The Creative Operator

Two Camps

Creative services, most of the time, are split into two camps. People who think and people who build. On one side you have consultants and strategists, on the other designers and creatives. Concepts go from one to the other. Strategy informs execution but the two rarely touch and are mostly done by different teams or departments.

This separation in most cases does not serve the client from an output perspective. It is an outcome of convenience. Have the strategy done in house or with your own thinking and then hand off the execution to someone else. If we put this approach onto a different scenario it sounds ridiculous. In a medical context, it would be similar to getting a diagnosis from ChatGPT and then having a doctor perform surgery simply by following what the AI came up with. The ideal case is always to have the thinking and doing done by the same party. Not only in medicine but also in creative work.

The Split

Realistically this split is a root cause of how the industry has evolved. Scaling a business solely through execution is most of the time a lot easier than through thinking. If you only have to operate from a brief, the opportunity to outsource or, in the current landscape, use AI to handle the execution is exponentially higher than integrating from the thinking part and trying to understand the business and its goals as much as possible.

When strategy and execution are done by different people, something almost always gets lost in the translation. Even just thinking about simple cases where you have to do projects with different people, it is nearly impossible to have the same vision about the project in your head and where it needs to go as the other party.

Even if the strategy looks right on paper and the execution is right in isolation, the two don't reinforce each other. Whether that is the brand not supporting the business logic, the website not doing any of the selling, or there being no systems that reinforce growth. We have to fundamentally differentiate between a brand that was designed to look good and a brand that was designed to do something. This is not a push towards disregarding design and aesthetics just to optimise your click-through rate or page speed, which I believe rarely makes sense for most businesses except DTC brands. It is more a strategic and even just logical way of thinking about how to connect both ends.

The Gap Is Getting Harder to Ignore

There are two key things that are making this split more and more expensive to maintain. The first one is AI. Artificial intelligence is compressing the execution layer. Whether that is building a website or creating a logo, the "doing" is getting cheaper and faster. Secondly, a new type of business is emerging where the founder, the brand, and the product are all the same thing. This kind of business does not fit the old model of "here is a brief, go execute."

Execution keeps getting cheaper, and if you are only competing on it, it is a race to the bottom. AI has commoditised the execution layer and is going to push this further as it evolves. The value migrates up into other stages and practices.

Blair Enns has outlined a hierarchy of skills for the creative person which becomes more and more true the further this evolves. Artistry sits at the bottom of the pyramid as it is the most comparable and commoditised. This is followed by writing, to cement the thinking, and the highest tier is consulting. The most executable skill is also the most vulnerable to being commoditised. If you can lead with thinking or consulting, it becomes harder to be compared and commoditised.

The type of business that actually exposes this gap most clearly are businesses where the founder's judgement and taste are central to the brand. Creator businesses, boutique brands, or one-person companies building products. These are the businesses where the gap becomes impossible to ignore because the founder's taste and vision cannot be written into a brief. It lives in their head. You can't hand it off to someone else and expect them to translate something the founder hasn't even fully articulated yet. The thinking and the building have to come from someone close enough to understand the business and skilled enough to make it real.

The Creative Operator

This is where the concept of the creative operator comes into play. A creative operator is not a designer or consultant but also not an agency or coach. It sits in the gap and refuses to choose a side. The defining characteristic is that you diagnose before you prescribe. Much like in the previously outlined medical scenario. Most creative engagements start with a brief, whereas a creative operator starts with a question. The thinking leads and the creative output reflects that thinking, because the creative work should express the business.

Diagnosing a business through a creative lens sounds like a very design-heavy task. However, a majority of the creativity a business can possess is through the way it operates. The offers, pricing, business model, the gap between what the founder thinks they are selling and what the customer thinks they are buying. All of those business decisions involve a lot of creativity to put the imagination of what a business can do and the practical action that gets it there into reality.

Fact is, diagnosing before prescribing is rare in the creative field. The main reason for that is most of the time it is hard to justify billing a client for thinking, especially when thinking with AI is almost free. This is where the writing skill from Blair Enns' hierarchy comes into play, to cement yourself as an expert and be able to charge for your thinking.

The concept of fractional C-suite or engagements in general is already an established practice in the business world, but those engagements most of the time are very thinking-heavy. The output of a creative operator still uses a lot of thinking but is similar to someone who helps you think through business ideas and then also has all the skills to put those ideas into reality. Not just making them look good and on brand but making them scalable and practical. It combines the outputs of the designer with the outputs of the consultant.

Why Now

The forces that kept thinking and execution separate are weakening because execution becomes cheaper and clients become more informed. The idea of fractional leadership has normalised across every function of a business. Solo practitioners are building serious businesses with serious clients and the idea that you need an agency with layers and departments to do good creative work is fading.

The best creative work has always required someone who understands the business. Maybe think of your own business and how creative you are at the beginning and how full of ideas you are. Most times however, you reach a state where you become blind to your own business and need someone else to have a look and bounce ideas off. This is where a creative operator sits.

In general the role of the operator will shift more towards strategist over time as AI takes more of the execution. Nevertheless, the value of someone who can think and build goes up because fewer people try to develop both. Also, thinking and executing on the AI side of a business will create huge amounts of upside.

The Bet

The creative operator is a bet that the most valuable position is at the intersection, not the extreme. You still have to do things like niching down as a creative operator, but the skills and expertise widen and span across more fields. The bet is that the people who can think clearly about a business and then build what it needs will always be harder to replace than someone who only does one of the two. And the gap between the two keeps growing.