Creativity, Anxiety And The Fear Of The Unknown

It doesn’t matter if you’re a child or a brand manager. It’s easy to be afraid of the unknown. Whether it’s a monster under the bed or an untested creative idea, the uncertainty of something inevitably creates anxiety.

Neurologists say that anxiety is a disturbed relationship with certainty. The more we obsessively think we need to know, the more anxious we become. Business hates uncertainty. No one wants to place a value on something that is unknown. So, given the fact that true creativity works in the unknown – a clearly uncertain domain – it’s hard for business leaders to trust or truly champion creativity.

Creativity is how we get to “new” or “exciting. It’s what leads to solutions that have yet to be discovered. It’s where we see things that haven’t been seen before. That’s the beauty of creativity, but it’s also what frightens too many CMOs and brand managers.

That’s why advertising that takes chances or represents “out of the box” thinking is constantly being boxed in by those whose jobs are to reduce any uncertainty. The more certainty you can offer the boss, the less anxiety you’ll have to answer to.

Within marketing departments, strong guardrails have been put in place to prevent potential crashes and burns. Consultants are there early on to tell you what they think will work for you. Then there are researchers who will help allay fears through their A/B testing. And planners and strategists provide the over-thinking necessary to tighten and seal creativity’s box.

The main problem is that what creatives have learned is not even close to what a CMO is looking for. The creatives aren’t at fault; it’s the CMO who hasn’t learned the tenets that serve as the building blocks of classic creativity. The same learnings that provide the basis and learnings that make an art critic or movie critic experts at what they do.

It’s not blasphemous to say that clients need to “manage” creative people. By that, we mean they need to understand, trust and be open to the unexpected. Right now they don’t know how to do that. They need to manage the process by removing the obsession to dictate and demand answers every step of the way.

When anxiety creeps in, creativity suffers.

Let’s let creativity run free in the unknown. Only then will we be certain of experiencing something new and exciting every time.