve the issue that we’re faced with.
There’s a quote Mandela said something like courage is the triumph over fear.
And you get it when he’s saying it because he’s talking about life and death and race.
But in an advertising, we’re not trying to triumph over fear.
Really what we’re trying to do is create the conditions where the solution we’re presenting is the natural one that solves the business problem that we’re faced with.
So I think there’s a little bit of like semantics work and when you go into a room, how do we make sure that everybody is as open that they can be for the solution they’re about to be presented?
Do we create the right conditions is the right sort of tenants of trust and curiosity at sort of present in that room and then then we can get to great work quickly.
But I don’t think that the goal should always be to get to good work quickly.
It should be to get to good work as quickly as possible under the conditions that exists.
I’m sure there’s a difference between working with big pharma versus a car company that’s more used to creating a consumer focused advertising, for instance.
Yeah.
We have come to the end, which I we clearly could have another hour.
Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you would like to tell our listeners?
My old boss from.
Saatchi’s Richard Huntington, he always used to say that good planners have strong opinions and they hold on to them lightly.
And for me, it’s a very good reminder to not stay inside your barrel or to stay inside your barrel, but also remember all the other barrels that are looking.
I think it’s a particularly good quote for planners who can be quite stubborn when they sort of descend from the ivory tower with the truth.
So I think I have strong opinions, but hold them lightly and listen to the people around you because it’s OK sometimes.
Not to know it’s a very.
Phenomenal thing to adopt other people’s points of view or to amend your own to it.
It you, you don’t lose just because you do that.
On the contrary, you win in the long run.
Thank you.
So much for this.
It’s been amazing.
Until the next time, Until the next.
Time, thank you so much.
Hey everyone, it’s Philippa again.
I hope you enjoyed listening.
Now if you’d like to dive a little deeper, why don’t you check out my book Return on humanity Leadership Lessons from all corners of the world.
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A huge thanks to Benna Vieira for the music and to Pete Morgan for his help with the editing.
Until next time, and I hope we’ll meet again soon.
