Stopping at a light and thinking about creative direction.

I was recently driving along and wondering what the subject of my next post would be, when I was reminded of an article I read a few years ago about how the brain develops. (I don't remember the exact article but I do know that it alluded to research by Dr. Harry T. Chugani, about whom there is lots of related information.)

It seems that our brains have these synapses, junctions between various transmitter cells along which all the information that goes toward stimulating ideas must pass. When we are infants, a new one is established with almost every new idea, but after awhile, we begin to run out of room and a way to organize a whole mess of them, so our brain gets very practical. It cuts down on the number of new pathways and develops the ones that get the most traffic. By the time we reach our early teens, our brains have half as many of these connections that we did when were three. Some of them have atrophied and withered away, while the other pathways become important to us.

These are the roads that receive the most traffic, the ones that develop and become most productive, where information stimulates a receptor, the receptor gets excited, and sparks fly – "Eureka! I have a great idea!" Shakespeare had a language superhighway; Beethoven a music

superhighway. Of course not all roads are superhighways. When information travels along the back roads, these neurotransmitter vehicles don't move as quickly, nor can those pathways carry the same load. But on the highways, well, the highways allow for the big 18-wheeler ideas.

For a creative director–for any manager, for that matter–the implications, I think, are pretty clear.

The only way to assume someone is working at full capacity is to make sure she is working on her four-lane highways. If we could direct a creative person down one of those highways, she would have a good chance at flourishing. On the other hand, what if we directed her according to our own tastes, the way we would do it, or according to the creative-award-style du jour? And wouldn't it be tragic if someone got fired without us knowing what that person was really good at or what would have really inspired her?

I've heard of (we've all heard of) creative directors that are like traffic cops. They give the red light to those ideas they dislike and the green light to those they approve. And that's the extent of it, which is to say that the creative director doesn't really direct much creative.

To be an effective creative director, one has to really know a person, know the person so well that you know what her extraordinary talent is and at what she is just so-so. You can't be a great creative director, or be relied upon to provide great creative direction on a regular basis, unless you do. Only then can the creative director apply the right tools of teaching, inspiring, bolstering and setting expectations.

Anyway, that's the gist of it. And off I drove, I believe it was down a two-lane thoroughfare.