13. Send This to Your Boss: The Pitfalls of Uncreative Work

If Rip Van Winkle, the famous fictitious narcoleptic who slept 20 years straight and missed the American Revolution, were recast as a modern-day knowledge worker, his story may go something like this: Rip has a cool job at a cool tech company where there’s hope of doing creative, fulfilling work. One day, he gets handed a menial task, like a spreadsheet to update or a report to pull, and suddenly, he awakens 20 years later to realize he’s been updating spreadsheets for two decades and never did anything creative or fulfilling.

I’ve had a Rip Van Winkle Era or two. How about you? 

(Thankfully, my eras did not last 20 years.)

Time has a funny way of speeding up when we’re not looking at it, when we’re too focused on our same-old routines. 

This is especially true in the business world where playbooks reign supreme and efficiency is worshiped. We can get so wrapped up in the grind of uncreative work. This is the work that tends to get prioritized because it is safe and predictable. But it comes at a cost. As creative people, we find fulfillment in breaking outside of the ordinary and doing something new. Our businesses thrive when they celebrate creativity.

The list is long of reasons why uncreative work just doesn’t cut it. You may know this list well (see below), and nod along as you read. You may breathe a sigh of relief as you email this list to your boss with the subject line “Thoughts for 2024 strategic planning :pray-emoji:” 

If you find yourself on the treadmill of doing uncreative work – either by your own unintentional habits or because your job lacks that creative oomph – remind yourself what you may be missing out on and go find some ways to rejuvenate your creative practice. Hopefully this list gives you and your workplace the nudge you need.

The Dangers of Uncreative Work

1 - Stagnation – Your business will stop growing.

There are a handful of things that happen in business so often and so predictably that they’ve become their own type of universal business laws. And two of these laws in particular speak to the risk of uncreative work. 

• The law of diminishing returns – the benefits you stand to gain from something will get smaller and smaller, by proportion, the more you invest in it

• The law of clickthroughs – the inevitable decline, over time, of your marketing performance

These laws simply state that your expected gains will always go down over time because of so many factors: you’ve exhausted the audience of early adopters, the competition grows stiffer, the audience’s tastes change, you’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit. 

This is why almost every business experiences an S-Curve (or several) at some point in its lifetime. The S-Curve shows visually how companies are growing up-and-to-the-right until these laws take effect at which point you must come up with fresh ideas or pivot or evolve in order to go up-and-to-the right again.

2 - Indifference – Your people will stop caring.

Indifference will impact not just the people you sell to (an important group of people) but also the people who work with you (an even more important group of people!). 

You can only ask someone for TPS reports so many times before they’re going to check out. A highly engaged workplace increases profits by 21 percent, and yet the treadmill of uninspired activities that plague most businesses isn’t creating the type of environment where people want to be their best selves and do their best work. 

Indifference also will plague a business’s brand. Consumers today have a very short fuse on the boring and undifferentiated. The era of formulaic playbook-driven brands is over. We need less CSI: Miami and more The Bear. 

3 - Disloyalty – You will lose your audience.

As growing businesses quickly find out: It is easier and less expensive to keep the customers you have than it is to go out and get new customers. Therefore, retention plays a critically important role in a business’s success.

Unfortunately, being keen on retention and keen on efficient, uncreative work is an exercise in incompatibility. An uncreative brand will suffer greatly when it comes to brand loyalty. People don’t really mind abandoning a brand that is unmemorable. As soon as something better comes along, they’ll leave. This is what happens with the commoditization of so many goods and services – it becomes a race to the bottom where price is the number one factor keeping consumers loyal to brands.

But when you instill creativity and storytelling and emotion into your work, people can tell. Customers with an emotional connection to a brand have a lifetime value that’s 306 percent higher than customers without this connection.

4 - Disappointment – You will fall short of expectations.

Clickbait. 

Vaporware. 

Indiana Jones 4. 

We’ve all been sold a bill of goods: we arrive with excitement to be squashed by reality. Uncreative work has this same effect of teasing the potential of something great only to leave a taste of disappointment once reality sets in. Particularly in the marketing world where building hype is de rigeur for every campaign, companies tend to promise a new widget or exciting launch yet struggle to come up with the follow-through of anything truly original or valuable.

In a world of hyperbole, uncreative work will expose you. In order to cut through the noise, especially in crowded markets, you HAVE to say something that will catch attention, but if that catchy statement is not backed up by an equally compelling and creative end result, then you risk disappointing people.

5 - Homogeneity – You will lose yourself.

A core part of a brand strategy is coming up with a voice and tone so that you can sound uniquely, unmistakably like you. 

The same can be true of so many different aspects of brand work – a unique purpose, original story, one-of-a-kind narratives, they’re all in service of helping you be more true to yourself and stand out from the crowd. Of course, you can have all these artifacts in place, but you render them all moot by uncreative work that ignores these creative foundations in favor of fitting in with the market. 

In the article Why Everything Looks the Same, author Ryan Duffy explores the sameness of brands, apps, websites, and more pulling examples from “the Airbnb-ification” of interior design and the uniformity of direct-to-consumer brands. If every wellness product kind of feels the same, it’s because most of them are borrowing the same playbook!

6 - Dead ends – You will find yourself stuck.

Uncreative work does not create any opportunities for learning and development and personal growth. If you’re running the same old playbooks and working in the same old spreadsheets, then there’s really nothing to stretch you to become a better version of you. For companies, this is a problem, too: You don’t want your employer brand headline to be, “Work at Acme, Inc. Where It’s Always Monday!” 

Low ceilings cause people to become disinterested and disengaged in their work, which is usually just one step away from people looking for new work elsewhere. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with treating a job as a paycheck, so long as you find your fulfillment somewhere else (and if you need a hand with that, we’d love to chat with you!).

7 - Hopelessness – You will miss out on optimism.

Uncreative work harms businesses, stifles people, and on a very macro scale it harms our ability to create a better world. Some of the best ideas for change – be it anything from climate to human rights – are the result of thinking outside the box. 

Creativity breeds hope. As Kristen Ghodsee writes in Everyday Utopia: 

A lack of imagination, then, dampens this optimistic outlook and robs people of the drive to try new things, to persevere, and to build a better future. 

Over to you

How creative or uncreative is your work today? 

What would need to happen to create the ideal work environment for you? 

We’re all ears and would love to hear your experience - and how we can help!

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Kumbaya,Shannon & Kevan