ANDREW BRADY
Work
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Periscope
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Creative Colors
Client
My Contribution
As part of an internal initiative, Periscope assembled several task force teams to address certain areas of agency improvement. I volunteered for the group meant to improve our process for internal creative reviews (ICR), which had a tendency to be unproductive or acrimonious — or both.
Reviewing the review process
By the first meeting, everyone else on the committee had quit. So it was pretty much a team of me. Nevertheless, this became a total passion project for me: it combined quite a few of my nerdy obsessions into one concrete opportunity to make a positive impact on our agency culture.
This was the money shot of the deck. The thought was to use Periscope's brand colors to group employees by their creative function (rather than job title or rank). Creative feedback is built on tension and disagreement — but that doesn't mean it needs to be mean-spirited. If we could understand the role that everyone plays in the creative process, we all might be a bit more receptive when individual concerns are raised.
This "color theory" emerged from weeks of scouring research in creativity science, drawing heavily upon the Six Thinking Hats theory of teamwork (which I condensed into five, because the "emotion" hat wasn't super unique to one domain within the agency model).
But it wasn't all abstract theory. One of the initial asks was to deliver an actionable set of best practices for constructive creative reviews. Using the paradigm of People & Partnership I established in the initial slides, I created a matrix of rules for behaving in an ICR. And admittedly, none of them are particularly new or groundbreaking. But having the rules formalized on paper goes a long way.
After I finished the deck, I spent hours presenting it up the management ladder — with a lot of positive reactions. But then, it just...died. I didn't mind too much, since I had just accepted a new job at a new agency. All the same, the project's unceremonious death was still a bit disappointing. And that was the end of it.
Or so I thought.
A few months later, I suddenly got a slew of texts from my remaining Periscope friends. Apparently, the creative leadership had just given a presentation about the future of the agency creative review process:
Look familiar? I thought so too. Thankfully, my excellent friends were bold enough to stand up for me — demanding that leadership give due credit for the lifted idea. So on the next all-agency share call, the speaker gave credit to "the many people who worked on this idea." Better than nothing, I guess.
Holy moly. This is so thoughtful and elegant. We need to implement this — like, yesterday.
Natalie M, Periscope Group Account Director
