Crossover creatives

For most of history, knowledge work was about disseminating knowledge, instead of generating it.

This led to the creation of hundreds of millions of jobs - all based around managing, verifying, and communicating information.

This is no longer the case. The low-hanging fruit is gone.

Mundane tasks that once created value are being automated, a process that will only accelerate.

In this world, your value is the choices you make, and the directions you give.

In other words, all knowledge work is, or will soon be, creative work.

Yet we still view creativity as the domain of a select few.

Most of us aren't trained artists, musicians, or writers. We're coders, managers, analysts, entrepreneurs.

That's nonsense. No matter your role, you can - and should - approach it creatively.

You may not be an artist, but you will need to work like one.

In 1989, the author Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a novel. Here’s how he wrote it:

“For a four-week period, I ruthlessly cleared my diary and went on what we somewhat mysteriously called a ‘Crash’. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone.”

Two and a half decades later, Ishiguro had, after enormous effort, just finished a new book, The Buried Giant.

He showed it to his editor. It wasn’t good enough.

The whole thing was thrown out the window. The book was rewritten from scratch.

A year later, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This is what great creative work looks like: idiosyncratic, and highly inefficient.

Working on instinct and rhythm, with periods of reflection followed by bursts of productivity.

The approach to work I’ve just described is what's required for breakthrough thinking.

But most of us would never approach our work in that way, because we’ve been told that’s not what knowledge workers do.

Instead, we think work means rigid routines, constant meetings and emails, and general-purpose workspaces.

This might have worked for a 19th-century clerk, or a 1980s office worker, but for the type of work we do right now, this approach will likely lead to failure.

There is another way.

Creativity, in its simplest terms, is executing a crossover: finding two unrelated ideas, combining them, and creating something new.

This concept, "crossover creativity," comes from London advertising legend Dave Trott.

Applying this approach to company building has traditionally been the pursuit of only a few iconoclasts.

Jeff Bezos’s top recommended book to new Amazon employees to understand the company wasn’t a business book or autobiography, but the aforementioned The Remains of the Day..

Many of us have used the Regret Minimisation Framework, Amazon’s Day One philosophy, or the difference between a one and two door decision.

We’ve done this without knowing the inspiration for these principles lay with the fictional reminiscences of a butler in 1930s England, created in a four week sprinting haze. 

To do great work today, we all must think in the same way.

Drawing lessons from those who've done great creative work to unlock insights within ourselves.

We must become crossover creatives.

The best already know this.

Bill Gates does ‘Think Weeks’ twice a year: a week in an isolated cabin solely to read and come up with new ideas. An artist’s retreat, but for a CEO.

Mark Zuckerberg built Kualoa ranch not only as a place to live but as a space to bring teams together in nature to workshop ideas and strategies. A musician’s studio, but for business.

Stripe started a publishing arm to expose employees and partners to transformative ideas, and let those ideas shape their work. A writer’s showcase, but for technologists.

It’s simply about how quickly the rest of us catch up.

This doesn’t mean forgetting that work is still work. In fact, the opposite.

Right now many of us are stuck at two ends of a spectrum.

On one side, unthinking discipline: grinding ahead, digging holes dawn to dusk without ever stopping to ask whether we’re digging in the right spot, or why we’re digging at all.

On the other, unfocussed creativity: full of ideas but stripped of routine, meaning a daily battle to do the work needed to make the idea reality.

It’s only true artists that have learned to blend both creativity with discipline: the hard, boring work needed to actually keep the show, whatever it is, on the road.

To put the reps in every day, because as Jerry Seinfeld put its, even the creative lives remains "a game of tonnage."

It’s why - in Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back - Paul McCartney spends just as much time making the other band members turn up to the studio each day, as he does on writing songs.

Without creativity, discipline becomes drudgery.

Without discipline, creativity remains an unfulfilled promise.

Nor, in this world, is there a linear treadmill linking effort to results.

As the Buried Giant attests, it's one of relentless failure, where 90% of success comes from 10% of what you try.

But it's the only way to build great things.

By accepting what our jobs actually are and the challenges we face, we can break free from these limitations and create something meaningful.

Building great things today requires not only technical proficiency and raw productivity. It demands the kind of creativity that artists have, and a much higher tolerance for failure.

The future belongs to those who can navigate these blurred lines between creativity and discipline, inspiration and execution.

Who can take creative techniques honed over centuries and use them not just for art and music, but to build great businesses too.

“As created beings, we chafe. Only as makers are we fully achieved."

aled@ashore.io