The next person who says “just work your magic” gets a punch in the face

If you’re even vaguely working on the creative side of a business – that is, you don’t spend your days planning what the rest of us should be doing, or your life isn’t defined by a spreadsheet – then you’ve no doubt heard this at least once and probably a thousand times when handed something messy that you’re supposed to turn into something meaningful or cool: “just work your magic”.

Face it, if you’re in the business of making stuff, like content, to the rest of your organization what you do is clearly magic because how else to explain how you got from here (“um, sorry, hope you can make sense of this”) – to there (“wow, this is amazing!”)?  How else to explain terms like “creative guru”? (Is anyone ever called a planning guru?) And it’s funny because with all of the literature written and consultant’s fees spent on how to make organizations more creative, you’d think by now that all the mystery had been squeezed out of it.

Alas no. The process of making things – whether an infographic, presentation, online ad, video, you name it – remains, in the eyes of the non-practitioners among us, firmly rooted in the realm of alchemy.

If you’re one of the mysterious ones, you might think this is a good thing. You might believe there’s no better moat around a skill set than to have most of the world not understand how you do what you do. You might also be wrong. The mystery that surrounds the creative process – the set of steps that gets you from this to that – is, in a business world that has an incessant need to attach a clear value to the specific activities of its workers, not a good thing at all. If you can’t assign predictability to a process – any process – then you can’t determine its cost.  And when you can’t determine what something costs, you cannot in turn determine whether it adds value to the organization. The bottom-line people – and remember we’re all servants to the bottom line – hate that. To them, magic is anathema.

In the interest of sustaining our value, all of us who make stuff should do ourselves a favour: lose the cloak of mystery and learn to articulate very clearly how we do our jobs.

Here are some tips:

Remind everyone you have trained to do this

Unless you are in fact a magician, the term “magic” implies that a great result is some form of happy accident. It is not. Creating content that is original, engaging and delivers a clear message, is the end product of a set of defined steps that you have learned over years — if not decades — of taking poorly integrated information and turning it into something that excites people. You may have always had a way with words, but you became a really great writer by honing your craft over and over again. That training – the thinking, the experimenting, the things that worked and the stuff that didn’t – all of it adds up to a set of steps you go through every time to get a good result.

That sounds more like practice than magic.

Don’t be afraid to take the machine apart

De-mystifying the creative process means you have to understand how it works. Creative types are their own worst enemies on this score because too few of us ever take the time to think about how we get from A to B. It’s understandable. Content producers like to produce stuff, not think about how they produce it. Time spent thinking about the “how” is time away from actually doing, and most of us prefer the latter.

In the interest of promoting a better understanding of the way we work, however, it’s worth stepping back and learning to articulate what it is exactly that you do, and more importantly how you approach the challenge of creating compelling content. Even if you’re unpracticed in this exercise, it would be a mistake to think there isn’t a defined process at work when you make something. There is, and there are specific “artifacts” as they say in the project management world, that we use to support this process – or least there should be. And though at some points in the process it may look like a black box, it’s best to take the time to pull the box apart, look inside and describe it. In my experience, being unable to explain how you go about your job does little to promote your personal value and less to protect your role when the sharp pencils come out.

If you take even a little time to think about it, you’ll feel way more comfortable explaining what is it you do the next time someone asks. Isn’t that infinitely preferable to not having an answer?

Promote the differentiation of content makers

People often make a big deal of creative types being “different” from everyone else in the organization. That usually implies descriptors like “crazy” and “out there”. This is hogwash and a cliché and it does nothing to promote the value of the corporate world’s creative class. Yet many can’t think of another way to articulate their differences.

Well here’s one: I don’t know any writer, designer or video producer who doesn’t always try to make the work they’re doing right now their best yet. Creative types are wired to one-up not only their peers, but themselves, too. The creative suite is one area of a company where you can legitimately demand and expect increasingly better work without changing the players. It doesn’t happen every time out, and we should always be judged by our respective bodies of work rather than a single piece or campaign. That said, striving to always do better is a trait we should make widely known across the companies we work in. It’s a true differentiator that is actually worth something to an organization.

Learn the business

By accepting the role of the freak on the other side of the fence, creative people almost by default thumb their noses at the rest of the business. This is a mistake for two reasons. One, if you can’t converse knowledgeably about the business you’re in with someone in your company who needs your help, your respect will plummet accordingly.

And second, one would think, logically, that the more you know about the business you’re supporting, the better your work will be. I’ve seen creative work that is positively cringe-worthy in its irrelevance to the business it’s designed to support – often in a misguided attempt to do something “creative”. I used to be a painter. I know it’s way easier and more fun when you have a blank canvas. It doesn’t work that way in business. The canvas isn’t blank. Usually it comes with very specific instructions like, “put your mark here”. So you’d better put it there. Our job is to make sure that our mark stands out from the competition’s. In doing that, it helps – immeasurably – if you know what you’re talking about and what your company does.

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I remember, way way (insert appropriate number of “ways” here) back, when I left my first job on the “business” side of the business to be a copywriter at a small ad agency, one of our in-house creatives asked, “oh, did you study to be creative?” What I think he meant was that you don’t look too creative to me, and you’re not working in my area, so how on earth could you write copy? He was cultivating the image of the creative as an unknowable genius, the magician. It was – and is – a false image. There’s no magic. It’s just what we do, and how we do it can be easily described and embedded into any process an organization has for creating content. The steps should be there for all to see.

So the next time someone throws you a piece of work and says, “just work your magic”, you don’t necessarily have to punch them in the face, but you could ask “dude, where’s my brief?” for starters, and take it from there.