Once as a child I saw the moon in the morning. It was early. I was on my way to school and there in the silence and soft light, low above the suburban rooftops, hovered a beautiful full moon. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The mysterious sight troubled me all day and, when I returned home, I asked my mother about it. “Mum, how can the sun and moon be out at the same time?” She put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Jimmy, the world is full of wonderful things.”
When we’re young the world is brimming with the strange and surprising, curious and confusing. When we’re young firsts come at us apace: first step, first kiss, first job, first love. We are constantly challenged to rethink our understanding of the universe; to guess and hypothesise; envisage and imagine. This is possibly why many of us are most creative in our youth.
As the years pass, we learn and understand. Things make sense. The frequency of firsts dwindles to a trickle. With middle age we are reduced to surveying ludicrous bucket lists for new thrills. And we begin to experience lasts: my last night of sweaty clubbing; my last ponderous performance on the football pitch; my last egg-and-chips at the New Piccadilly Café; my last conversation with my mother. In mid-life we can lose our sense of wonder.
Inevitably organisations experience their own equivalent of this: institutional ageing. As businesses mature, they become more complex, sophisticated, sensible. They are more absorbed by process and management. They take on more support and technical staff. Their vision and values are anchored in a time that recedes into the distance. They become more engaged with titles and structure than teams and culture; more worried about relationships than ideas; more concerned with conserving what they have than gaining what they have not. They are more conservative.
Inevitably, with time, companies become corporate.
Yet creative businesses in particular must sustain an appetite for innovation and invention; an aptitude for possibility and opportunity. This is what our clients pay for. Creative businesses must retain their youthfulness.
I worked for the communications agency BBH for 24 years. When John Bartle, sage strategist and company founder, left the business in 1999, he encouraged us to “immature with age”. But how do we do this?
In part it’s about employing and empowering young people; sustaining a flow of new perspectives and ideas into the heart of the corporate consciousness.
However, there’s also a need to resist the gravitational pull of institutional ageing. Bartle warned that “the opposite of creativity is cynicism” – that we must combat corrosive scepticism, caustic sarcasm. I’m sure he was right.
As I’ve grown older I’ve noticed an impulse to dismiss the new and original as familiar and derivative. With age and experience we are cursed with the memory of past disappointments, flawed precedents. We’ve seen it, done it, tried it before. We are denied the blind enthusiasms and full-blooded convictions of our adolescence.
But it must be possible to inoculate ourselves against this cynicism.
The excellent 2011 documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, recounts the life and work of the legendary editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Born in Belle Epoque Paris, coming of age in New York in the roaring twenties, Vreeland brought fantasy, vision and invention to her magazines. Throughout her life she was restless, demanding, intensely romantic. She stayed forever young.
The secret of eternal youth for business cannot be mindless carousing in inappropriate party shirts; unseemly expeditions on Harley-Davidsons. It’s more than this. Individually and collectively, we must sustain our sense of wonder.
Just occasionally I still see the moon in the morning and I still marvel at it. Mum was right. “The world is full of wonderful things.” As we grow older we just have to try harder to see them.
To get weekly news analysis, job alerts and event notifications direct to your inbox, sign up free for Media & Tech Network membership.
All Guardian Media & Tech Network content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “Paid for by” – find out more here.