Social Control

01 March 10

When you're working with creative people to develop brand communication and brand marketing initiatives, it can be easy to have them take off down proverbial rabbit trails. While sometimes rabbit trails can lead to innovative breakthroughs, they can often lead to time-wasting dead-ends that don't help to move the project forward.

Managing creative people requires that you find the right balance between giving them enough leeway to see were an idea goes but not so much slack that the project is delayed. If you work with creative people as much as we do, you'll find these tips helpful:

1. A clear definition of the project is helpful, but even more helpful is a clear definition of the desired outcomes of the project. So, if you sell shoelaces and you want a social media app, that's a good place to start to define the project. But with creative people you'll probably be more successful if you define the intended outcomes: "We want a social media app that encourages our shoelace owners to share their funky shoelace designs with their friends."

2. If you're using a main whiteboard for your brainstorming sessions, place a smaller whiteboard off to the side that you can use as a parking lot. When the creative team gets too far down digression, park it and let it percolate in their brains while you move on to something else.

3. Be prepared. Don't let creatives just create. Instead, divide the project into smaller segments and tackle one piece at a time. Prompt them with questions and specific brainstorming tasks. (For example: "Let's brainstorm for 10 minutes on how a specific target market might talk about our app"). Your preparations should include providing some boundaries.

4.Use the buddy system. While there may be "no dumb ideas" during a brainstorming session, there are ideas that don't always contribute. After a round of brainstorming, have them break into buddy-teams and rank on a scale of 1-5 how "on-task" each idea is. Park the ideas that score an average of 3 or less.

It's not unlike the coloring you did as a young child. It was okay to color outside of the lines – which is similar to the role that we ask creative teams to take on today – but you still need to keep the crayon on the paper.

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