Creating is deciding.

We are lucky to spend most of our working lives making things.

These things we make are mostly strategic ideas and they are largely expressed with words (sometimes accompanied by a little bit of design and some carefully chosen pictures).

Experience has taught us that we’re not bad at this. Clients are pleased with what we do, more often than not, and we work hard at it. When we’re not satisfied with the thinking, we do more, create other versions, look at it from different angles, until we have a whole range of interesting choices and options looking back at us from the screen.

That is the thing that many people might think of when they bring to mind ‘creativity’ – generating ideas, perhaps loads of them. Filling a blank sheet of paper with things that weren’t there before.

But we have some bad news.

That bit is not the creativity.

The options on our pads, or even those that make it to the deck we present to our clients exist only in the minds of a few. These ideas are at best only potentially creative. They are proverbial trees falling in a largely empty forest.

No, the real creative act is the decision that happens next.

Which ideas should go further, be developed, executed, influence the behaviour of hundreds, thousands or millions?

This is an entirely different skillset to the generation of ideas. Any act of creation requires you to expose yourself a little, and say ‘I think these are good’, but the act of saying ‘this is the one’ is a much, much bigger commitment.

This is why we are continually in awe of the great clients we work with.

Those who are able to unerringly commit to a direction and then get everyone to move behind it. Over the years we have realised that this decision and commitment is worth as much, or even more than, the generation of the options in the first place.

Creating options is about developing the potential for creativity. A necessary first step. But the creativity only really happens in the deciding, the moment when the paths are narrowed and everyone moves forward.

It’s a point where we remember that strategy can never be a theoretical or abstract discipline.

Of course it’s about thought at some point, but it’s only really any use when thought turns into action.

The world’s greatest thinkers knew this. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are brilliant philosophers, creators of great thoughts, but they constantly obsessed about action. It doesn’t matter what you think. It only matters what you do.

Paul Feldwick reminds us of this in his excellent recent book “why does the pedlar sing?”. In marketing and advertising, we sometimes spend so long defining “ideas” (that are often just tortured strings of committee-made buzzwords that make very little sense out of context) and forget that the execution of the idea is all that actually exists for people who haven’t read the deck.

Strategy is important.

Creative thinking is important.

Design is important.

But only decisions and delivery can release their creative potential.