the joy

As someone who gets sucked into a lot of meetings, it's easy to forget the simple joy of a good brainstorm. I carved out a couple of hours last week to sit with a team and just play and, damn, it was fun. It's a challenging category, but this is an opportunity to show the client not only that we get it, but that we can knock it out of the proverbial.

Seeing the way forward was hard; the team and I frankly had a block, not being able to see past what everyone else in the category is doing. (And, um, that's not a compliment to the category.)

But we just kept at it, saying bad things, goofy things, anything. We had to trust each other, not judge each other's goofiness. Suddenly, what seemed like a bad idea was revealed as something interesting, something that no one else in the category has done. And slowly, other possibilities opened up, too. 

Sure, it's work to keep pushing when there's no clear answer, when everything you say is wrong. But that's how new things happen.

And there's nothing more fun than that, "Holy crap, what about this?" moment.

It's why we do what we do.

(Well, me anyway.)

"damn it, Smithers, this isn't rocket science – it's brain surgery!"

It's not difficult, what we do. Not in the way that, say, getting the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth alive was hard. And certainly not in the way that saving an entire Antarctic expedition from certain death was hard. But that doesn't mean it's easy.

Case in point. I was in a meeting with several senior people (account, creative, strategy and media) today and we were trying to agree on an overall strategic approach for a certain proposal. There was some raising of voices (not in anger but just to be heard) because there was much interruption, and much more back and forth.

All of which was okay – more than okay, it's actually good. People with different backgrounds, experiences and thought processes shouldn't agree right out of the gate. The noise meant that people were talking with passion, saying what they meant, and not out of concern for the niceties of not hurting anyone's feelings. We were finally getting real feeling and thinking without the too-common political considerations.

And the thing is, no one in the room was wrong. It wasn't about anyone's point of view winning out over the others. It was about hashing through all the possibilities. It helped us consider all the angles. It allowed us to bring up comparables from other clients. And then we talked, seemingly in circles but not – maybe it's more accurate to say that we talked in a whirlpool, round and round until we could all come together in some common point.  

And it was more than the inevitable dynamics of group decision making – it was also about language. It took some time to figure out that several people were in actually agreement once they agreed on definitions. Definitions that different clients also have different perceptions of.

So, yes, in some ways it was maddening and frustrating, but it was a vital exercise. All the questioning strengthened our thinking, clarified our language, streamlined our purpose. (I know that sounds like I'm selling you, but it's actually true. And how many meetings that does that actually happen in?)

If that ain't brain surgery I don't know what is.