creative direction? we should look to sports coaches

Christophe Waldenkrantz asked a question:

Is the Creative Coach the new Creative Director?

According to him, creative processes in a project are usually managed by a creative director, someone who has a firm technical grasp on a whole project, 'a role that few can master'.

You usually graduate to this rarefied level after years as a creative. But, similarly to lawyers who make partner, the skills you need in your new role are nothing to do with your old one. While a lawyer who is good at being a lawyer is rewarded by becoming a highfalutin salesperson, a creative essentially becomes a manager. And creatives are often not people who have managerial skills. they are creative, with whatever that brings with it.

Doubtlessly there are creatives who make phenomenal creative directors. But my most creative friend is not someone for whom management is an obvious line of work. He's very much from the come in when you like and play Playstation until you get an idea school of creativity.

According to Waldenkrantz, the skills needed to be a creative director are,

culture development, professional and personal development, and leadership beyond knowing right from wrong.

Basically all the traits that are required from a sports coach.

What sports coaching is

While sport used to be a dictatorial business, with an omnipotent manager and a squad of subservient players, used to being shouted at and existing as a resource to be milked, nowadays and particularly in the world's biggest sport professional football, the players are all powerful while the manager is easily replaced.

Managers now need to have a range of soft skills and the ability to assemble a management team. The job is now too big and too broad for anyone to have the bandwidth to do it all.

My experience of this was Graham Dawe being fired by Plymouth Albion, only for them to realise that he was doing the jobs of 3 or 4 people, including looking after the pitch himself. When the new coach wouldn't sit on a tractor, the board found themselves in a bind.

At the top level, Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger were probably the last of the autodidacts but where Wenger failed to devolve responsibility, becoming hamstrung by a lack of resources and his own refusal to bring in some new influences, Ferguson delegated the coaching to younger, fresher minds with new ideas to keep his charges stimulated. This is as creative and humble a move as you'll see in the still quite old school world of football and epitomises leadership beyond right and wrong, instead serving the players with the best ideas possible.

Where the manager is a true creative director is in their role as a frontman. They're sat in front of the press narrativising their vision for the team, how this mission is progressing and justifying what's happening as it's happening. They have to seduce a board or an owner with their vision to get the job in the first place and while they set the ideas and the methods, they are less and less the man delivering the boots on the ground training sessions.

Where their influence is felt the most is in the creation of the team's culture. The narrative of the season needs to be powerful and convincing enough to bring highly paid talent on board, young men who have little need for material motivation. They need something to believe in, something that bends but doesn't break when stress tested and that accommodates their differing backgrounds and personalities. Culture is regularly misunderstood and alluded to, frequently referenced but not always adhered to, but when a coach gets it right, it can lead to extraordinary results.

A coach's job is increasingly two things. They're a storyteller and a motivator. They need to understand people and tell them a story that motivates them to go up to and beyond their limits. To stretch their imaginations.

Sports coaching is creative direction.

Alex Garland and film direction

In many ways, filmmaking is the ultimate creative direction, a confluence of mediums uniting on screen. This was also once the responsibility of one person and the distance between what was 'the way' and how it is now is epitomised in the approach of Alex Garland. He feels that the process is one of collaboration, ‘anarchist’ filmmaking compared to a traditional auteur approach.

There’s an old culture of film making – the cult of the director as dictator. That wasn’t my experience. Film making is self-evidently collaborative.

He illustrates his point with an anecdote from his film Ex Machina (2015).

A female-appearing robot dresses herself in a white dress and walks out of the room. The white dress was chosen by the actress and the costume designer and I had no involvement in that. She walks past a painting by Klimt of a woman in a white dress, which is actually a painting of the sister of Wittgenstein (a philosopher referenced earlier in the film). I didn’t know that Michelle Day, the set decorator, had selected and hung that painting. It is a reference to the script and the costume. Rob Hardy (the Director of Photography) shot it beautifully. I was not involved at all in any of that…but when people noticed these details, I got the credit. And for one reason, on the credits it says the film was directed by me.

Like a football manager, Garland gets the credit for this sequence despite it being conceived, facilitated and acted by others. He will also draw the opprobrium if the scene isn't up to scratch. He's the front man after all.

What he has clearly done though, is select and empower some amazing talent. Michelle Day had the knowledge, nous and confidence to hang a particular painting that enriched the scene without his say so. The actress and costume designer chose the garment to suit the scene, happy to take responsibility and without checking if it was ok. These people all believed in their own decisions and in their director's belief in them.

Clearly Garland knows how to foster and lead an amazing culture of collaboration on his sets. I thoroughly recommend that film in particular but most of his work I've engaged with has lingered with me long after I've stopped watching.

the end of executive expertise

Waldenkrantz visited 72U - a platform and creative residency for cultivating new ways of thinking, creativity and diversity - and found some counterintuitive occurrences, notably that ' none of them had any previous experience of the communication industry.'

Garland had no experience of any medium before he began working in it. He wrote The Beach and a couple of other novels before writing a screenplay. He wrote a game. He switched back to film where he managed to get to direct his own project. He's switched codes a few times with great success.

There are countless examples of football coaches who weren't 'super-talents' as players. There are even some almost historically young coaches in professional football around the world right now who have never had playing careers. Ability with a ball doesn't necessarily indicate that someone has the coaching skills required to become a great manager.

What I don't think has happened is a high profile manager or head coach switching sports. Clive Woodward tried with Southampton FC back in the 2000s but I can't think of another example. In theory, a manager wouldn't need domain specific knowledge if they had the soft skills to motivate the squad. It might be more that the squad can't respect someone without domain knowledge.

Back to Waldenkrantz,

the soft values, not the hard ones, dictated how things were to be done.

From Creative Direction to Creative Coaching

Where sport is forward thinking is in bringing in coaches from other sports to see what there is to learn from them. Waldenkrantz references how creative industry 'processes at agencies have gone from linear and characterised by working in silos, to more agile methods with faster feedback loops.'

Sport, the ultimate fast feedback environment, requires joined up thinking and the elimination of silos. If your medical team, performance team and coaching team aren't in sync then god help you. Ego needs to be parked in order for these areas to harmonise and provide the optimal experience for an athlete. Equally, outside influence is occasionally required to prevent echo chamber thinking.

If creative industries need inspiration on how to welcome a flatter structure and new ideas, they could do worse than look at the methods of some of sport's top coaches. Waldenkrantz is asking for a Creative Coach rather than a director. But what does that mean exactly?

A Creative Coach focuses on building environments where creativity can flourish. Comfort, conversation and collaboration raise the creative bar through questions and understanding of how to bring forth dormant creative skills. The work is then transformed into a learning experience that in turn builds momentum.

Does that brief summarise the best sporting environments? I'd say so.

Ideas:

Range - Epstein's book is so good on the foxes vs hedgehogs question - perhaps a manager needs to be the fox, assembling teams of hedgehogs

Kanye West - the ultimate creative coach - switches domains and collaborators with impunity, always with a humble servant leader/growth mindset, his taste filtered through a collaborative lens, working with the best talent he can find, regardless of background

Borussia Dortmund - taken a different tack to other teams and so has become a preferred destination for the world's best talent, despite being an unglamorous location in an industrial part of Germany