Creative transformation plans don’t work like other transformation plans because creativity isn’t taught – it’s liberated. Unlike technical skills that require training, we were born creative. So, organizations sit upon a treasure chest, but struggle to pick the lock. Zach Duenow, founder of MUZE, shares two stories from his experience liberating creativity from within big food and big pharma.
Introduction
Stick with me for a few paragraphs; I promise it’s a worthy digression pertinent to strategy.
Jung saw something that Freud missed. Jung would have been a better strategist. He knew at some deep level that unlocking our full power meant bringing our masculine and feminine drives into harmony. Freud failed to see through the veil of gender conditioning.
The focus of this article is on one of Jung’s lesser-known theories – the theory of anima and animus – and how it serves as a helpful model to unleash our full power as strategists.
Volumes could be written about the theory, but in the spirit of gross reduction, the essence is simply this:
men need to get in touch with their feminine traits
women need to get in touch with their masculine traits
NOTE: Apologies to the academics who are choking on how base this sounds
Jung believed that everyone had within them a harmonious self, but cultural conditioning created discordance. Boys are told not to cry. Girls are told not to yell. We are born into harmony but learn discordance.
He began working with patients to employ a process called individuation which involved merging these aspects of the personality to foster serenity and clarity. For simplicity’s sake, let’s use the below ‘traits’ as shorthand – the left side is anima, the right side is animus:
Important to note that the above ‘traits’ have nothing to do with sexual anatomy; both sexes contain both traits – and this is precisely the point of the theory. Where this becomes more relevant to our work as strategists is when we use this lens to review the last century of prevailing strategic ‘aesthetic’.
A brief history of strategy
If we use the traits of anima and animus to recollect a brief history of strategy, we begin to see an oscillating pattern that offers a legend for where we are now, and how we can work to unlock the full potential of strategy. Worth noting that this exercise is subjective (and no doubt distorted to selfishly support my pet hunches). Here we go:
Yes. Trust your gut. There’s gaping holes and leaps in logic in this analysis. But for the sake of poetry not precision, let’s allow a little anima and suspend skepticism in favor of storyline.
Where we are now
Last year WARC published a piece called “Strategy is constipated. Imagination is the laxative” by a trio of wise planners (Rob Campbell, Paula Bloodworth and Martin Weigel). The title of the piece you’re reading now is a nod to this sentiment (continuing the tradition of potty-humor), and an assertion that strategy needs more than just a laxative – it needs an anima.
Years back, the inimitable Rory Sutherland foreshadowed this with a great headline:
“Lately I feel like someone who was going to a poetry workshop
only to discover I’d ended up at a book binding conference.”
He well knows the danger of our inner-animus and its tendency to trade ‘growth’ for ‘more’.
Binet and Field similarly foresaw this era by highlighting the necessary balance of long and short. Mark Ritson calls this ‘bothism’. Orlando Wood has been shouting about this imbalance for years in texts like Lemon. More than auditing the pundits, as you scroll through chat rooms and LinkedIn feeds, there’s ample sentiment of an imbalance in strategy.
From an archetypal perspective it feels like a tug-of-war between:
The industry is pushing strategists to act like the wiseman and supply ‘data-driven-delusions-of-certainty’ in an uncertain world. But many strategists see the folly in this and make a case that strategy should be summoned as a muse that supplies enthusiasm, energy, and ideas that stoke the marketplace. Both sides are right. Capitalism requires delusion and enthusiasm in equal parts.
This piece clearly advocates for a balance of both, but anecdotally it doesn’t feel like we’re in balance. Maybe, maybe not. But rather than fuss about some abstract, moot cultural claim, the key question likely isn’t are we out of balance. The key question for you is: am I out of balance?
Regaining balance: A personal anecdote
For years I was out of anima/animus balance personally and professionally. As an executive, my ignorance metastasized into manic hubris, and mid-career I became more showman than strategist – I cheated the brands I worked on during those years. Suffering, rigorous honesty, then humility, finally brought me back into harmony. All of it was predicated on sobriety and recovery. I’m finally a decent strategist (but still a ham).
As a young planner, I tried to posture as having anima/animus balance in professional circles, but I had what Jung would have called “anima possession” – I’m sure I reeked of it. I was seduced by the brand-building narrative and ignorant (even dismissive) about commercial rudiments.
This undisciplined disposition worked in agency circles but was an embarrassing deficit when I was asked to join Kraft in 2009. The assignment was to build client-side planning and help the organization revive its brand-building legacy. At first, I tried to double down on my smarty-pants-planner-persona, but it didn’t work – in fact, it was damaging.
I was doubling down on anima in an ocean of animus. I pulled left; they pulled right. I was scaring them; they were scaring me. I was out of balance; they were out of balance. Our fledgling planning team fumbled at first serving up a strategic smorgasbord of boxes, pyramids, circles, and pillars. Then I realized the magic wasn’t in the process, it was in our presence.
We weren’t supposed to push strategies onto teams, we were supposed to pull strategies out of teams. We had to unpack the intuition of planning and facilitate teams through it. For the strategy to work, they had to work it. However, the real discovery wasn’t just a need for facilitation, but an awakening to a new kind of facilitation – more muse less wiseman.
Creating space for creating
My father was a high school art teacher for 35 years and was decorated as Illinois Art Educator of the Year when he retired. He still receives letters from old students thanking him for connecting them with their creative self. His legacy was simply his presence. His anima/animus balance held the space for young men and women to set aside their conditioning and rediscover their imagination. His classroom was on the first floor of New Trier High School – but it was on another planet in terms of the psychic atmosphere.
This was our business at Kraft; this was our job to be done – creating the conditions where anima and animus could come into balance so that creative excellence could emerge. We weren’t the rebalancers; we were merely the ones who created the safe space where rebalancing could happen. And we learned a lesson worthy of being shouted from the rooftops:
Executives will rarely admit vulnerability; they’re masters at masking their insecurities behind a filigree of intellect and cleverness. But beneath, they’re often scared. Mortgage, children, failure, layoffs are very real antagonists in their lives. The problem wasn’t that they weren’t creative, the problem was that they “won’t creative”.
Once we realized this, we shifted our demeanor, our models, and our timelines. This wasn’t just a transformation plan; this was organizational metamorphosis. We would need to build ‘creativity cocoons’ one team at a time so everyone felt safe enough to grow wings. We’d also need to secure cultural cues from leadership (air cover) that it was safe.
We had to dispense with canned classrooms and constrained capability-building models – they just don’t work. We had to travel relentlessly and could only work with a couple of teams at a time. And we had to do it. This was intimate and personal – no RFP, no consultants, no train the trainer, no workshop-in-a-box, no easy solutions. We met as people and worked as equals until 1-by-1 we built a culture that believed:
1) We are inherently creative
2) We are unique in how we are creative
3) We are incented to bring our unique creativity to work
Humility, patience, and humor put Kraft back in touch with its anima and unlocked their creative pursuit. I reprised this work for years at GSK and found the same thing – but leveraged a ukulele with more aplomb.
The results were our reward.
During our tenure at Kraft the company experienced a notable increase in industry recognition for creative achievements, including multiple gold Effies, a series of Gold Lions, and a Grand Prix at Cannes. After years of stagnation, Oreo claimed the Grand Prix and a gold Effie along with lasting double-digit growth and significant audience expansion.
GSK/Haleon showed a significant increase in creative recognition after 2018 with multiple wins every year at both the Effies and Cannes Lions. The stock continues to outperform expectations.
Both big food and big pharma shifted just a bit and awakened to a more harmonious approach to marketing with equal parts anima and animus. This metamorphosis not only delivered commercial value but cultivated enduring personal and professional growth within the marketing disciplines that can still be seen flourishing today.
Three lessons
My favorite book in this space is Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. But it’s the subheading that hints at the way forward: overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration.
As I work with clients to cultivate creative transformation, my focus is often on these ‘unseen forces’ – and many times there is indeed some inner anima rebalancing that needs to happen. Of course, I don’t call it that, nor do I evoke pop-psychology or woo-woo spirituality in the board room – when you’re working with invisible forces, it’s best to use invisible tools.
Here’s three invisible unlocks that have been hard-learned:
When you get it right, the result is a trojan horse of transformation – you offer the small gift of support with brand strategy (the horse), but you facilitate in a way that unleashes an army of anima (the Trojans) to counterbalance the animus.
Not only do teams build more meaningful and distinctive brands, but they develop intimate command over the strategy, and a new vocabulary for creative. This yields better briefs, less creative churn, effective work, more cogent pipelines, and most importantly, more engaged ‘human capital’ that grows to become ‘creative capital’ – each worth at least 2x to the business.
You get a transformed brand, a transformed team, and over time a transformed culture. You get marketers that are equipped to make marketing that matters in a culture undergoing an undeniable rise of the right brain and christening of the creative class.
Bon Voyage!
Gratitude
I owe this article to all the women who (patiently) helped balance my anima/animus over the years:
Dana Anderson, Paula Ausick, Elizabeth Harris, Wibke Fleischer, Kay Allison, Pamela Narins, Debra Berman, Chris Faldetta, Eliza Esquivel, April Starr, Jill Baskin, Tamara Rogers, Meredith Herman, Ellen Ratchye-Foster, Marie Chan, and of course Dorothea Emery, Min Dahn, Mary McIntosh, Eliza Duenow, and Ami Saraiya.
