One of the nifty tricks you learn when working at Flow is the ability to don different hats when you have to. In a single day you may be called on to wear a creative hat, a corporate hat, a therapist hat, a navigator hat, or a delivery person’s hat.
At Flow School, one aim is to upskill staff so that they are better equipped to cope with the kind of difficulties faced when working in the contemporary communications landscape. Upskilling means that you feel you can confidently wear more, different hats as the need arises.
One of the challenges we are constantly faced with is selling creative work, a task that is often as difficult for creative staff members as for those not directly involved in the creative field. Creativity is often a slippery eel, not easy to pin down and explain, not easy to measure, and usually, incredibly subjective in its interpretation.
Because we invest a great deal of time and effort in the creation of creative work, it is really important that our presentations give credence to this and persuade clients of the merit of the proposal. The Flow School session on "Presenting creative" suggested that a way to deal with the slippery eel is not to wear a creative hat, but rather to wear the logical hat; to turn lateral thinking into something definite, believable and useful, as opposed to something vague and elusive.
Presenting creative in a logical and considered way that focuses on how it effectively addresses a client's concerns is the best way to get a proposal accepted, rather than with smoke and mirrors, vague suggestions and allusions. Logic tends to take subjectivity out of the equation.
What this Flow School session attempted to do was give an easy-to-copy template that can work as a starting point or foundation on which diverse presentations can be built. As Flow writer/editor Willem Steenkamp said, "The class gave form to something that I have always known instinctively."
The feedback from the class was very positive; staff feel they are now better equipped to structure presentations and talk more confidently about creative work. Wearing so many different hats is never a problem with Flow staff – what turns them into Flowstars, though, is the willingness and panache with which they pick up a new hat and wear it!
