Web Business by Ken Burbary

A modest proposal: Before a project starts, the creative team needs to go into a room—their literal Black Box—and close the door. They need to write these four questions up on a whiteboard and then do some soul-searching. If “no” is the answer to any, they should put the brakes on, and everyone—the account team, the client, and project management—should head back to the drawing board. Here are those scary questions:

1. Are we aiming high enough? What is truly new-to-the-world about what we’re doing? Is the thing we’re about to advertise or design truly meeting a customer’s unmet need, or are we just designing an “also-ran” or putting lipstick on a pig?

2. Are the right people in the game? Is our concepting team genuinely multidisciplinary? Does it include profound input from industry experts, brand strategists, consumer insight specialists, technology wizards, information architects, and copywriters?
3. Are we willing to fail—quickly? Are we prepared to be wrong a few times before we are right? To be really, really uncomfortable? Are we willing to throw out our tried-and-true process and all of our favorite creative tricks—even though they work—in order to create a real breakthrough?

4. Is there a story here? Are we designing a page or an experience? What is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the brand story we are creating? Does it move—and are people moved by it?

Creative people will always represent something of a Black Box within their agency or for their clients, because anagement is overwhelmingly left-brained, analytical, and linear in its approach to problems. And creatives are, well, the opposite. This is not a bad thing, but it goes a long way toward explaining some of the blank stares that both sides give one another when they are talking to each other. The point—now more than ever before—is not that creatives have to be more assimilated, or learn how to use a spreadsheet, or care less about perfection. It’s just that it might be time to put some new furniture in the Black Box and then invite people to come inside for a visit.

Clipped from From Avenue A / Razorfish, Digital Outlook Report 2008 (Download full report here)