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The Best Work Comes From Tension, Not Repetition
When I was at Nike, I worked on one brand for eleven years. On paper, it was a dream gig. But if I’m being honest, Nike probably got my best work in those first two years. After that, the creative spark dulled. Not because I stopped caring—but because I got too comfortable. Familiarity bred tunnel vision. The questions stopped being interesting. The fear of failure faded. And that, for any creative, is the beginning of the end.
That experience taught me something I carry into every client relationship: comfort kills creativity. I believe the best work happens when you’re just uncomfortable enough to care deeply, ask harder questions, and rethink what’s possible. When you’re outside your industry. When you’re just a little scared you might get it wrong.
There’s science to back this up. According to a study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people who experience moderate levels of stress perform better on creative problem-solving tasks than those under no pressure at all. Tension fuels curiosity. It activates the brain. It makes us reach. And the reach is where the magic happens.
Creatives are not artists chasing perfection. We’re translators, synthesizers, interpreters. And when we’re dropped into a world we don’t know—a new industry, a new audience, a new set of norms—we have to listen harder, think faster, and hold onto our beginner's mind. That’s when the most original ideas surface.
One of my favorite metaphors is parallax—a shift in perspective that happens when you change your point of view. In astronomy, it helps measure the distance between stars. In branding, it helps you find the white space between competitors. It’s how you see your client the way no one else does.
When we talk about cross-pollination at Watson, we’re really talking about parallax. Our team is made up of people with backgrounds in architecture, music, health, education, finance, and sport. We’ve built campaigns for hospitals, city governments, SaaS startups, shoe brands, and nonprofit boards. And the gift of that diversity is this: we never default to the obvious. We see from multiple angles.
Clients are often deep inside their own vertical. That’s not a bad thing—it’s how expertise is built. But it comes with blind spots. They know how everyone else in their industry does it. What they don’t always see is how the audience has shifted, or how a completely different sector solved a similar problem.
Parallax thinking helps bridge that gap. We might bring a storytelling model from consumer products into a healthcare campaign. Or a user experience approach from education into B2B tech. These ideas don’t always come from a brief. They come from lived experience, from past failures, from working on something totally unrelated and making the leap. This is the advantage of creative cross-training.
There are agencies out there who only do financial brands. Or only serve higher education. Or just work with food and beverage clients. They’re often referred to as “specialists.” And while that might sound reassuring, I think it’s risky.
Specialization, in creative services, has a shelf life. It often calcifies into formulas. Safe bets. Familiar frameworks. There’s less questioning. Less wandering. Less wonder. And when you’re only ever looking in the same places, you stop seeing new ones.
Consumers, meanwhile, don’t operate in verticals. They don’t care if your brand is using the industry-standard CMS or if your visuals echo what everyone else is doing in your space. They respond to ideas that feel fresh. Human. Clear. Which means the best creative work comes from people who are thinking across categories, not inside silos.
According to research published by McKinsey, companies that embrace diverse teams and perspectives are 35% more likely to outperform their competitors. Creativity is a direct outcome of cognitive diversity—differences in experience, training, worldview, and problem-solving style. And that doesn’t just apply to people—it applies to industries too. When we cross industry lines, we unlock new metaphors, mental models, and solutions.
The most powerful partnerships happen when deep industry expertise meets creative curiosity. Clients know their world. They know the jargon, the regulations, the history, the politics. What they often need is someone to come in and ask: But what if we didn’t? What if we started over?
That’s our role. We come in with a clean slate. No baggage. No sacred cows. And our process—equal parts qualitative and quantitative—is designed to uncover the human truth that often gets buried in data or diluted by internal language.
We interview real users. We map competitive gaps. We build personas based on psychographics, not just demographics. And we co-create key messaging that resonates beyond the boardroom. Our process is the product. That process isn’t linear. It includes secondary research, primary insights, stakeholder interviews, and a healthy amount of debate. That tension, again, is part of the magic.
When clients bring their expertise, and we bring our perspective, what we create together is more than marketing. It’s a point of view that stands out in a crowded market. It’s a brand that knows who it is, what it believes, and why it matters.
