“The modern world seems to present us with a choice. If we’re not going to fast-twitch from browser window to browser window, [then] we have to live like a hermit, [and] focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else,” he says in his TED talk. “I think that’s a false dilemma. We can make multitasking work for us, unleashing our natural creativity. We just need to slow it down.”
The current debate about returning to the office creates a similarly false dichotomy—one that ties productivity and creativity to work or home, one environment or the other. The kind of fluidity that will be a part of the future of work is being lost in the conversation. Instead of an either/or scenario, there is another way to conceptualize hybrid working that is especially relevant to creative professionals: Not one or the other but both.
Just as slow multitasking describes a natural back-and-forth flow between projects, spending time in the office and spending time alone is a mutually informing process for creatives. There’s a time for heads-up collaboration with others and a time for heads-down execution in solitude.
Heads Up: Creativity Requires Engagement
The best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell argues that returning to the office fulfills the psychological need for a sense of belonging. “[I]f you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work-life you want to live?” Gladwell asked in the “Diary of a CEO” podcast. “Don’t you want to feel part of something?”
Putting aside the caricature of remote workers, Gladwell is right to attach importance to social connectivity. The basis of all creativity is forming new connections across ideas, closing gaps and putting things together in fresh ways. By definition, you need new inputs to make those tangential leaps, and the office is one of the main venues where they are available.
In the advertising industry, very few great ideas come from the lightning strike of inspiration. Rather, the creative mind thrives on the free exchange of ideas. Tapping into a diversity of viewpoints in an office setting is a great form of input that also helps shed light on any blind spots of unconscious bias.
The “Like a Girl” commercial that challenged gender stereotypes, for instance, was the result of producers and directors workshopping treatments of an original idea. Social media experts then came in and added their own perspectives. The more people worked to revise the idea, the bigger it became.
But office-based collaboration is not the only form of inspiration. The inputs needed to generate fresh ideas can range from researching by yourself to entering and exiting stores on a creative mission. There really are no limits to how to exercise heads-up engagement. The point is that arbitrarily declaring where and when the generation of ideas has to take place is antithetical to the creative process itself.
Heads Down: Execution Requires Focus
Once a creative idea has been birthed, however, the office is not necessarily the most conducive place to bring it into a workable form. The cultural momentum of the future of work is shifting toward trusting employees to know when they need to come together and when they need to go off alone. Sometimes called an “office-occasional” approach to a hybrid work model, it means giving people the right of choice.
Any assumption that such freedoms are bad for productivity misunderstands the creative process. There will always be the moment in which you have to put pen to paper, and each individual knows where they can best focus to translate a vision into something actionable. Invariably, it is alone.
CEO of Detroit Venture Partners John Linkner, the man credited with first thinking about workflow in this way, says the urgency of heads-down work usually overrides the long-term importance of being heads-up. Finding space for both requires individuals to be very cognizant of their creative process and very deliberate in their planning for shifting between work modes.
Ideally, hybrid work is not about being in the office half the time and at home for the other half. The solution for leaders is not to erect rigid calendar-based boundaries between heads-up and heads-down work but to give space for the ever-moving cycle of the creative mind. The interplay between the two modes builds creative ideas and makes them bigger, better and more robust.
The Future of Work Is Holistic
In his TED talk, Harford cites the study of a group of medical students who learned to critique visual art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and as a consequence became significantly better at performing tasks such as diagnosing diseases of the eye than the control group. It is an example of how the cross-training of the mind can bridge disciplines and connect seemingly unrelated stimuli in a way that is inherently creative.
In the debate about whether or not to return to the office, we also need to break out of the box of linear thinking. We should be discussing how work and workplaces are evolving—and it’s not an either/or choice of pajamas or formal work attire. The future of work demands that we pursue both heads-up and heads-down in all their adaptable guises. It is less about dualistic choices and more about the interconnection of disciplines and environments. That is the reality we need to be preparing for now.
