We’ve talked about it here & here. Here’s the real question…

As you go through your day as an agency leader, you get bogged down with P&Ls, and payroll and HR compliance and annual planning and sales forecasting… So much of that work is heads-down, focused work where coloring outside of the lines just isn’t OK in ANY WAY. (BTW, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you have all your federal & state mandated workplace signage up? Just want to make sure you aren’t gonna get in trouble…)

For me, that kind of administrative, factual, only one right answer, is the equivalent of walking on legos barefoot while Ben Stein as the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day off says “…anyone…anyone…” over and over again. It’s a slow, painful march to the depths of boredom & despair.

It’s worse, still, when creative entrepreneurs also get trapped in a world that is ruled by the workflows alongside the brittle, exacting nature of your reporting and client deliverables. You become subservient to the gears and pulleys of process and precision.

For so many of us, we thrive as entrepreneurs because we have the opportunity to sidestep the rigors of other people’s systems. But as our businesses mature, they can become more mechanical. As we try to grow, often we focus on avoiding a mistake rather than creating success.

I know that’s 100% NOT why I followed my entrepreneurial bent. I started a marketing agency - ran it into the side of a mountain (in 2004), then started another, exited, started another and exited. In some ways, I know that running an agency helped me define who I am.

Think about that word for a moment…agency. It’s jam-packed with motion, purpose, progress. It's not passive. It's about action and autonomy.

Part of it is the nature of your role as a founder. The onus of success for you, your team & your clients rests on you understanding the situation and reacting well. You have to face rapidly changing circumstances and priorities. You always feel resource constrained and like you are out of time.

The pressure of the role can wear you down & drain the creativity that your business used to inspire in you.

Even in the most carefully engineered solutions, there is a duality between intention & operation. This guy, Gilbert Ryles, in the 1950’s described this difference as a “ghost in the machine”. He was talking specifically about the unique circumstance of a brain capable of philosophical, spiritual and artistic pursuits trapped in a machine made of flesh.

Listen, you may have inadvertently created a machine that stifles you. You may have, without intending, created a risk-averse organization because you have such a fear of churn, or of poor results. You might be the leader of a business that has such few resources that any misstep means certain failure.

It’s just too risky, right? Doing things differently might impact not just in the work you do for clients, but in how you run, grow, and position your business. All of these things might make you retreat from being creative.

But there is still that ghost in the machine… you amongst all those SOPs & W2s. (BTW, Ghost in the Machine is an extraordinary, but still over-rated album by The Police, and is completely overshadowed by their magnum opus, Zenyatta Mondatta).

One of my high school English teachers was a published poet, fun fact - his most famous poem involved a red light in the window of his mother’s house - just like in Roxanne - another Police gem. In his creative writing class he had this process he called “The Creative Whack Pack”. It was a simple exercise:

Then you had to present it to the class in a serious way and then again in a ridiculous way. He said that the randomness of the words, the 15 minute time limit & the mandatory dually-styled presentation forced you to create something new because nothing that resembled anything ever before created could withstand those pressures. It was hard, but he was right - the stressors made you take chances that you might have otherwise thought against. The output was rarely good, but it was always the start of something that you could build on. (While I am sure that there was some pedagogy behind it, I think he secretly loved watching us embarrassing ourselves…)

But let’s take the stressors of time & payroll & churn & resource scarcity and turn that into your Agency Creative Whack Pack.

Here is your mission:

Monday:

Weds: Do it again.

Friday: Take your best plan & your worst plan & present it to someone in a way that you just might be able to pull it off. (Need someone to present to? Record it and send it to me.)

A stupid, unachievable plan made to seem real.

A stupid, unachievable plan that faced the stress of presentation.

A stupid, unachievable plan that is the skeleton of some thing you 100% will be able to pull off.

Your creativity hasn’t been worn down with tedium or risk aversion…it’s just been waiting for you to put some pressure on it by throwing off all of your constraints.

The creativity crisis isn't just about the work we make for clients. It's about how we think about our own businesses.

You have agency, in both senses of the word. You can choose to do something different. Something that makes people take notice. Something that builds your authority and attracts the clients you actually want.

Because playing it safe is the riskiest thing you can do.