Build your creative capability like a sporting squad: for the season you are actually going to play.
Sporting organisations know how to build squads.
You recruit for the season ahead, balance experience with potential, plan for the inevitable peaks and injuries, and keep enough flexibility to adapt when reality does not follow the original plan.
Creative operations need much the same thinking.
The mistake is to build your creative resource around a typical week and then expect it to cope with the busiest periods of the season.
Sport has fixtures. It has peaks and quieter periods. It has campaigns, launches, commercial deadlines, matchdays and moments that cannot simply be moved because the creative team is busy.
That makes planning important.
The more foresight you have around resource, budget and timing, the more opportunity you have to make sensible decisions before the season becomes congested. Once everything is live, it becomes harder to allocate budget, arrange the right people and fit additional work into an already crowded schedule.
There is also the question of succession.
A sporting squad rarely stays unchanged for two or three seasons. Players develop, move on and need replacing. New talent comes through, while experienced players provide the knowledge and leadership needed to keep the team performing.
Creative teams need the same consideration.
You may need to nurture capability internally, bring in specialist expertise externally or use a mixture of the two. The important thing is to understand what the organisation will need rather than simply what it needs today.
That means looking at creative resource as an asset rather than an overhead.
What capability do you need for the current season?
Where are the likely pressure points?
Which skills need to be available all the time?
Which can be brought in when required?
What happens when a major campaign lands at the same time as a busy match schedule?
And what happens next season?
You cannot predict everything. Sport teaches us that much.
But you can prepare for the things you already know are coming, while keeping enough flexibility to respond to the things you do not.
The more foresight you have, the better your creative operation will perform when the season gets busy.
That is the long game.
Talk to us about planning creative capability around your sporting calendar.
