ABSTRACT
Although Rick Waller, Chief Creative Officer at Heric Advertising, mildly
discouraged creatives from continually working in the same teams, he allowed it.
Friends since middle school, the first artist-writer team we will consider, creatives
in their early forties, had worked with each other most of their professional
careers. Such lengthy experience, the literature on mindfulness suggests, could be
a liability because their work routines could obscure the nature of the problem at
hand. A more “loosely coupled” team might “increase the number of ascertaining
moments and the proportion of those moments that are directed at weak signals of
developing problems” (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006, p. 521). On the other hand, the
reason this artist-writer team had been able to work together for so long was that
they had been very successful in doing so. Their work routines were very efficient
and effective once the problem at hand had been accurately diagnosed.
