"I return to that line often, not because I'm nostalgic about youth (heaven forbid, I've only just turned 21...), but because it captures something we rarely acknowledge in the creative industries: the longer you do this work, the harder it becomes to stay playful. Not less capable. Not less skilled. Just less willing to take risks that can't be neatly explained or easily defended."
"Budgets grow. Reputations harden. Stakeholders multiply. And ultimately decisions carry more weight. Suddenly, in that environment, "what worked last time" doesn't sound conservative - it sounds responsible. Data-backed design promises certainty. Optimisation replaces exploration. And risk is quietly reframed as recklessness. Experimentation doesn't die dramatically, it gets politely edited out. Somewhere along the way, "evidence-based" began to mean "already validated"."
Longer careers and institutional maturity reduce the tolerance for undefendable creative risk, making playfulness harder to sustain. As agencies and brands grow, budgets, reputations and stakeholders increase the weight of decisions and prize responsibility over novelty. Data-backed design and optimisation promise certainty and displace exploration, reframing risk as recklessness. Experimentation becomes gradually edited out as ideas are expected to arrive pre-validated, with heavier decks and elaborate rationales. The insistence on proof burdens genuinely new concepts and makes justifying experimentation increasingly difficult, especially where more money is at stake.
Read at Itsnicethat
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