Ep 91 Career: The critical difference between design vs. creativity

In this insightful episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates unpacks the critical differences between design and creativity—two terms often used interchangeably but with distinct meanings that can greatly impact your career, team, and influence within your company. Stephen dives into how design and creativity are commonly misunderstood, why defining each is essential, and how recognizing these differences can elevate your work and drive meaningful results. Tune in to learn how to apply this knowledge to advance your career, empower your team, and maximize your impact.

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Transcript

Stephen Gates : 0:00

What's going on everybody, and welcome into the 91st episode of the crazy one podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about how to help you be more creative, become a better leader, create more innovative work, create a stronger career, and a whole lot more. Now, as always, be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform to get the latest episodes whenever they come out. And while you're there, take just a couple seconds and leave a review of the show. And as always, you can listen to all the shows, get the show notes, see my essential list of creative tools and even get some crazy one propaganda you all you have to do is just head over to the crazy one.com that's the crazy and the number one.com. And you know what, if you got some questions, you want to just keep up with my adventures or just kind of get more content like this. Be sure to follow me on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. Now, I mean, doing the show sort of interesting, I think especially doing it over what 91 episodes now. It's crazy. The numbers getting that big. But you know, I know not everybody listens to every show. Not everybody You can make it out to every one of my talks. And so there's some times whenever I pull out a theme, maybe I've mentioned it before, maybe we've hit on an episode in the past. But I just feel like it's something that's so important that I just want to take a minute to be able to really focus on it to give it the attention it deserves. And that's what I want to do with this show. And I want to revisit and sort of focus on something that I talked about, like I said, I've talked about this concept in other episodes, but it is a problem that is so big and so foundational, then I want to come back and sort of give it its own episode. And I want to do this because I see the problem, honestly, on probably almost every design team I work with. And I think that's sort of a misconception. A lot of people have that like oh, well, only small teams are only kind of immature teams have problems. That is not the case at all. I mean, you've heard me say in the past, every company is dysfunctional. And that's true. And that's true in this case as well because this isn't a problem. This is limited to small companies, right? Like, again, you know, I've taught at a few small places that struggle with this issue as well, like, you know, I don't know, Amazon, Google, Apple, IDEO, like many, many more of these, right? Because I just think, you know, anytime we're going to put creativity in a corporate or a company environment, we're just going to have some basic things that we're going to struggle with. And I think that, you know, it's this understanding of this sort of really basic concept that has a huge impact on driving the value, the growth, the investment in your career, and on the team, you're either a part of or maybe leading, and that is understanding the simple difference between design and creativity. Now, if you're listening to the show, and you think to yourself, hey, look, I'm not a designer, right, like so I also want to be clear from the top that whenever I use the word design, I'm using that word as a stand in for honestly, any sort Creative execution. That could be design writing, coding, painting, sculpting anything, right? Like it's just anytime you do anything that is sort of creative execution. For the purpose of the show, we're gonna have the word design stand in for that. So in this episode, I want to look at how these two things are often confused and misunderstood with other things. start to understand the basics of just kind of why are these two things different? And then get into this, the couple really, really key places where the difference between these two makes a huge difference. So that's what we're talking about today. And I think you know, what, I'm also perfectly well aware as the year is drawing down to an end, it's the end of December, The holidays are almost upon us, you know, and I thought maybe doing a show that's over on the shorter side doing everybody has so much else going on might not be the worst idea. But you don't let's get into it because, you know, like as I've worked to lead my own teams have watched so many other teams over kind of the past 18 months, at my time at envision, you start to see some really interesting things. And I started to notice this back on my own team, as I move from company to company, or you sort of move between different teams, and I definitely have seen an explosion of it. Again, as I've started to just travel the world working with so many different companies and so many different teams. And what that is, is why is it that you can take two teams at two different companies who have similar If not, maybe identical tools, processes, methodologies, they're hiring a similar hiring process. So and the thing is, is that so much as the same, yet one of those teams would be respected and empowered and would be almost sort of revered in their company. While the other one would this be sort of this overlooked, frustrated team who can't seem to break through Can't seem to have an impact. They're just told what to do. And I think seeing this sort of thing, and like I said, even sort of seeing it and needing to do that sort of transformation on my own teams really got me thinking, you know, I don't know what, a couple years ago, because I just wanted to understand what was going on, right? Because I and again, I think that for so many of us, we tend to get very caught up in those things I was talking about, right? Like somehow tools make the difference or processes or methodologies are going to make the difference. And I think hopefully you've seen as a theme through this show, that I think a lot of the things that really make a difference, aren't those things right? Like Yes, they are important, but bigger things like trust and understanding your value and building your brand. Those are the things that make the much bigger difference in a much bigger impact. And I think like you said, whenever you see that so much was the same get the results were so wildly different. I just I knew that it had to be something that under the surface, right, like it was something that wasn't obvious. And something that we didn't see or understand yet, but it was sort of right in front of all of us. And one of the other things I started noticing was that a lot of the companies, a lot of the leadership's a lot of the teams started to use very similar terms. But if you really listened to what they say, you would start to understand that a lot of those terms didn't really describe what they were looking for. And I think I would argue in a lot of cases, it actually caused way more confusion. Because what you would hear people talk about was how they wanted design or collaboration, teamwork, brainstorming, they wanted to be more agile, or they wanted to be more innovative, right. But in many cases, it wasn't necessarily just about collaboration or teamwork. It wasn't about running a brainstorm. It wasn't about being more agile or more innovative, right? Because I think what you start to realize is that most people in most teams have no idea what it was they really needed. And man, if and whenever that happens, isn't that always the root of the whole problem. And what I realized was that what they were trying to talk about was often two different things. And that's the title of this show. It was the difference between design and creativity. And it's how we define and understand those terms. That makes all the difference. And I know a lot of people out there are gonna argue that they're the same thing. And like I said, That for me is the root of the problem, because for me, they can't be more different. I've talked about this a ton for years in my talks, and it's one of the starting points I use in doing like any transformation work or the coaching work that I do, and there's a reason for that. So what I want to talk about is how I think these two things are different because I see the concepts in the terms get confused and misused. All the time. And I think let's start just by thinking about this in the most basic way. And the way that I always look at this is that creativity is problem solving. If you look at to What does design thinking, what do design sprints? What What do these methodologies bring to the table, what they bring is creativity. But they do it in a way because creativity is such a nebulous thing, right? It's almost feels like Voodoo, or mysticism or something like that, like, be creative. It's like telling somebody to be funny or something, right? Like, it just doesn't. It's not that readily available to most people. But what those methodologies do is that they give shape and form they let you put it into a process where people can be creative without, I don't know what just that you know, the joke I always make about kind of like sitting off in the corner, wearing a braid, doing a watercolor of your spirit animal kind of thing. But it's thinking, that's what creativity is, right? It's problem solving. It's going back and connecting with your consumers. It's like it is Just the ability to create. And then design design is the visual expression of that idea. Right? It is that it is the executional part of that. And one of the best quotes I ever heard was that great design is a visual expression of great thinking. And that's sort of what crystallizes for me the difference between these two, because the great thinking is creativity. And I think that the challenge that you have here is, as you look at those two things, one of them is super important, and one of them is sort of inaccessible and really hard. And, and so I think it like if we want to, if we want to think about this, and why is this important, right? Like why should you care about this? Because whenever it comes to your career whenever it comes to your team, creativity, I will argue, is what will find you long term and large scale success. Most of the people that I see And here's the challenge, right is that for most of us, you need to start your career on the executional side, right? Because that's, most of the time it takes us a while to learn our creative process, it takes us a while to understand who we are, it takes us a while to find the confidence in who that person is. So that's that switch that you need to make is that most of us are going to start on the design side on the executional side, right, because you need to learn your tools you need to learn your craft. But there comes a moment Not long after that, where you need to pivot to make it about thinking and ideation because that's where the value is going to be. That's where the long term success is going to be. And again, that doesn't have to just be in leadership. It can be as an individual contributor, it can be at any sort of level. But the other reason why this is important, is because if you want to start to have more of an influence as you go on in your career, creativity is the thing that you can bring. Creativity is the thing that you can give to other people create creativity is what you can use to change our country. Putting your team yourself or things like that. Now, the good news about that is that everybody is creative. They just forgot the best way I would tell you to do this. And if you ever have a chance to do this, if you have kids, like, you know, take the time to either think back or just spend a couple minutes in just around a bunch of kids. And like, especially like you go to like a kindergarten class. And you'll watch the teacher ask who's a painter, who's a singer, who's a superhero? Who's, who are all these different things, and all the kids will answer yes to all of them. Because in that state in childhood, tends to be the most pure when it comes to creativity. And what happens is then over our lives, because of our educational system, our society, our jobs, everything else like that. That sort of creativity is taken away and replaced with certainty. It's replaced with structure, it's replaced with that sort of outcome because creativity is uncertain and as you get older, and certainty is not something that people like. But the good news is like I said, Everyone is crazy. creative and our power often. And I see this in that way as a leader, as a part of a team, as a part of anything, right? Like your power is your ability to bring that creativity and to basically be one of the kids that survived the ability to bring that to everybody else. And I think that's the sort of thing, right, because if you think about your value, just being designed design is a very specialized craft that very few people can do. So whether you're a designer or a writer, or a painter, or a sculptor, there's some technical execution that you're specialized in, that, again, will intimidate a lot of other people. And so that's why often you you tend to find people who cannot participate in it, and when they can participate in it, they tend to diminish it and to belittle it and to make it smaller and simpler. And that that's why in many cases, it often doesn't have value. But I think that's, that's one of the things that I've tried to do, right, like I've always tried to base the value of my career, the value of myself of what I bring to a project or team or company in creativity. Because I always think that it's my idea, my ability to have an idea, my ability to inspire people, my idea, my ability to think differently, that's gonna set me apart from everybody else. Because that's the thing, if you think about at the end of the day, can talk about this as we went through sort of job interviewing and those episodes, the world is full of people that can make pretty pictures and write pretty words and do a lot of those sorts of things. It's the intent, it's the perspective, it's the the things that you bring, that inform how you do that, that make you different, the execution alone is not enough. And I think that the same thing, though, sort of holds true that when you think about the approach for these things, the approach needs to be different. Because if you think about it for your team, or for yourself, if the real value and what we want to strive for, is to be creative. And again, this is why I've done these episodes on like the rules for brainstorming and like I've spent so much time on this because I really think it's valuable. But the problem is, like I said, is that creativity is unique to everybody, which means there's not going to be a one size fits all. Sort of magic bullet solution, any of this? And that whenever that happens, people tend to struggle because people like processes and things that are easy, right? Well, we like a box to be able to check and say we did this. This is how you do it. Creativity isn't that simple, right? It's just, it's more amorphous. Because there again, there's not a right answer to any of this stuff. And I think that's why for me is you think about how do you engage in creativity? How do you bring it to other people? How do you bring it to your team, your company, things like that. You need to almost think about this more as a social movement to empower people. And I think, you know, the funny thing that I've done in the past is like, one of the ways that I was able to scale the impact of design was to never use the word design. That you know, I would talk about it as a discovery mindset. I would talk about it as creativity, I would talk about it as, as words that people would keep an open mind to because in many cases, whenever you talk to people about how you want to elevate the impact of design, you want to elevate you know what that Is the immediately form a thought rightly immediately form a judgment about what it is you're trying to do. And in many cases that shuts them off, because they hear that word. And they think you mean the executional part of design. And that's the thing is like most of the time to be able to actually change people, you need to do it in a way that sometimes isn't obvious. And that's what I said is I think when you think about creativity, if you think about it more like a social movement, if you think about it about inspiration, if you think about it, about energy, and about the ability of what you would do to to create a social movement, that that sort of inclusiveness, that sort of passion, again, the ability to give it structure and a voice and those sorts of things. That's often what's necessary to be able to scale creativity. If you look at the really good companies that have great, really strong creative cultures. That's what it is that they do is whenever you talk to the people, they're not hiring people that are that much smarter than everybody else. What they're doing is they're getting those people to be really bought into that mission. They're getting them bought in and empowered to be Creative. And that that makes a huge difference. And I think in many cases, that's where a lot of people will go wrong. Because if you base, your value and your career just solely in the ability to execute on something, those are the things that can be endlessly debated, and they can be reduced because it's just about the execution of it. And the harder part of that is it also I will argue that most companies that I work with probably almost damn near all of them. They don't value the execution, right, because they see it as a commodity. And I've talked about that again in the past. And I think that's the reason why all this matters so much, is because how you position yourself and how you position your team makes all the difference. Most you don't, not most, um, pretty much every team that I see that is struggling, that is frustrated. And you know, so many people who also get to that point in their career where they say, look, I am not happy. I don't know why I'm not progressing. I don't know why I can't get to that next tier in my career. Again, most of the time if you track it back This foundational issue is so often what it comes back to. Because that's the thing is that creativity and your ability to problem solve and your ability to bring a new perspective and your ability to do all those things. Every company, every team, every leader, every client, every whatever it is, is always going to want that, right? Because that that is something that is never going to go out of style, it is something that's never going to fade. And again, I think that's why I've tried to base my career in that because what I know is that taste change, tools change, technology changes, what clients want changes. All these things are in flux. And the problem is if you think back about it, whenever you base your career just an execution maybe it's about knowing a tool really well maybe it's about knowing a language maybe it's about doing some specific executional thing really well. Every one of those things has a countdown clock on it because there's going to be a time whenever the next thing comes whenever that fades whenever, again, like that's why I will sort of talk about it. mean how if you think back, like how many of us, myself included, invested in sort of thinking that like flash was a career, right like, and that was the problem is it went from being a futurist flash to Macromedia Flash to Adobe Flash to a dead end career. Because with one keynote, whenever Steve Jobs put up that screen that had the little broken, broken blue puzzle piece on there, where a flash plug in should have been, the technology immediately started to fade, right. And so that in that moment, all those people that I knew and like I said, myself included, who invested in learning ActionScript, who invested in all those things, suddenly was obsolete. And that now that skill didn't count for what it should. And you went from being very successful to being completely out in the cold in a very, very short span of time. And so again, there's a lesson to be learned there, that if you're basing your value solely on execution, and again, I'll see this in a lot of cases for sometimes for people who would just sort of do whatever anybody wants, right like your your the value to your company is your ability to be nice. Your ability to do whenever anybody asks, while that may get you spoken of, well, it rarely gets you promoted. It rarely gets you a raise, it rarely gets you to move on in your career, because again, you're viewed as a commodity. And it's, it's, I've talked about this in past episodes, right? Being the hard worker, being the one who invest in these things, being the one who is there for the team of the company to do the hard things that nobody else wants to do, should count for more. I, Lord knows, I wish it did. But like I said, is at the end of the day, you know, your boss in your company and everybody else, just the harsh truth, are either looking at you as a critical critical asset or commodity. And the critical assets are the ones who get promoted. The critical assets are the ones who get empowered. The critical assets are the ones who continue to grow in their career, while the commodities hit that ceiling, and they're the ones who get frustrated and they can't figure out why can't I grow in my career. And like I said, so much of this comes back to this basic value proposition because this is the foundation that you build your brand upon. This is the foundation you build your career upon. This is The value proposition. So again, just just very recently, as we talked about why you're not getting promoted. Again, these are those sorts of things about the way that you think about your brand, the way that you position yourself make such a huge difference. But like I said, that's the thing is that creativity is never gonna go out of style. Creativity is never gonna work. Whenever you have to get to a place where people are like, gee, I wish we could be less creative. And so because of that, that's the place to invest the time and money but here again, this is then the trap. Because as we know, as you get into your creative process, now here come all the insecurities and the design, imposter syndrome and all this other stuff, because now what you're doing is more freeform, right, what you're doing can be judged what you're doing is more based on your opinion, and a lot of things like that where the executional piece, again, is much more process driven. Again, it is much easier to feel comforted by that side of it. Whereas again, then the creativity is more about risk taking and more about doing things like that. And that's why it's That is, you know, understand that as you go through that the mindset sets in because your career will start on the execution side, that's where everybody's always does. You start by learning to draw, you start by learning a program, you start by just learning to build. But the thing that I'll always argue is that what you need to do is to know the tools know what it is you're doing, to the point and when it becomes transparent. Because that's always been the thing for me is that all of this technology, all these tools, all this, I don't know what ever increasing world of technology that we have to deal with. I've never lost sight of the fact that at the end of the day, these things are no different than a pencil that I can take the latest app, I can take the latest social media network, I can take any of this stuff, right. And at the end of the day, if you don't have something to communicate, if you don't have something to write down, that's going to matter if you don't be able to create something that's going to connect with people, right? Doesn't matter. And I think That's been the true like nature of all sorts of creativity, communication, dating, probably as long as man has been around. And so I think, you know, we can get very caught up in the glitz and glamour and the execution of that sort of side, right. But at the end of the day, like I said, the execution side of it is no different than a pencil. That it's what the pencil produces. It's about the person who holds it's about the mark that they make. That's what makes the difference. That's what has value, right? Because a pencil costs, what 10 cents, you know, if the right person holds it, and the marks that they make, it can be worth millions of dollars. So again, the pencil is not what has the value. It is the person that holds it, their creativity and the output they make that has the value. And I think that's the kind of the the moral of the story, right? Is that your career and you need to evolve to creativity if you want long term success, base your career around the ability to have ideas, based around the ability to solve problems, to be To connect with other people to bring creativity to other people to help them rediscover that part of them that maybe they forgot, right? Like to come back to that childlike wonder. And yeah, know that they're gonna be afraid and maybe a little insecure because they haven't done it and so long, but it's in there. But like I said it is if you step back and think about that, think about it for you and your career. Think about it for your team or your company, or different things like that, to always look at it through that lens of are we building these sorts of tools? Are we building these sort of things, that's gonna be based in creativity. But it's also to think about, like I said, the words that you use and understand for so many conversations when you need to pull these two concepts apart, because I see them get confused. So often, I see people not understand the difference in them where they can be wanting creativity, but they use the word design, or they're gonna, like I said, they're gonna use the word collaboration or teamwork or agile or like all these sort of things, and we confuse the issue. So I think also your ability to bring clarity to this discussion to No and identify and again, be deliberate in the way that you work about what are the moments when we need to be creative. And then what are the moments whenever we need to design and execute, because again, so many problems are born out of when those signals get crossed. Because of that, because again, there is nothing worse when you're trying to be creative than when somebody's trying to be executional. Then also when you're trying to just execute something to get it done, when people keep coming in with new ideas that drives you crazy. So again, the confusion of that the blurring of that line creates such a huge problem. But like I said, just take a minute and think about how you use these words. Think about how you think about these words. And like I said, understand how this is going to generate such foundational value. If you're able to think about them the right way and build them into your life and your team the right way. Because that's why I said is that for so many people, the reason why you're struggling is because if you're making yourself into a commodity, then that's where your frustration is going to come from. So, hopefully as always you like the show. If you want to find out more about the podcast, get some related articles get the show notes for this show. So again, I always put sort of really extensive show notes into the site, you can always just head over to the crazy one calm the crazy, the number one com couldn't afford the crazy one with the word because they wanted like, five grand or something and on the shows free, so I love you guys, but there are limits. Anyway. Look, subscribe to the podcast. So you get the latest episodes whenever those come out, as always, and I asked everybody all the time, and I'm always so blown away by what some of them are. leave a review, always super appreciate it. Like follow me on social media, you can always like the page on Facebook. Just go to the crazy one. On Facebook, you can like the show there. Like I said, you can follow me on Twitter, on Instagram on LinkedIn. Try to post there as much as I can. Some a little more work some was more personal. As always, everybody down and legal wants me to remind you that the views here are just my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. These are just my own thoughts. And finally I say it every time because I mean it every time Thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real commodity that any of us have was incredibly humbled. You want to spend any of it listening to me. So look, think about creativity and design differently. Understand how to base your value understand how this was going to make you a incredibly kick ass success. And that it's going to get you past that hurdle that maybe has been in front of you. You can't figure out why you can't get over. And all the while is you do it. Hey, stay crazy.