Are you more creative under pressure?

By Thomas Lamprecht

Lamprecht is vice president, executive creative director for Hacker Group (www.hackergroup.com), a marketing agency located in the Western United States. During his career on Madison Avenue, Thomas created award winning campaigns for Fortune 500 and other clients, while working with Bates Worldwide, Wunderman Cato Johnson, and Siegel & Gale, among others. In 2000, he opened a new division of Grey Global Group in San Francisco, growing it to more than 200 professionals.

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Selling is a creative pursuit. So when developing marketing campaigns, creativity must come to the fore.

Most of us recognize whether we are procrastinators or early-birds. We know how much pressure to put on ourselves to get the best results. I know of artists with enormous self-discipline who are very successful, and others, equally brilliant, who must "wait until the muse arrives."

Develop a productive creative team
The complexities multiply when leading a team of creative workers. Writers, art directors and designers must collaborate, but they may not share personality traits. Throw a variety of client expectations into the mix, and it can be a recipe for either great fruitfulness or unmitigated disaster.

Think about how a creative team might react to an assignment from a large, important client requiring a range of many concepts and given a short (but not excessively so) timeline and adequate resources. Compare that with an assignment from another client of lesser size requiring a similar scope of effort but an "impossible" schedule. Work would need to be rushed through with all-nighters, weekends and taken down to the wire. Consider yet a third client that has allotted a generous schedule allowing for play, slow-cooking and several rounds of refinement.

How much time do creative people really need to come up with the best work? Is more blue-sky time better? Is there an optimal number of hours, well-planned and distributed over realistically scheduled days? Or does a short time frame, with crazy, due-yesterday pressure produce better ideas?

Boost creativity, regardless of deadline
The cases outlined above actually happened recently in our agency. Results were mixed and not necessarily intuitive. The first effort went terrible at the beginning, but as time shortened and pressure mounted, the quality increased. The second surprisingly produced more work, but the quality seemed to have drowned in volume. The work wasn't focused enough and, while solid, didn't bowl anyone over. The third effort produced great quality and range of ideas that blew our client away.

It's interesting that, in the first example, the great work came later in the process, when deadlines loomed. From that, one might decide the important factor was the increase in time pressure: We cut to the chase by tightening up deadlines to get to the good stuff sooner. Unfortunately, it rarely seems to work this way.

From this admittedly unscientific experiment, one can conclude that a slower schedule provides more quality. However, the schedule is not always under one’s control. Consider the following ideas to have an impact on creativity, regardless of deadlines:

• Let the team play. You often receive better results when you let your creative team play. Tight deadlines give the illusion there's no time for playing. But there's always a little time to get away.

• Establish a proper set-up. Your creative brief must be thorough and completely thought out or the results will be mush.

• Be an enthusiastic leader. If you have short deadlines, you need high energy. Energy is contagious. It takes just one negative person to sour the entire team.

• Add new blood to the team. If a writer and art director are always paired together, it's possible to get faster results because they are familiar with each other's patterns. But mixing it up a little will get creative sparks flying in new directions.

By managing the factors you can control, your team will be in a better position to dazzle you with their brilliance next time you have a project for them.

CA