• by John Immesoete , Op-Ed Contributor, August 5, 2015

A new executive creative director starts at an agency. He or she comes in, examines the physical landscape, and makes an executive decision that is going to “radically change the place and the work.” He or she proposes eliminating all the offices and cubicles, tearing down as many walls as possible and creating an “open work place that will encourage everyone to be creative by engaging in a freer, open exchange of ideas.”

Rookie move. 

It sounds nice on paper and may even photograph nicely and look stunning on the agency web site, but such a move, more often times than not, does not work. It will in fact, more likely encourage the kind of activity that is becoming more commonplace in our increasingly personalized-yet-desensitized world. 

Prepare for the invasion of the “pod people.”

What are pod people? Let’s dial back to the great late-’70’s sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Nebbish radio Farm Reporter Les Nessbaum considered himself worthy of a window office after he won the coveted “Silver Sow Award” for superior farm reporting on the radio. He didn’t get a window office so he created one in his mind. He taped together makeshift “walls” around his desk and wouldn’t acknowledge anyone who spoke to him unless they knocked on his imaginary door first, which he would then open with a dramatic flourish. Unhappy with the distractions of the world around him, Les created his own environment and insisted everyone else live in it. 

Call it radical personalization. Les Nessman may have been the original pod person. He created his own office using tape to avoid intrusions. Today’s cubicle-less, office-less creatives do the same with computers, mobile phones and ear plugs.

Why? First, many creative people are inherently introverted. They relish a certain amount of alone time and need it to conceptualize or simply recharge. External stimulation affects and drains them in a way that requires physical withdrawal. That’s difficult to achieve when you’re sitting shoulder-to-shoulder between two other idea generators.

Second, many creative people are protective of their ideas (or soon learn to be) because, in a “publish or perish” world, the larceny of intellectual capital is not unheard of. The walls have ears. When there are no walls, there is nothing but ears.

Third, and perhaps the most ironic, when there are no walls, people will build their own, not unlike Les Nessman. Creative people are not free-range chickens. A walk through many open-space agencies today will reveal anything but groups of people conversing and sharing dialogue and ideas across big family-style tables. Instead, you’ll see pod people wearing earphones and staring straight ahead at their computers, living in their own radically personalized worlds.

This is not a free-thinking creative Valhalla. This is a place where creativity dies.

We now live in a world of hyper-selective perception and hyper-selective retention. We can watch exactly what we want to watch whenever we want to watch it, listen to exactly what we like whenever we like, expose ourselves only to things we like and avoid things we don’t like. Our computers and devices encourage this incessantly: “If you liked this, we also think you’ll like this.” “Genius recommends…” “You bought this blouse, let us recommend these accessories.” 

The bigger the world gets, the more it frightens us and the more we retreat into what we know. When physical walls don’t exist, we build our own virtual ones. We consciously avoid dissonance at all costs. We miss the chance encounter with things, ideas, people, etc., that we may not like immediately but may grow to appreciate with time.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why the world grows increasingly polarized; thoughtful discussion and resolution of almost any kind are uncommon. Maybe this is why, artistically, we are not living in very interesting times. We’ve torn down our physical walls and isolated ourselves behind much-harder-to-infiltrate digital walls.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” 

Creativity depends on this as well, entertaining a host of many ideas to synthesize new and original ideas of our own. 

That’s a tall task if you’re living in your own little pod.