The five Ps of better creative management

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How do you improve your creative process? Make lots of mistakes and create a bunch of problems.

Whether you're right at the beginning of your creative career or experienced as heck, I hope there's something for everyone to learn here. We'll go through the philosophy of creative management, identify the key stages in creative ideation, setting a clear process, helping your team get the best from themselves and finally, principles that can guide you. There's actionable takeaways and simple tips throughout.

What guiding principle underpins the successful delivery of better creative? Quite simply it's a combination of time, mistakes and problems. A successful creative team needs a clear problem to solve and the time to make lots of mistakes when doing so.

An effective creative leader will create this dedicated time and space (physical or online) to generate ideas. Along with the time needed to generate lots of ideas, the team needs to feel comfortable ditching ideas too. Ideas that aren't used are not failures or wasted. They inform decision making. They are useful directional dead ends on the dungeon quest to find the creative gold.

It's often a costly mistake to fixate on getting to the 'right' idea quickly. This can lead to problems later in development. So, take time, have lots of ideas and ditch more ideas than you save.

How long do you need? Well, depends on what you've got. It could be ten minutes to think quietly about how to solve a simple problem without knee-jerking a solution. Or it could be weeks and months to work with a team to develop concepts over multiple sessions.

Identifying how much time and space you need depends on