Assassins

Todd Henry [00:00:03]:
Imagine you're driving down a familiar road, one you've traveled hundreds of times before. Suddenly, your car starts pulling to the left. At first it's barely noticeable, just a gentle tug on the steering wheel. So you compensate without thinking, making minor adjustments to stay on course. But over time, that subtle pull becomes more demanding, requiring more energy and more attention just to maintain your direction. Now, you can ignore the issue with your car's steering, but it's going to make your job driving the car so much more difficult. You're going to spend way too much time just trying to keep the car on the road, not even thinking about where you're going or enjoying the scenery, enjoying the drive. Well, this is exactly how Some of the Dynamics of Creative Work Some of the darker dynamics can infiltrate our life day to day, and eventually overwhelm us.

Todd Henry [00:00:49]:
They're subtle. They're often imperceptible at first, but they're increasingly demanding over time. As someone who's spent two decades studying and leading creative teams, I've observed these hidden dynamics that silently sabotage our creative potential. I call them the Assassins of Creativity because they operate like stealth agents. They quietly undermine our ability to bring our best work forward every single day. In my work with creative pros, I've noticed a concerning pattern. We're all trying to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy at the same time, but something keeps getting in the way. These creative assassins create gaps between what we say we want to do and what we actually accomplish.

Todd Henry [00:01:30]:
So during a recent conference keynote, I shared these insights because they touch on a universal struggle in our create on demand world, in which we're expected to solve problems creatively, to develop strategies brilliantly, and to deliver everything by Wednesday at 2:00pm which is great. We love what we do, but those pressures can undermine our ability to do our best work. Understanding these hidden forces isn't just about improving our creative output. It's about sustainable excellence and building a body of work that we can be proud of. In response to several listener requests recently to hear more ideas from my books, I wanted to take you through these assassins of creativity. Not just to identify them, but to understand how we can work with and around them to produce our best creative work. So on today's show, I bring you a section of a recent keynote about my book the Accidental Creative, in which I share the assassins of creativity. This is Daily Creative, a podcast for creative pros who want to be brave, focused, and brilliant every day.

Todd Henry [00:02:35]:
My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Todd Henry [00:02:42]:
I want to talk about why this is so difficult for Us, because there are all kinds of hidden forces, hidden dynamics that cause us to hit the.

Todd Henry [00:02:50]:
Wall creatively and professionally.

Todd Henry [00:02:54]:
I call these the assassins. The assassins are stealthy. They're like ninjas. They sneak into our lives and they slowly assassinate our ability to bring our best work every single day. There are three of them we have to be aware of. The first one is what I call dissonance. So dissonance is a force that exists in a lot of contexts. For example, in music, dissonance is used to describe.

Todd Henry [00:03:20]:
That word is used to describe two notes that are played together that don't quite belong together. So you have this, and it creates a kind of tension in you because your mind is wired to crave harmony, to crave resolution. Your creativity is forming patterns. It's resolving dissonance. And so when you experience dissonance, it creates a kind of tension in you that wants to be resolved. Filmmakers use this to great effect. Imagine you're watching a film. It's a beautiful day.

Todd Henry [00:03:47]:
There's a woman. She's walking through an apartment. The birds are chirping. The sun is shining. But somehow you just know there's a serial killer hiding in the bathroom. Right? How do you know this? Typically, it's because there's a bed of music, a dissonant bed of music playing just beneath the surface of the film. And it makes you feel uneasy, like something bad is about to happen. I would submit to you that many of us have a similar dissonant bed of music playing just beneath the surface of our lives and our organizations.

Todd Henry [00:04:16]:
It's a gap between what we're doing and why we say we're doing it. It's a gap between tactics, strategy, and purpose. And when that gap exists, we feel it as creative professionals, we feel a gap. We feel a dissonance between what we say we're about and what we actually do. And that dissonance can zap our ability to bring our best creative effort. Let me give you a couple of examples of how this plays out. The first source of dissonance. These are my three children when they were slightly younger.

Todd Henry [00:04:47]:
They are not your greatest source of dissonance. Just want to be clear. That's my youngest, Ava, who is a total free spirit. Don't fence me in, man. Don't fence me in. Don't tell me what to do. And my oldest, Ethan, in the striped shirt. They're about to have a race.

Todd Henry [00:04:59]:
And at some point, Ava's going to throw her arms up in the air and say, I win. I win the race. I am the champion. It's some arbitrary point, right? And Ethan is like, what do you mean you win? What are you talking about? Where was the starting line? Where was the finish line? What were the terms of engagement? Typical firstborn behavior. Right? Now, listen, it's kind of silly when kids do this, but we do this all the time in our work. We don't clearly define the edges of our work. We don't have a clear strategy. We haven't defined a problem we're trying to solve.

Todd Henry [00:05:29]:
We don't know when we're finished. How do we know when something is finished? Is it when we run out of time, when we run out of money? If we haven't defined the edges of our work, it introduces dissonance. And we'll talk about how to remedy that in a minute. Now, I'm going to move on because they're about to assault one another and I might get in trouble. Okay? The second source of dissonance is what I call unnecessary complexity. So this is a formula I put on my office wall after I tanked my first creative team. I thanked them because I love complexity. I do.

Todd Henry [00:05:59]:
As a manager, complexity feels like progress to me. It does. If you give me a problem, I'll hand you back some remarkably complex thing and say, look at how amazing this. Only I have created this kind of complex value as a manager. Only I could have done this. Right? No, it's just complex. It doesn't help my team because it's not defining things as simply as they can possibly be defined. How many of you have customers who come back to you with a set of expectations where everybody on their side has had to have their say about what they're looking for, and so they hand you some giant Frankenmonster problems that you're trying to solve.

Todd Henry [00:06:39]:
It's unnecessary complexity. It is. So where in your life is there unnecessary complexity? Because it's an opportunity for dissonance to emerge and by the way, in process, and how you're defining problems and how you're approaching and structuring your life. The third source of dissonance is what I call the opacity phenomenon. This is when all of the why based decisions are made in some kind of a black box. And then somebody comes out and says, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this. And they go back in the black box. Everybody's left saying, why are we doing this? Do you know why we're doing this? I don't know why we're doing this.

Todd Henry [00:07:13]:
It's a gap between what we're doing and why we're doing it for. Smart, talented, create, on demand professionals. If they don't understand why they're being asked to do something, they can't see the through line. If there's no story behind what they're doing, it's really difficult to gain traction. It introduces dissonance. If you manage teams of people, I encourage you to have regular Y chats. We're going to do something and now let's talk about why we're doing this. Let's talk about why this is important.

Todd Henry [00:07:39]:
Let's talk about why it ties into our bigger vision as an organization. And if you're on a team, I encourage you to seek out that. Why it's your responsibility to seek it out if you don't understand it. So this is dissonance. This is how dissonance can affect us. The second assassin is fear. Fear is when the perceived consequences of failure outweigh the perceived benefits of success. So we don't act, we don't take little strategic risks that are necessary to produce disproportionate value.

Todd Henry [00:08:09]:
There's a guy named Neil Feary who does research into procrastination. And he'll often bring people into a room like this and he'll put a wood plank on the floor, 10ft long, 6 inches wide. And he'll ask people, could you walk the length of this plank if I ask you to? And they'll say, of course, it's a wood plank on the floor. Why wouldn't I be able to walk the plank? He'll say, great, great. Now imagine I take that wood plank and suspended 100ft in the air between two buildings. Now, could you walk the length of that plank? And they'll look at him and say, no way, Are you kidding? I'd have to be drunk. No way am I walking a wood plank 100ft in the air. Well, what's changed about the technical skill required to walk the plank? Absolutely nothing.

Todd Henry [00:08:45]:
If you could do it on the ground, you could do it in the air. What's changed are the perceived consequences of failure, which in this case is plummeting to your death. So I kind of get it. But listen, I would submit to you that many of us go through our days artificially escalating planks, artificially escalating the perceived consequences of failure to the point that we don't act, we don't take little strategic risks. If we want to produce brilliant creative work, we need to discipline ourselves to act in the face of fear. My friend Brian says fear is often the smell of opportunity. And I think that's true. You see, fear turns something innocuous into something terrifying.

Todd Henry [00:09:24]:
That's what fear does. We have to discipline ourselves to act in the face of our fear, to produce, to engage in small acts of bravery creatively, to countermand fear. Okay, so that's fear. That's the second assassin. The third assassin is something I call expectation escalation. So this is what happens when somebody, let's say, for example, your manager comes to you and says, hey, Sue. Hey, great job last quarter. You not only hit your numbers, that was amazing.

Todd Henry [00:09:52]:
You did 25% more than we asked. You did 125% of what we asked you. That's amazing. Great job, by the way, 125%, your new baseline. Hey, Joe, you not only did 125, which is what we asked sue to do, I mean, Sue's only doing 125. You did 140%. That's amazing, by the way, 140%, your new baseline. And once people realize we can do something, what do they want? They want it again.

Todd Henry [00:10:20]:
They want it again. We slowly ratchet up expectations. It doesn't matter what it took you to do that. It doesn't matter what it cost you. You had to work nights and weekends for three weeks straight in order to deliver that. It doesn't matter. All that matters is you delivered it. And when this happens, when this dynamic begins to emerge, when our expectations become escalated, it squeezes all of the white space out of our life.

Todd Henry [00:10:45]:
Where does creativity happen? Where does innovation happen? It happens in the white space. It happens in the gaps between. And so we start off doing something very simple. By the end of the day, it feels like this.

Todd Henry [00:11:02]:
The first step in overcoming the assassins of creativity is becoming aware of their existence. So hopefully through today's episode will at least give you some handles, some language, maybe some things to be looking out for in your life, in your collaboration and your leadership, and in your creative work to help you identify what exactly is going on. Is unnecessary complexity causing you to spend too much time spinning your wheels, just trying to get going on your work? Or is it possible that there's a gap between what you're doing and why you think you're doing it? Is there a misunderstanding in your organization about the core why?

Todd Henry [00:11:38]:
Why?

Todd Henry [00:11:38]:
Of the problems you're trying to solve? Just being aware of these dynamics can often illuminate possible next steps. And in my book, the Accidental Creative, I talked about five practices to help you countermand the assassins of creativity in the areas of focus, relationships, energy, stimuli, and hours. So I encourage you to check that out if it's something you're interested in. And if you like for me to spend some time with your organization, spend speak at your event, speak at your conference, or teach your team through a workshop how to deal with these assassins. You can contact me@toddhenry.com or learn more at todhenry.com speaking hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like daily episodes of Daily Creative, full interviews, guides, and much, much more, including courses, you can get them in the Daily Creative app at Daily Creative. Again, that's DailyCreative app. My name is Todd Henry.

Todd Henry [00:12:35]:
You can learn about my books, my work, and more@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.