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Orange and white wavy shapes - Let creativity flow, with all its twists and turns (Idea Page)

Let
creativity
flow,
with
all
its
twists
and
turns

Theo de Monchy

Senior Client Manager and Strategist

How we enable the best ideas to come
through in the first place.

In our last article, we discussed how Wonderlanders overcome creative
blocks, sharing the different approaches they turn to when they feel
creatively stuck or are unable to find a solution they’re happy with. What
we didn’t discuss is how we enable the best ideas to come through in the
first place.

As we’re sure the creatives reading this will agree, and it’s far from an
easy task to interpret what a client or project manager wants and then
translate that into a creative expression that everyone is happy with.
Throw in a few deadlines, someone on holiday, and maybe an unexpected
request from a different project, and you have all the makings of a
challenging project. For some people, this is where they thrive, while for
others it becomes stressful and can remove their inspiration.

Within the Wonderland team, our Project Managers work incredibly hard to
avoid crunch as much as possible for our creatives, as we don’t believe its
condusive to good work, or fair on them as our friends and colleagues.
Instead, we’re transparent with clients and let them know if we need more
time for our creatives, or if requests fall out of scope.

In return, our creatives return the favour by trusting each other. By this,
we mean they use the extra time to bounce ideas off and challenge each
other. By adding a small degree of pressure to a work culture where team
mates know each others strengths and weaknesses, they are able to unify
their skills and move us towards an overall greater whole. By now, many of
you reading will be among the millions of people to have watched the
video of Sir Paul McCartney playing erroneous notes on his guitar until he
arrives at what would ultimately become the Beatles famous song Get
Back. In a way, the video shows what we’re trying to explain here.
McCartney has the freedom and trust of his bandmates to explore and
experiment with music, despite their looming deadline, until he finds
something that sounds and feels right. This is what we enable among our
creatives, allowing them to communicate openly and rely on and unify
their individual strengths to create a challenging and exciting end
deliverable for our client, or clients.

At the end of the day, what it boils down to is trust. Good work can happen
alone, but great work is often the result of someone trusting someone
else, and believing in something that doesn’t yet exist. It’s the human
factor in the equation that makes good work great, and great work
amazing, and in a world that is changing almost daily, the reliance on team
mates needs to remain constant. For us, it’s a tribe of coffee-fuelled
creative magicians who we trust to be free when they create, just like they
want to be.

We recoginse that there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to
enabling and encouraging creativity, and what works for us might not work
for others. As we mentioned in our future vision for design studios article,
we’re revising the way we run our studio, and how we approach and
deliver work. Central to this change is the ways in which we give our teams
the creative freedom and trust to deliver work to the best of their abilities.
That said, we’re far from perfect, and we very much view this approach as
iterative, and to that end we’re curious about how others approach such
challenges. If you have a different approach, or just want to chat creativity
and design, we’d love to hear from you at hello@wonderlandams.com.

INC 16-22 BRAND EXPERIENCE DESIGN

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