DUNCAN MACLENNAN | Creative industries must leave the productivity clock

Flow is a beautiful thing. We come up with our best creative ideas and solutions when we have free flow of thought. But when we do this thinking for someone else, like a client, we come up against constraints like time and budget – finite resources. Anyone who has worked in the creative consultancy environment will be familiar with this conundrum.

Dentsu Creative’s recently released Power of Modern Creativity Report says 85% of clients agree that while consumer behaviour has undergone rapid changes in the last five years, the agency model is yet to adapt. And 78% of chief marketing officers say that the siloed, over-engineered agency model is no longer fit for purpose in today’s world.

In a quickly evolving ecosystem full of interesting and complex challenges to solve, it’s perhaps the ideal time to start experimenting with new ways of working. To start, I believe the time-based billing model is one of the legacies that should be re-coded for a changing world.

That’s because strategy, innovation and creativity need velocity – flow plus momentum – to thrive, and outdated systems stifle this. I know innovation is an overused buzzword, but I really like the idea that as humans we can apply our imagination and intelligence to the pursuit of progress and transformation. That’s what got us from the Stone Age to the Age of Enlightenment, and perhaps too, the future Age of Spiritual Machines.

These leaps in humankind imply that the evolution of innovative thought is not just about what we do, but how we do it, and how we create value. And time, for me, in and of itself, isn’t a very interesting or useful way to measure what our ideas are worth. Let’s think for a moment about the value of experience, insight and wisdom. Sometimes we have a lightning-quick but invaluable spark of creativity, born out of years of experience, that offers deep strategic value to the recipient.

I’m not sure if we simply bottle that offer at a higher hourly rate, that we’ll arrive at a fair price for the idea. The converse is also true – agencies can charge out many hours for a bad idea that adds no value. So, what if we were driven by outcomes instead of outputs? I bet that would be a healthier and freer way of approaching the achievement of results, instead of simply monetising the monotonous ticking over of the big process machine that is the current agency model.

I have a hunch that if we free ourselves from the confines of billable time, we’ll be able to build better and more interesting collaborative partnerships and strategic solutions. We’ll also be able to come up with ideas that don’t get crushed under the weight of the great ticking clock and serve us in new ways. As the great Nick Cave once said in his “my muse is not a horse” speech, “My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature.” Though he was talking about the art of music-making, I feel the same way about the art of strategic creativity.

That is why I took the rather bold step to free my muse from the confines of time counting. A client once told me my ideas were like a secret sauce, and that got me thinking, what if I could quite literally bottle my ideas as something measured only by value and quality? So, I bottled my Secret Sauce. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s a fun idea that is opening up opportunities for richer engagements with my clients.

So here’s what it looks like:

I believe ideas that are just so good that you want to bottle them, are what we need to build new businesses, new products, new services, and new cultural ideas. Meaningful work puts the purpose back at the core of everything we do.

Research has shown that people who work in creative industries are less creative and less happy when they are on the productivity clock when they perform tasks. Creativity thinker Maria Bowler argues that our culture’s obsession with productivity is counter-productive to real creativity and sucks the joy out of inherently creative people – and I agree. Creative flow transcends the boundaries of time and when in flow, that is when the magic happens.

• MacLennan is founder of Sunny, a futures and innovation company.