The Hired Guns Blog

Todd Henry runs The Accidental Creative, a speaking and consulting firm that helps teams do their best work consistently, not haphazardly. His book of the same name, about “how to be brilliant at a moment’s notice,” will be published this July by Portfolio.

In 2005, military strategist Thomas Barnett took the stage at the TED Conference to share insights on the state of the US Military. In his talk he said that there are two primary functions of the military: to take ground, then to maintain that ground once it’s been taken. Barnett argued that it is quite challenging for the same force to accomplish both tasks well because they each require unique skills and practices. You don’t want your advance “Leviathan” force to have to oscillate between taking new ground and administrating a system, yet that’s frequently what’s required.

As creatives, we are primarily wired to take ground. We are the Leviathan force. We love to invent things, to develop elegant solutions, to design and fabricate worlds. But those of us who work in an organizational setting or with clients know that this passion for taking ground often comes into conflict with the need of our manager or client to ensure that we’re protecting the ground that’s already been taken. In other words, they want us to be creative, but to be practical all at once.

This tension between possibilities and pragmatics isn’t going away anytime soon. Whenever there is an attempt to organize the creative process, it will be present. Still, there are a few things we can do to mitigate its effects on our capacity to do brilliant work:

1. Recognize that the tension is there. Rather than feeling frustrated, misled or ignored by the client or manager, simply acknowledge that they are dealing with a set of constraints you may not see, and ultimately everyone is on the same team. Simply acknowledging the existence of the tension can sometimes help break it.

2. Engage in process conversations, not just product conversations. When everything hinges on someone’s subjective interpretation of a finished work, everything can fall apart at the very end of a project. But if there is some measure of process-related conversation happening throughout the work it makes creative decisions much more transparent and therefore makes conflict over the finished product much less likely.

3. Take ground on your own time. Your boss won’t let you take on that project you’re dying to work on? Find another way to blow off your creative steam. Carve out a little time on your own to explore possibilities, hone your skills, and build something new and risky. Your job may never line up perfectly with your passions, but that shouldn’t stop you. I launched my current business while working a full-time job, running a volunteer non-profit with my wife and raising three kids. It’s possible; it just takes some planning.

Make the time to explore possibilities. That’s what you’re wired for. Take some ground, and don’t let anyone convince you that you’re just here to protect what’s already been done. You have a lot of great work in you that’s yet to see the light of day!