Ep 148 Creativity: 7 Years, 3 Buzzwords, 2 Studies, and 1 Constant Problem

In 2019, I helped run the largest study ever done on the relationship between design and business performance. We found that the vast majority of companies were stuck, full of creative potential that they couldn't convert into results. This month, Accenture Song published a brand-new study of 1,725 executives across 14 countries, and they found the same exact gap, almost to the percentage point.

This episode puts both studies side by side. Not to say "I told you so," but because two firms, working seven years apart with completely different methods, landing on the same wall, isn't a coincidence. It's proof that this was never a technology problem. I also break down why "applied creativity" is on track to become the next "design thinking," a term everyone adopts and nobody actually builds, unless leaders treat it differently this time. And I close with a three-question audit you can run on your own team before the episode's even over.

This one's for anyone who's tired of hearing that AI will finally make creativity matter. It already mattered. The infrastructure to act on it just never got built.

In this episode:

• Why Accenture's 2026 "applied creativity" data lines up almost exactly with the InVision design maturity study from 2019
• The three pillars both studies independently found: commitment, structure, expertise
• Why only 9% of board members at major companies have creative backgrounds, and why that's the actual story
• Why design thinking died, and the exact pattern that could kill "applied creativity" the same way
• The harder truth: AI didn't create this gap, it just removed the excuse
• A three-question audit to find out which pillar your team is actually missing

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So back in 2019, when I was at Envision, I helped co-author what at the time was the largest study that had ever been done that looked at the relationship between design and business performance. A lot of you maybe remember this. It was called the design frontier. And if you didn't see it or you didn't know, the finding was that what we found was that the vast majority of companies were stuck. They were full of creative potential, but they just couldn't convert it into results. And the numbers were there for why being more creative forward, why doing design thinking, why it had huge business benefits. This was not the first study that showed that. And so it was interesting when over this past weekend, I saw a new study from Accenture or Accenture Song. I found it's just Nick Laws, the ECD or the creative lead over there. He used to be at RGA New York, just super smart guy with an insane amount of respect for. But they did a new study and they looked at somewhere just north of like 1,700 different executives in 14 countries. And drum roll, please, and as a surprise to absolutely no one, they found the exact same gap, almost to the exact percentage point that we found. So in this episode, what I want to do is I want to actually take a minute to look at both of these studies side by side. Why two firms, two companies seven years apart, totally different methods, found the exact same wall for creativity. How that is not a coincidence. I want to look at there's a new term that I keep hearing a lot of people using, which this like applied creativity. Why I think it is well on its way to becoming the next design thinking in that it's a term that everybody's gonna adopt, nobody builds unless we all start to treat it differently this time. And I want to look at like because look, if we're gonna do this, then there's also something I want to share, which is this sort of just like a three-question audit that I think you can run on your team, you can do it before this episode's over to try to help you understand where do you sit? Do you have this wall? Because here's the thing is that there's obviously there's two camps, right? There's the one camp that AI is going to kill creativity, and then there's the one for everybody who is sort of tired of hearing that AI is going to make creativity matter, which I guess I kind of don't agree with either camp. And that's the point that I want to make, right? Like creativity already mattered. It was just nobody ever built, or almost nobody built the infrastructure to actually act on it. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. So welcome to episode 148 of the Crazy One Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. This is the show where we talk about leadership, creativity, design, and all sorts of things that matter to creative people. So, usual plug, right? Like do the review, YouTube, all that, blah, blah, whatever. Um, unless this is your first time listening to the show, and I'm guessing it probably isn't, you know, all that stuff. But but let's start, but like why do this episode now? I've talked about the study in the past, it's seven years old. Like, that's not anything new. But for those of you who maybe didn't, you know, forgot or whatever it was, that so seven years ago to Envision, we did a study called Design Frontier. And what we did was we looked at 2,200 different designers in 77 different countries. And coming out of that, we built a maturity model based on sort of five levels. We could look at basically 12 different factors inside of an organization, and based on those 12 factors, we could assign them to one of five tiers from ones where design and creativity and those sort of things were core assets and they were reaping the business benefits from it. And it fell all the way down to the lowest level where you know, design and creativity was that sort of just make it pretty, right? It was seen as almost purely executional. And so again, I think that I guess it was maybe last week, or I just saw it last week. I don't know candidly what the published date was on it. But Accenture came out with a new study, and they spent a year doing the research. They talked to 15 different executives and like I think it was 1,725 other people to just sort of again do a similar sort of challenge. And then you know, so again, for me, like it's interesting because look, I think just to say it simply, what's in that report isn't a new problem, it's just gonna bring new attention to it. It right, like it's it's an old problem that's just kind of getting reconfirmed. But let's just do kind of a quick comparison by the numbers and some of the things that I saw when I looked at the two reports. So back in 2019, we found that about 41% of companies were stuck in the lowest level of design maturity. 82% of the world's companies were stuck in the middle to the bottom, that only about 5% of companies really were at the highest level of that maturity, and that as a result, they saw really disproportionate and outsized benefits. You would see, on average, they would see anywhere between kind of 4x and 26x the business results. There's episodes on here, you go back to my old talks, right? Like they they could produce products more quickly, they could do it more cheaply, like every metric in the world that you would want was there for why you should lean into this stuff, aside from cultural problems and things like that that prevented it, that it wasn't just flipping a switch. So the new study found that now 81% can generate ideas, but only 16 of them can actually convert them. They can actually take that idea and get it out the door and convert it to something that makes an impact. So, again, the the problem basically has the same shape, just different decade. And I think that both studies landed on three things independently. I think Accenture would call their model like commit, like structure and expertise. We called it people, practices, and platforms. And I think even it's interestingly, even kind of like the failure models match because in Accenture study they saw that only 9% of board members at major companies have creative backgrounds. Ours was that again, we saw that bigger teams didn't predict maturity, right? Like again, if you had a really big team, it didn't mean that you had a big impact or outsized impact, that in a lot of cases there there weren't creative leaders, bigger didn't mean better, that in a lot of cases, you know, no matter what the size of your team was, most companies were stuck on the bridge between level two and level three, which was often defined by level three was basically when a team or a creative would start to take more control of their destiny, right? You would see things like design ops, we would see documentation. We wouldn't basically just see them taking whatever mess they were given and trying to make the best of it. They would define and say, look, to be successful, we need to do very specific things. And so we need briefs and processes, infrastructure, and people to help us accomplish that. And I think like in Accenture Study, they had kind of like a creative penalty stat where they basically found that 57% of leaders say they've personally been held back from being creative. 59% say challenging the status quo makes you quote unquote difficult. Welcome to my work. I've been labeled as difficult, divisive, right? Like all of those sort of things where basically, if you want to not just do the status quo, if you want to do something different, if you actually care about what the output is, you're often labeled as slow, you're labeled as difficult, you're labeled as challenging, right? Like, why can't you just go along to get along? And again, not seeming to understand that that's not the goal of what we're trying to do. And what I think is interesting for me is that that the gap between those two studies really is two kind of distinctly different eras. And that I think a lot of the problems that we have now predate AI, right? It was always there. I think that's the argument I've been continuing to try to make is that that's what we are seeing, is that again, this is AI is going to continue to be a culture problem, not a technology problem. Now, the other part that layers into this is this the emergence of applied creativity. And so, again, if you're not you know intimately familiar with the difference between design thinking and applied creativity, let's do sort of just a quick rundown on this. So I think like design thinking has been around since I don't know what it's been, the 50s or 60s, it's had a few different resurgences. Um, it came out of IDEO and and look, I still think that it is the gold standard and has been for decades, but it is obviously, I think, actively disappearing right now because it had its moment a few years ago. A lot of companies saw that resurgence, they tried it, and for a number of reasons that we'll get into in a minute, it didn't work, right? They didn't see the benefits, it wasn't this magical switch. And so, because of that, you see it disappearing from job listings and descriptions and conversations, and it's being replaced by applied creativity. And sort of again, for the comparison, design thinking, I think is a very structured methodology in that you sort of go through and you do research that lead into insights, that lead to how might we's that lead to it, that lead to ideation, prototyping, and testing, and you repeat that loop, right? It's a way of how do we do structured creativity that gets us data and feedback that we can act on, not opinion, which is why I like it so much. And then we have a way of moving forward in a structured way that gives us structure but doesn't force us into specific, you know, just more solution-oriented thinking. Now, applied creativity is more, it is not something I practice. I've had a lot of conversations, I've done a lot of research. It's more of sort of like a mindset or a skill, and it's using creative thinking to solve problems. And again, I think that you know, design thinking in a lot of cases will focus more on kind of user needs and empathy. You start with research into insights doing those sort of things. Applied creativity, it could be aesthetic, it could be conceptual, commercial, personal. There's not necessarily a fixed starting point to that. And again, where design thinking is taught to be run by teams and scaled across organizations, applied creativity seems to be a little more kind of idiosyncratic in that it depends on your personal taste, your instinct, and your range. So I can understand why this would be more corporately palatable, I guess. Um, because it's just it isn't as structured, it doesn't require as much accountability, I guess, that it can be a little more touchy-feely and those sort of things. Um and and look, and I think that even Nick had Nick Laud said it in this, and I agree that you know, really design thinking's fatal flaw was, I would say maybe twofold. What he said was like the flaw was really treating creativity as a vibe, kind of instead of a trained skill. My assumption continues to be that everybody is creative. Most people just forgot. And I think that that was what I saw, why design thinking failed, because I worked with company after company, taught it at place after place, where what you would see was that companies would only take parts of design thinking, usually the parts that were easy, but they would skip over most of it and then kind of moan about why they didn't get results. I had one company that tell me they ran design thinking, and when I asked them to tell me about their methodology, they showed me a stack of post-it notes. That what that's not a joke. They actually thought just using post-it notes was design thinking. And that that's often what it was is they would take the shiny parts, the post-it notes, the how might we'll do a few of those things. They didn't have the rigor, they didn't have the discipline, they would only run the cycle once, like a lot of those sort of things, and then again, like I said, bemoan why they didn't get magical results. And that's the that's for me is the repeating pattern why I don't think this time is going to be any different. Because I look, I don't think frameworks die because the idea was wrong. I think they die because most companies like to adopt the vocabulary and skip the infrastructure and then blame the framework. And this is the fundamental difference whenever you study organizational change and what makes great teams great, it is the difference between the teams that address behavior versus thinking. Behavior is we're gonna use some new words, we're just gonna take the shiny parts, and then we're gonna go back, and it's it's like waterfall with different props kind of a thing, I guess. And that that's the difference is the fundamental thinking, the approach, the rigor, the discipline, the comfortable being uncomfortable never manifests. And I think that's the part, and that's why my prediction here is that applied creativity is headed for the same grave unless companies and leaders build actual pillars instead of just renaming slide decks. Because I think that's most of the time, right? Like it's just what's the phrase of the moment? Because here's the thing that I've learned and that I know for an absolute fact is that vocabulary without structure is nothing more than theater. That that's just simply the way that it is. Talking differently, using a few different words, picking up some design thinking phrases, talking like that sort of thing, with no structure, with no impact, with no discipline, without the ability to understand that creativity is about learning and iteration, and that if this is why corporate culture and creativity generally do not like to coexist, is because there is a tension there that they don't want to address. But but that is the tension that I think is worth sitting with. Is that again, I in my eyes, design thinking can produce competent, validated, and forgettable work if it just follows the recipe, right? Because again, you can I can run a design thinking sprint and get the answer that I want if I want it. And that it's you know, I think that a lot of the kind of applied creativity or those sort of things probably de-risks some of this. But I think that that's my concern in this, right? Is it's gonna be a bunch of decoration and a bunch of language that I think in applied creativity it's going to sort of keep the focus on the output, but it's gonna be generic, right? It's the taste and the judgment layer that can't be manufactured. That I think that the best teams use design thinking for rigor, and you can use applied creativity for distinction. So to me, these are more complementary kind of approaches whenever I'm looking at it objectively, as opposed to one as a replacement for the other. But but that's the thing, is that no either one, that just the process alone doesn't get you a defensible answer, right? Process just gets you a lot of people that tend to go through the steps. That's why, in most cases with organizations, I like to instill behaviors, not process, because process is something people will follow because somebody told them to. It's that creativity gets you an output somebody actually cares about. And I think that's maybe a little bit of the harder truth than all this is that look, I think that most companies aren't failing because they don't get it. They're failing because they're optimizing for shipping, not for quality, that they think that speed, and again, this is something I've said for longer than I wish I'd had, right? That for like done is not a standard, shipped is not a standard. Quality, impact, moving the business, right? And I think that that's the thing that maybe this is more of a failure on leadership, is that velocity became the only thing that that leadership or somebody could put on a dashboard. So it became the only thing that mattered. Quality doesn't show up on a dashboard, quality doesn't show up in a sprint report, but a ship date does. And I think that in a lot of ways is the actual engine behind plausible noise. Whenever we talked about that, right? Like that work that is polished enough to clear the review that says nothing underneath the polish. It's a veneer. It ships fast because nobody has honestly to defend that opinion. And they don't have to defend it, usually because there isn't an opinion there, and leadership isn't looking for one. They are just simply looking for progress. That's why for me, as I've talked about on previous episodes, we talk about pre-mortems, we talk about decision logs. This is why I bring this stuff up. Because, like, look, I think now for me, this is gonna be, and this for me is always the thing, right? Watch what happens the second, and I mean the second somebody tries to slow down that train, right? They want to do real design thinking, even if they want to do real applied creativity. And I think that the kind that goes looking for a position nobody's claimed yet, right? The the kind that makes somebody uncomfortable, they call it slow, they call it cumbersome, they call they like the line you always get is like, you know, look, we just have to move. No matter how many years I've joked that, like, look, if you think doing it right is expensive and time consuming, let's try doing it wrong six times. And that's often the case, is why we would see in the report that we did. That's why the companies at the higher maturity move so much faster, the work they did was so much cheaper, because they did it once. They did it once and they did it right. They didn't do it six times and sort of with mediocre fumbling, fawning attempts every time to sort of get it right. Yes, it took them a little bit longer to ship it out the door, but whenever it shipped, it stayed shipped. It wasn't somebody that we shipped and then we had to make a bunch of excuses, and maybe somebody had to get fired, or we had to wait for the next quarter, and then we had to come back and revisit it, right? Like we all know the cycle. And because my thing is like that slow, cumbersome, we need to move, that reaction was never about speed. For me, it's a tell. It means, for me, if I'm being totally brutally honest, right? It means that nobody in that room can tell the difference between fast and right. So anybody that takes longer than fast gets treated like a problem. And AI is just making this worse, not better. Again, it didn't build a quality machine, it built a faster noise machine. The same gaps, same output like that need to get filled in. But this is where AI is making this worse. This is why I'm saying that AI is going to destroy so many companies because, again, they're just gonna ship bad ideas faster. But that's again to go back to what I said in the beginning. For me, creativity has always mattered. The infrastructure to act on it never got built. Now it's competing against noise that ships at the speed of a prompt, right? That's the thing. So, so let's talk for a minute because you know, for a lot of you, if you've been through this, this probably this episode is probably gonna turn into a therapy session a lot more, right? Like, um, I think the best of you, maybe you're talking to your car, you're talking to traffic, you're talking to a screen, you're trying not to yell out something if you're listening to it at work, because we've all been there, right? We all seen it, we we all know it, we all see it when it walks in the room. So, how do we start to kind of like go through this? How do we start to push back? And I think that for me, like let's start with how do you beat that slow label? And for me, it's again, I think it's not arguing that slow is actually fast because it isn't, right? That argument gets you kind of laughed out of the room to go, oh, it's not slow, it is slower, yes. What I often like to do is to argue sort of an asymmetrical point instead, right? Because again, I think that for me, that if you look at hard data, right? Pull any of these studies, there are other ones that are out there, right? Like we talked about before, that doing it right will get you not only disproportionate returns on the project, you'll do it ultimately faster and like again, a lot cheaper. But again, I think that slow and right beats fast and forgettable. And that at the end of the day, the thing that we forget is that that is the only metric that your leadership or your board gives a shit about. Is that at the end of the day, everybody forgets the process, everybody forgets how long it takes, everybody forgets those sort of things. That fast is sort of just a short-term vanity metric that nobody's gonna remember if it's not right, if you have to do it again, if you have to go ask for more money, right? Like all of those sort of things. And in a lot of cases, for me, this is really an approach where I'm trying to separate the judgment from the ceremony, right? Like that a five-step workshop is slow. A trained eye knows that, you know, in 10 seconds whether an idea is ownable or not, right? You can tell if it is good or not. And I think that that's always the thing that I hear is like design thinking is slow. And again, I think that what people are often reacting to is kind of the ritual around it, that maybe people that were running it didn't know how to do it. Again, because I I can run a design thinking sprint in an hour. We can get a prototype in an hour. So, again, that some of that is is pulling those two things apart. But I think that in some cases it's kind of shrinking that unit of stop selling judgment as this kind of like phase that gets bolted onto the front of a project. Because that was often the problem, right? Like you design, quote unquote, would do design thinking, then we're gonna do the work. If if that is the way anybody thinks, you're running it wrong, right? Where again, it's not somebody that gets bolted onto the front, it's built in as a filter that runs at shipping speed. That if you are doing this stuff, right, that this isn't some two week detour that you go on before then it's like we get back to doing those sort of things. That again, this should be something that everybody of every discipline is doing, and part of that is also. Also, look, I think one of the biggest faults of design thinking, if I'm really being honest, is that it has the word design in the title. Like that was why when we brought design thinking into Citibank, didn't call it design thinking. Nobody wanted design thinking. If we gave them a discovery mindset, everybody wanted that. But also stop calling it a process, right? It's not. Processes get scheduled, anything that is on schedule, right? Like again, then that gets deadlines. They're those sort of things. Now, look, this is not mean I'm not saying this is just a free-for-all. This is a standard. This is a mindset. This is an approach, right? That this is a way that we need to work. Because standards get applied or right are those sort of things. And like I said, it's also for me, it's just, it's not, this is why I think design thinking and design systems, all these things have struggled inside of corporations. Because for so many other teams, design is not seen as an approach, creativity is not seen as a mindset, it is not seen as something everybody is doing. It's seen as a word of ownership, right? Design thinking is what design owns. The design system is what design owns. We all know none of that's actually true. Design thinking is something everybody can do. A design system needs a lot of different teams from a lot of different disciplines for it to work. But here's the other thing that, and I kind of promise this at the top, right? Like, what's this three question, three-pillar audit that I think you can do to sort of figure out where you're at? And again, let's kind of go back to this commitment structure, expertise sort of approach to things. And real quickly, I think you can just do an audit of where you're at and where your company's at. On the commitment side, the easiest thing that I knew to do is can you bring a risky, often unfinished idea to your leadership or an idea that challenges the status quo without it being held against you, without you being labeled slow, without you sort of trying to disrupt product, with like can you actually because look, ideas are really fragile, but for me, just that simple, simple question, right? Can you bring an unfinished idea to leadership or can you challenge the status quo without that actually being held against you? This is why I'll often say that I think most companies value compliance over creativity, is because of that question. The second one on structure is that is there an actual owner and process for creative decisions? Or does everything die in committee? Are you able to take a risk? Are you able to try something? Are you able to prototype it? Are you able to get feedback? Or is it just down to the way an executive or somebody quote unquote feels, or is decision making just being made based on a calendar? So again, does anybody actually own those decisions? And then the third one is on expertise. Does anybody with real creative judgment sit in the room where resourcing and priority gets decided? Now, often for me, this is a place where it will fail on two sides. Oftentimes, one, the creative judgment is not sitting in the room, but also whenever it does sit in the room, too often that person only wants to focus on the executional aspect of it, not the is the idea right? How do we make it better? Is anybody gonna care about this? Or are they gonna forget it before they're done looking at it? Kind of approach to things. And then here's the thing there's simple questions, but if you can't say yes to all three of them, you already know where to start. Because here's what each no actually looks like. And and again, I think the one move that could maybe fix all of this. So if we're talking about commitment, right, can you bring an idea without getting published? If that's a no, I think that here's the thing for the way that actually often looks like in practice, right? Ideas only survive if they are proven to be safe. If a competitor has done it, if we can point to somebody else has done it, right? And look, I think at the end of the day, again, if we're being real, nobody calls that kind of punishment, but risk quietly gets remembered the next time your review comes around. And that's where you are being labeled as difficult, that's where you're being labeled as problematic. I know that because I still have my reviews that have used that exact same language. And look, and I think that the fix for this isn't going to HR, it's not some poster about psychological safety. It's a specific public rule that look, I think one unfinished, risky idea per cycle gets brought to the room and is protected from blame no matter how it lands. At some companies, this has been innovation boards. You'll see at companies like Disney, where I think about 60% of the work they do is expected to fail because they know the 40% that works makes the expenditure worth it. But is that sort of rule actually achievable? Now, again, you can try this inside of your own group, try to find some success and then scale it. But for me, the first move, if you get like a no-on-the-commitment line, is to pick one project this month. Say it out loud in front of your team, if you can, in front of your leadership team. And again, I think that the riskiest idea in it won't be held against somebody if it doesn't work. This is why in so many places I've tried to instill the understanding that like failure is just badly placed learning, right? Like the fail, fast and break things, the intention is right, but the phrasing is wrong. But it speaks to this moment. But I think if you are not able to create a space where you can try things, if you're not able to create a space where you can have an idea where you can try something, or you can take a risk, this is where I'll often also comment. There's a difference between crazy and stupid. I'm not encouraging stupidity. But if that one simple thing of trying something is impossible, innovation, progress, usually all the goals that your leadership is asking for is also impossible. Because that's something I can tell you absolutely is that if you want to innovate, if you want to do something different, if you want to make an impact, you're gonna have to try some things, you're gonna have to get some things wrong, and you're gonna have to iterate. It's just the way that it works. And that again, this is why the corporate culture and creativity often don't like to coexist, is because those ask for fundamentally different things. Now, for the second one, if structure is a no, right? And here's what that looks like, right? Like you have eight stakeholders, there's not a single owner anywhere in sight, everybody has veto power, and nobody has the call. And again, I think that in a lot of cases, usually what happens is the decision doesn't die from disagreement, it dies because nobody is actually responsible for ending the disagreement. Who is the person that is in charge? Who is the decision maker? And so again, I think that a lot of cases for me, it's that whenever you're doing this work, the fix is to name one owner per creative decision, not a committee, a person. They take the input, they ultimately make the call. I think it's somebody who, again, you don't want to be authoritarian, who will listen to the other opinions in the room. But at the end of the day, that call stands unless something is broken, like right, not just again, because it's, you know, somebody else doesn't like it or something like that. But that's the thing, is that there's actually somebody who makes a decision. Now, again, a lot of companies and groups don't like this because then it means somebody's accountable. Most of the time, the reason why there's a decision by committee is because then no one person can be held accountable. And that again, it's more out of protecting your bonus and your big five than it is actually caring about the work, the company, or that something that's going to move the needle. And that for me is the first move, right? Like take the next decision that would normally go to committee and give it to a person. Do it in writing and watch how much faster, how much better it comes out the other side. And I think that is often one of the fundamental failures of a lot of leadership at a lot of companies is that what it requires, what success requires, is that you actually push power down into your organization. You trust people to make decisions, you give them accountability. Most leaders that I see, the reason why they are struggling is because they seem to be afraid to task people in their organization with accountability, to be in charge of something. They'll soft sell it, they'll do the work for them, they'll do a lot of other things, but they seem to just really have a hard time holding people accountable. And then finally, if right, like if that expertise is a no, and I think here's what that looks like, right? Like for me, that in a lot of cases the resourcing and the priority gets decided in a room where it's nobody's job to even question if the idea is good or not. It came down from high, it showed up in a requirement document, something, and we're just going to blindly sort of go ahead with it. And I think that in a lot of cases, where I think you'll sort of see that that judgment loses out to headcount and politics, because in a lot of cases that judgment was just never invited to the table. It wasn't in the room. So again, I think a lot of what that is, and this is the part where it is on us, where I think we have had massive failures on the design and the creative side and the marketing side, is that if you're going to sit in that room, if you're going to take that seat, then again, you are there to be a voice, right? Not somebody who's just there to consult and sort of bitch about it behind the scenes. But again, to be somebody that is a voice, to be somebody that can push back. And again, for what we said before, in a lot of rooms, that does not happen because there is no benefit to it. But at the end of the day, if you're able to do that and to see, and this is why I think this is maybe the biggest unspoken problem that we have right now, is that I think if you're sitting in these rooms as a creative leader, in almost every case, and I know this has been true for me, you basically have to be willing to be prepared to be fired to stand up for some of these things for people to take you seriously. That you almost have to be willing to end your job to say, no, this is a hill I'm going to die on. That this is something that does matter. We have to be better, we have to be different, we can't just keep going through the motions. And I think that's why, in a lot of cases, leadership anymore is just fucking exhausting. It is, right? Because of those sort of things. But the first move here for me is like it is when you're in that seat, right? To use your judgment in that room before the call gets made, not after, to push back to be able to do. Because again, this is often where design and marketing and everybody else screws themselves, is because when you're not in that room and it lands on your desk and you don't object, and you take on a project where there is not going, you know it before you start that you know there's not a plausible outcome here. You know there's not a good outcome because this is a crap idea. But when we take on their problem, then it becomes our problem. And then that usually the failed result gets hung on us. And I think, you know, for me, the way I would say is that you look, you probably tried these things in the past, you haven't had success. I I would say if you're gonna take another run at it, start with one thing, and that's starting with just commitment. It doesn't cost anything, there's no org change, and it tells you faster than anything whether leadership's words actually match their behavior. Because I think in a lot of cases, that's what it's come down to for me is that is success here even possible or probable? And if that commitment answer remains a no, you know. Because look, I think that structure and expertise, those two require giving somebody actual authority, and that's a harder sell. It it takes more time than commitment. And in some cases, you're gonna try to get something done with a leadership team that's just never gonna do it, right? They're they're never gonna sign up for it. And I think that it's just to me, it's just it's been Accenture Studies has been an interesting inflection point, right? That I I think that the the gap that's there, the reasons to do it, the reasons why to invest in these things, the the data's been there for nearly a decade, right? But I think we also need to accept that like data's never been the missing piece. Infrastructure has been. And again, I think that companies are not going to see change, they're not going to see anything different until this is something that they are willing to address. And that right now I think a lot of companies are trying to paper over the problem, they're trying to paper it over with speed, with AI, with the devalue of expertise, and it's a short-term narcotic or fix or kind of feel-good thing to what's going to be a long-term problem. And again, this is all to me, keeps pointing back to the same thing that I know I'm going to probably rail on about for the next decade or till I decide I've just had enough and I'm going to go do something different with my life. But I think that's the thing is that look, AI is not going to be a technology problem, it's going to be a culture problem. It's going to be an infrastructure problem. And that that's why, again, we need to pick our head up out of the execution and stop just focusing on that and realize some of the bigger things that are going on here, and that these are problems we're going to have to address. And whether we can't address it at the company we're at, we need to start going and working for and supporting and making the companies that do get this the poster children. Right? Make them the ones that are successful, make them the examples, make them the new guard of the right way to do things. Because I think that's the only way I know to actually get anything done. Because if not, then you just tend to get to a place where you get burned out, you give up, and you just decide, should I just be doing something else? Because I don't think I love this anymore. And I've Lord knows I've been there more than once. So I'm gonna climb down off my soapbox. That was but it's just like I said, to me, it's just this has been rattling around in my brain for the last week and just wanted to kind of share. But look, I'd love your thoughts on what this is. Like if you have any thoughts on this, um, around what that is, if if your company's, I'd be definitely interested to hear if your company is trying to actually institute applied creativity. I've been struggling, I see the phrase a lot, but I'm struggling to find instances of where it's actually being applied. But um, yeah, I don't know. Let me know. So look, as always, you know, subscribe, leave a review. You know, if you want to work with somebody who has all these thoughts are gonna help navigate you, reach out. Um, look, as always, I know time is the only real luxury we always have any of us have. I'm always incredibly grateful you want to spend any of it listening to me. And hey, think about it. See that the problem isn't new, and hey, as always, stay crazy.