The rise of the robots is not the threat to reclaiming creativity across your business, with the real enemy being efficiency, feedback loops and timid leadership according to a panel of leaders from Canva, Droga5, Snack Drawer and a former BBH India boss.
The session was billed as “Make Creativity Great Again”, but the most provocative argument on the Cairns Crocodiles stage on day two had little to do with artificial intelligence. According to moderator Hannah McElhinney, chief creator and co-founder of Snack Drawer, the thing quietly strangling good ideas is the one thing every client says they want.
“What I find is a real barrier to creativity at work is actually efficiency,” McElhinney said. “All of those things that have been really annoying for creatives in the past – hand-drawing storyboards, spending a sunny afternoon trying to trace something on the window, printing out and sticking your slides onto foam board – that idleness was really important to me actually coming up with an idea that was good.
“Now I might have three presentations in one morning. You don’t get that time for the monkeys to play.”
It set the tone for a debate that kept circling the same uncomfortable idea: the enemy of creativity is not technology. It is us.
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The fear of displacement for creative craftspeople in a world where creativity is increasingly democratised through more sophisticated tools was a talking point with McElhinney conceding she worried about what it means for the industry as a whole.
She shared a story from a senior creative in her business who came up as a photographer, who had complained about having to watch a famous Philippines sunset through a wall of phone screens before quipping: “What made it worse is that they were all in my shot.”
Cat van der Werff, executive creative director at Canva, was unmoved by the panic: “These times of change, when things become democratised – going from portrait painting to the daguerreotype – there was this fear of portrait painters losing their role.
“But what it actually did was mean painters had to find new forms of expression, and that led to things like surrealism.
“Part of being a creative person often comes with perfectionism, so you want to control the whole process and own the whole process. But when you just let it go and see what comes back, it tends to make things better.”
Subhash Kamath, the former CEO of BBH and Publicis India, was even more blunt: “These are tools that can help anybody, and that’s where the democratic part comes in.
“But not everybody can be John Hegarty. Some people will be decent, some average and some brilliant – with AI or without it. So use the tool, rather than treat it like an enemy.”
If technology was acquitted, leadership was firmly in the dock. Matthew Michael, CEO of Droga5 ANZ and MD of Accenture Song, argued that bravery has to be engineered into the structure, not merely hoped for.
“Agencies need to be strong enough not to have a fear that you get fired as an agency, or fired as an individual, for bringing that thinking to a client,” he said.
“You have to decide: this is not necessarily what you want, but this is what you need. And good ideas have to be undeniably good ideas. Whether that plays out as a TV ad or a banner ad.”
Van der Werff told the room they have taken the removal process to a new level, stripping out the internal feedback loop for Canva’s growth creative team altogether.
“We had to still work really, really fast as a team, but also bring human creativity into the whole process,” she said. “So the way we did it was to entirely remove any feedback along the whole journey – including for myself. I don’t really give feedback on the growth creative team’s work. We just let the market give us the feedback.”
Kamath argued it does not matter how much teams lower down the chain do to let creativity run wild if the people at the top of the organisation do not value it themselves.
Inspiration and craft come first, he argued – “a great piece of work is 85 per cent idea, and that commitment to craft means training, it means practice, the same as any musician” – but none of it survives indifferent leadership.
“The bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle,” he said. “If the top leadership doesn’t feel creativity is important enough, it will not percolate down. But if the top leadership feels it’s absolutely required, because we’re going to change business and brand fortune through that creativity, then everybody else on the team will follow.”
Written by Clear Hayes Consulting principal Alex Hayes.
