The dangers of being 'right' all the time.

“Always go into a meeting being open to the possibility that you might be wrong.” - Roger Stephens

As creative and marketing leaders, it’s our job to come up with ‘the right answer’. The danger is that when we introduce more ego and fear and hierarchy to the equation than curiosity and openness, you often end up with more of a flashbang than an illumination. Sure, the lights are still on, but we’re all blinded and paralysed rather than inspired.

While it’s always existed in some sense or shape, I can’t remember a time where the obsession for certainty and safety has so permeated the world of commercial creativity. The availability of data and tracking and reporting isn’t without its merit and benefits, but it’s increasingly brought with it a pair of blinkers that inconveniently protect the wearer from discovering something more interesting. We’ve kind of lost our sense of adventure. Like tourists that just go to the hotel restaurant with the most Google reviews to eat the same shit they have at home instead of experiencing something ten times better down an alleyway. (And sure, sometimes you might end up with mystery soup in a bag that causes you to vomit out the side of a taxi, but that’s life isn’t it?)

At times, it feels like the critics now outnumber the creators. The number of people in meetings and posters on LinkedIn criticising the work seemingly greater in number than the actual people who make it. Which is not to say that criticism isn’t required or necessary, it absolutely is, but sometimes you have to be careful as to whose criticism really ends up behind the wheel. There’s opinions from those who can, and have, followed through on their own critique, and those who can’t. Because as the old saying goes, ‘A critic knows the way, but can’t drive the car.’

“Critics don’t make mistakes because they don’t make anything” - Damon Stapleton

This is a cracking line from Damon’s book, Keep Shooting until you see the f*cker’s smoke’. He goes on to use an analogy of rugby, whereby a stray pass is often what ‘breaks the pattern’ and opens up a new opportunity. (And how, in an environment laden with too much fear, players are often too scared to attempt such a pass altogether.) 

It reminds me of the story of AlphaGo. Go is a 4000-year old game, far more complex than Chess, so complex that computers had been unable to simulate it due to the requirement for creative and lateral thought. Until 2016, when AlphaGo, an AI trained on Go, made a ‘wrong move’. A move so wrong and unexpected it completely threw the Grandmaster it was playing for a loop and he left the room. He came back, rattled, and subsequently lost the game. The AI, not weighed down by 4000 years of pattern recognition and expectation, completely broke the expected system and opened up a new way of playing.

This idea of repeating the same patterns over and over again and expecting eternally-increasing growth and return has somehow become the status quo despite it being obviously impossible. (Einstein had a bit of a famous quote on that one, had something to do with insanity.)

This is because the one same answer can’t be ‘right’ forever. I mean, human history is laden with idiocy. Think of some of the things that we’ve considered to be ‘right’ over the years. Putting lead in make up. Opium-laced kid’s cough medicine. ‘Unspoiling’ milk with bleach. Clickthrough rates.

As not-so-famous philosopher but famous-gigantic-asshole, Donald Rumsfeld, once said: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

In short, there’s still plenty of shit we don’t know. In fact, there’s still more that we don’t know than we do. (The upside of that being there’s a hell of a lot of new ideas still out there waiting to be noticed, just as long as we allow ourselves to peripheral vision to spot them.)

So, our pursuit of finding what’s ‘right’ can’t only be based on what everyone else is doing.

Curiosity is what made this business great to start with. Advertising is going through a collapse and a rebirth at present, and with it we have the opportunity to recalibrate our systems. The chance to not only bring with us some of the learnings from the past, but to also remember to take a look at things with fresh eyes. To go into every meeting, brief, or challenge open to the fact that we might be wrong. (And to let those eyes stray into the corners a little more...)

Because that’s the only way to make work that’s more interesting than ‘right’. More entertaining than ‘right’. Stuff that’s simply better than ‘right’.

And, as we’re realising each and every day in the age of advancing tech, nothing is more important than ‘signs of life’. We’re scanning for them everywhere.

For advertising to turn around its waning influence, maybe we need to throw a few stray passes and break the defensive pattern.