UBA032 - Reigniting the Chaos
And reclaiming your soul.
In the constant challenges of organisational growth, we can sometimes find ourselves successful on paper but not in the founders hearts. For all of the organisational architecture, processes, systems, risk management it can feel like something magical has been lost. For organisations that rely on creativity for success this can be a death warrant. Those of us that have been around for a long time know full well that the moment we feel ‘safe’, it could all come crumbling down.
While these introspective moments can feel daunting, and be loaded with guilt or ‘what if’ contemplations, they can be vital milestones in organisational evolution, a rite of passage even. At Rosie Lee, we have been on this exact journey - from intuitive creativity to administrative efficiency and then to integrated wisdom. We’re not done by any means and will likely shed our skin multiple times before we call it a day but for now we feel like we’ve made it through one of the toughest phases of our own evolution.
I am keen to share my take on this pattern along with some of our own history. If you find yourself in this position, it might not reduce your workload but maybe it will reduce your stress knowing that it isn’t just you, that you didn’t make a ‘bad decision’. It may just be that we do need to go through this ‘middle’ stage to come out the other side stronger.
In the beginning
At its inception, Rosie Lee captured the essence of intuitive creativity. We went through multiple portfolio and website designs that deliberately tried to confuse those who we might not work well with. One iteration of our website had stickers randomly appear over the text the user was trying to read. We used graffiti of our logo and fly posted around Shoreditch in the early 2000s, and with such a small rebellious team nothing was off limits.
Our work and culture followed suit, with monsters made out of shoeboxes, photoshopped images of Charles Bronson helping to communicate our creative concepts and a Wayne Rooney standee was once accidentally shot with a crossbow.
In this stage we embraced spontaneity, daring to defy conventions and challenge norms. Our intuitive instincts served as the guiding force, propelling us forward with no real plan except to do good work for good people and have a good time doing it.
As we gained recognition for our bold approach, the studio attracted a diverse range of clients seeking fresh perspectives and innovative solutions. The team's intuitive understanding of trends and audiences allowed us to craft campaigns with ease that were loaded with emotion.
Intuitive creativity
Most companies start with some of the same energy that we did. Nothing has been built, there aren’t 40 employees to pay salaries for every month and it's a load of fun. There is far more to lose by playing it straight than by bringing the chaos and making it up as you go along.
Maybe some people reading this are in that stage, and maybe some are reminiscing about when they were. But all is not lost, this energy can be reclaimed.
One thing to note about this stage is that when we look back at it, it can feel somewhat romantic. We can forget the days where we had to dodge certain phone calls because our cash flow was poor and we couldn’t afford to pay someone just yet. We all forget that the leaders didn’t get paid in some months, and how we had to work really, really hard just to get some potential clients to speak with us.
Our growth years
In 2012, we made a firm decision that we would make more time to discuss the company’s future and consider topics outside of live projects to enable growth. The next year we developed our first ever company vision. The vision had milestones in 2014, 2017 and 2020 and we were going to take over the world!
What followed was a period of great success for us. Between 2013 and 2016 we opened offices in Frome, Amsterdam and New York and we bought our office space on Kingsland Road. We grew in number, and built out the group architecture, expanded the board and implemented a management team. We were all charged with producing written reports on a monthly basis (all my fault, sorry!) and we were forecasting to understand what our future might look like to plan more.
I’m sure our strategy played a part in our success during those years, but the planets definitely aligned as well, as our revenue grew year-on-year, peaking in around 2016/2017. I can safely say that I don’t believe our portfolio suffered with this growth as it does for some, in fact some of our best work happened during that period.
BUT our culture did suffer. We began seeing different tribes within the company depending on function and we had to get very formal on our approach to staff engagement to try to track what was happening because the size of the company and our geography meant we couldn’t see issues first hand any more.
In the long run, we learned SO much from this period, but that doesn’t mean that we were enjoying every moment, or that the company was satisfying our dreams…
Administrative efficiency
This stage is not uncommon in company growth - business evolution theories I subscribe to would class this as the ‘Survival To Success Stage’, where the skills required to run a successful business completely changes. But the organisation and determination required to keep a larger company going (let alone profitable) averts attention from some of the other crucial, more intangible aspects of a business.
Studios often enter a phase of administrative efficiency, characterised by a focus on operational stability and scalability. Structured processes, systems and software are required to manage and navigate the complex mix of team members, projects and deadlines effectively. While this transition brings newfound stability and financial success, it also presents challenges for the studio's creative ethos.
For a creative company it can be hard to retain culture and quality of work. Paying staff salary every month becomes a challenge when cashflow isn’t so good, and so client relations and income become crucial considerations every day. It’s hard to say whether they should ever supersede the importance of craft or quality of work but it definitely sits up there in the same tier.
This is not my beautiful house
And that’s when it hits you:
“Well how did I get here?
Amidst the focus on the organisation and its evolution, you somehow forgot what it was all for. The on-paper success becomes the measure of success itself. The human experience is not used to sense success like it used to be. The graffiti and fly posting now carries too much risk, and having a photoshopped Charles Bronson in a creative presentation might not be the best choice.
For Rosie Lee we spotted that we needed to bring some of the first stage back around 2019/2020 and we started to move in that direction but then the pandemic hit and we just lunged forward, seeking to integrate the energy from our first phase with our learnings from the second. We accepted that the plan we put in place might not be the best plan we’d ever created but we knew it was the start of bringing some of that old energy back. We recognised that uncertainty reigns whether we like it or not and that our only way forward was to go back to flowing with the universe.
Drawing upon our collective experiences, we sought to transcend the dichotomy between creativity and structure, embracing a holistic approach to organisation design inspired by Frederic Laloux’s Teal Organisation concept and Spiral Dynamics theory.
In our final stage, Rosie Lee Creative embraced a philosophy of collaborative creativity, and have sought to empower everyone who works with us as much as possible, focussing on adaptability and resilience, where new ideas are welcomed and failure is viewed as an opportunity for growth. The studio's projects have become increasingly interdisciplinary, drawing upon diverse perspectives and skill sets to tackle complex challenges. We are embracing future technologies at a faster pace than we have done for many years, and are bringing these benefits to our clients without holding ourselves back.
Spiral learnings
In Spiral Dynamics, there are various stages of evolution all characterised by different worldviews, each believing that it is better than the last. I resonate very strongly with this theory of evolution and recognise some of the patterns in our own organisation.
One of the principles of Spiral Dynamics is that it can be incredibly hard to jump over a stage. We need to become very good at a particular stage to then be able to see the solutions required to propel us into the next stage of evolution.
And so I take a lot from that principle when I think about our own history. The first stage was exciting, but I am absolutely sure there were problems we wanted to solve otherwise we would never have evolved to the second stage. And I firmly believe that we needed to go through the second stage to be able to navigate the third. The second stage gave us so much knowledge, so many tools and ways of thinking so that we can pick and choose which ingredients to use today and which to leave in our back pocket.
In the same way an abstract artist may learn still life first, or a rebellious genius needs to intimately know the very thing they are rebelling against. The second stage is not a mistake, it is a part of the evolution.
It’ll be ok
If you are lucky enough to be looking around at your organisation wondering how you got here, and whether you can reclaim some of that earlier energy you used to have - then know that you can, and you can enjoy that energy more fully than before because of your broader experience.
You’ll need to put the work into re-learning the enjoyment of uncertainty, how to let go and how to flow with the universe but in the end it’ll be ok.
Culture can be reclaimed, you can reignite the chaos and reclaim your soul.
Written by Russell
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