☀️ Why clarity & vision are more important than control

ChatGPT Prompt: illustration of a workspace inside a greenhouse, bursting with bright, directional light. The light illuminates plants with lightbulbs.

If culture is the soil and feedback is the water, then vision is the light.

Without it, your creative team is just feeling their way through the dark, guessing what “good” looks like, trying to reverse-engineer the picture in your head that you never actually shared.

And here’s the kicker: Guesswork is a waste of creative energy.

As a Creative Director, your job isn’t just to have the vision. It’s to illuminate it.

Creativity Craves Clarity

The best creative work doesn’t come from total freedom—or total control. It comes from clarity.

That means starting with:

• The Goal: What are we trying to achieve?

• The Objective: Who are we speaking to, and what action do we want them to take?

• Success Metrics: How will we know we nailed it?

If your team doesn’t know these three things, you’re not giving them a brief. You’re giving them a blindfold.

Direction, Not Dictation

Once the goals are clear, give your team guardrails—not handcuffs.

I like to set up moodboards, style prompts, or references as starting points, not blueprints. This isn’t about locking them into your taste—it’s about aligning them to the tone, the intention, the vibe.

Better yet? Build the vision together:

• Invite the team to co-curate a moodboard

• Run a collaborative kickoff where everyone brings examples

• Ask: “What does this look like to you?”—you’ll often get something better than what you imagined

The Trap of the Invisible Vision

One of the biggest mistakes I see creative leaders make—especially senior ones—is holding the vision too tightly.

You assume your years of experience will somehow translate telepathically to your team. You give vague phrases like “make it premium,” “elevate this,” or “something edgier.” And then you’re disappointed when the first round misses the mark.

But that’s not a creative failure—it’s a leadership failure.

You can’t expect someone to execute the vision in your head if you never articulated it out loud.

Light the Path, Then Let Them Walk It

Your role as a leader isn’t to dictate every decision. It’s to show the path—and trust your team to find their way down it.

Give them the destination. Give them the map. Then give them the space to discover a better route.

Because when creatives understand the why, and feel ownership of the how—they don’t just deliver work. They illuminate the whole room.