Eliminating The Bottleneck In A Creative Journey

The marketing world has changed tremendously in the past few years and with it, the need to create more engaging, personalized, and quality content has risen. Every brand, company, and agency is working to come up with the best ideas and content that will beat their competition and increase their rankings across platforms. Fortunately, with the advanced technology available right at our fingertips, we can easily align our projects and create content that can be accurate and competent without compromising on engagement rates from the audience.

But with the rise of content in terms of quantity, quality, and authenticity, comes the need to create a lot of content in the shortest amount of time available. And so, even with all the solutions available to us, the responsibility still falls on us to do as much as possible with little room to breathe. With this demand comes the possibility of creating a bottleneck in our creative journey. And that bottleneck can negatively affect your work and can cause creativity blocks not just on an individual but on a group level. But what is a creative bottleneck? And how can we eliminate it? I’ve discussed that in this blog.

What is a Creative Bottleneck?

A bottleneck is a situation that delays certain processes from occurring on time. A creative bottleneck refers to when you have a lot of quality content to produce, but you lack the time and capacity to accomplish this goal. And we can see the proof of this lag all across platforms when content quality falls and everyone conforms to age-old concepts rather than introducing unique ideas to beat the competition.

Two different bottlenecks can occur in any organization.

1- Short-Term Bottlenecks

These happen temporarily, e.g. a team member is ill and there are a few tasks only they are skilled at doing, hence the work gets delayed and piled until the member can rejoin and complete it.

2- Long-Term Bottlenecks

These, unlike the short-term version, aren’t as easy to fix. An example would be of a software or marketing agency that has introduced a lot of new projects and clients, and now they are overflowing with work. The result is that the employees end up overburdened with work; while more projects and clients can’t be introduced because the already-existing ones are taking up all the time, which means new ideas don’t get incorporated and the company comes to a halt in terms of creativity.

How to Eliminate Creative Bottlenecks?

1- Optimize Workflow

The first step to optimizing workflow is to ensure the right teams are assigned the right tasks at the proper time. Involve the creative team, including the content and design teams, as early as possible, so they have a good idea about the content they must come up with.

Make them come up with a few creatives beforehand to show to clients when the project kicks off. So it highlights their errors and strengths working for those clients in-time, and it doesn’t put delays in the due date later on. Just take a moment to consider how many people a project needs to go through for it to be approved. Eliminate unnecessary resources and make the creation and approval process as quick as possible.

2- Collect and Provide Proper Research

For creative work to be done according to the needs of your strategy, you first need to make yourself clear on the strategy you need to work on. After you understand this brief your team about it, so they can understand the guidelines and themes they need to discover for the creative process required to make a project successful. This understanding and clarity is vital for your work to turn out as efficient as possible without wasting your time. This efficiency will definitely get your work done on time without creating delays.

3- Introduce The Right Communication Channels

Make use of the vast amount of technology available at your fingertips, introduce new tech and ideas, and ensure your time has the right communication channels to convey their message with ease. There are many apps and platforms available that can align your team’s tasks on different dashboards for them to be easily available and worked upon. Incorporate the use of such apps in your company so that your work doesn’t get lined up and delayed because of confusions in scheduling.

4- Flexibility in Ideas

If your environment is too controlled or too strict, it will affect the motivation levels of your team members as they have to follow a strict set of principles to complete work. That’s not how creativity thrives. And if you need it to thrive, provide flexibility for your team’s ideas to take center stage and get shaped into successful strategies. Every individual is full of unique ways and ideas to get specific kinds of work done, hear them out, try their methods and choose what’s best for all of you on a whole.

Creativity doesn’t go hand-in-hand with rigidity, it needs flexibility to flow, and if you want to avoid delaying your work, you need to provide that flexibility.

Creative bottlenecks are a negative impact on your workflow and overall progress. It can occur for a lot of reasons, varying from leadership skills to the capacity of your resources, etc. The availability of time alone can not fix bottlenecks. The best solution is to have the right set of people, aligned with your team’s goals, ready to work and come up with the most solution-focused strategies which don’t compromise on your quality either.