How Did Great Happen?
Some content from my workshop that may help you.
The role of a leader is to create the conditions whereby great things can happen.
I think I read that somewhere.
Maybe I just made it up. The truth of the matter is, in my career, great things happened whenever I was around great leaders.
In the coming days, I’ll be giving a series of workshops and lectures on leadership and creativity at TBWA’s semi-annual Global Learning Programs.
And I’m going to explore this theory of “conditions for greatness” in an exercise called, “How Did Great Happen?”
In the exercise, I’m going to prompt the workshop participants (creative directors and rising leaders) with several different recent campaigns (as seen on the slide in the visual above).
The participants will pick one of those ideas (or another piece of work they like) and then reverse engineer what they believe were the conditions for that particular piece of work to happen.
By the way, the purpose isn’t to be right about exactly what happened.
The purpose is to express and articulate the kinds of things that probably happened — and are universal, so they may be replicated.
For example, let’s look at the Hilton 10-Minute TikTok. One of the conditions that made it possible was to have a brand platform: “For the Stay.” That provided a positioning that might trigger a thought: “What if we created a TikTok in which you “stayed” longer than 15 seconds or a minute?”
What else would you need? Knowledge of the platform? Knowledge of influencers? Understanding of how longer TikToks are working to keep people engaged. Knowledge of comedy? Site gags? Verbal jokes, etc.
Those are just a few items on creating and producing. What about selling? You’d need strong client relationships. Maybe some evidence that showed there was a likelihood that this never-been-done TikTok idea could work.
Again, this will all be extracted in the class, and together we’ll write up a “critical path” to achieve greatness.
Once that’s established, part two of the exercise: “What conditions are required for YOU, personally, to make something great happen?
And we will go into a Creative Director’s Mind, Body, and Spirit.
For you, right now, I offer up this suggestion. Look at something in your world that is truly great and try to reverse engineer what happened to achieve its greatness.
Write down your observations.
I promise, you will see a lot of activities that you can immediately apply to a current project. And these observations just might help you make something better.
As has been said before, “success leaves clues.”
So find something great. What do you see? What can you learn? What can you put into action for your project?
“Success leaves clues.”…love this. I didn’t go to ad school nor take a marketing class. I just kinda fell into advertising. Studied the work I liked to figure out why I liked it, and wrote my ass off til I got the same feeling. Many years later, still writing my ass off :)
I’m a big proponent of creative osmosis. The idea that we can absorb or ingest the frequency on which great work--or in this case, greatness-- manifests. In my opinion, there’s a kind of greatness code that can be broken. It’s definitely important that we try to find greatness, but so too is it important that we let greatness find us.