Creativity Isn’t a Vending Machine 🤖 (Part 1)
It’s a Garden Full of Weird Little Geniuses... 🧑🌾
About theBlogStack’s July guest writer: Hi I’m Marianne Kaiser! I help brands—from scrappy startups to Fortune 500s—tell stories that move people, shift behavior, and stand out in crowded, complex markets. I care deeply about rare disease, women’s health, patient advocacy, and telling stories with clarity, care, and depth. In 2024 I founded Contrary Collective – the kind of team I always wished existed. We specialize in healthcare, finance, and tech—and we only say yes when we know we can knock it out of the park.
Outside of work? I hoard fonts, overuse em dashes, read fantasy novels like snacks, believe in signs from the universe, and (yes) drive race cars.
There was a time—at an agency I won’t name but will deeply side-eye—where creative work was requested with what was essentially a Taco Bell order form. You’d tick some boxes, “Need headline / subhead / email / banner ad,” and hit send. No conversation. No curiosity. Feedback came as a Slack, an email, a carrier pigeon, a comment bubble with all the warmth of a voicemail from the IRS.
To be fair, this wasn’t new. I’ve seen creative departments as they’re being born, split in two, restructured, rebranded, and duct-taped onto the sides of companies that barely understood what they’d acquired. I’ve watched small, scrappy teams grow into brilliant ecosystems—only to have someone step in with a VC budget and a spreadsheet, eager to "standardize" creativity. And just like that, the spark starts to die. What once felt organic and electric becomes procedural. The people who once felt safe enough to take risks start to second-guess, and what was once joyful becomes efficient. Efficient, and deeply boring.
So let’s say it plainly: creativity is not a transaction. It doesn’t appear because you filled out a form. It shows up when the conditions are right—when people are trusted, stretched, heard, challenged, supported, weird, and occasionally ignored in just the right way.
The Creative Leader as Gardener, Not Foreman
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the most creative person in the room. I’m not the one tossing off Cannes-worthy headlines on a whim. But I do know how to spot brilliance. I know how to connect people to each other in a way that makes all of them sharper. I know how to build a space where the talent on my team can explode (creatively, not emotionally... ideally).
Leading creative teams for over a decade has taught me that it’s not about being everyone's cheerleader or everyone's friend. It’s about being supportive and transparent, without being a pushover. That means setting boundaries—not to limit people, but so they know exactly where the edges are, and how hard they can push.
We don’t do toxic positivity. We do “Why do you hate this so much, and what would you rather do instead?”
We don’t do "fail fast." We do "fail weird, fail proudly, tell us what you’d do differently."
And disagreement? I love it. I once got feedback that someone thought I didn’t like them because they disagreed with me. Honestly, I probably liked them more. Disagreement means we’re thinking, not just nodding along and building some soft beige thing nobody will remember.
How to Build a Team that Doesn’t Suck the Life Out of Each Other
I hire people who are better than me. That’s the job. People who are brilliant in very specific ways. You don’t need ten people who are all kinda-good at everything. You need one person who’s world-class at type, another who can crack a strategy open with a single sentence, and someone else who draws storyboards that make grown clients cry.
I want the person who has that one thing—and then I protect their ability to do it.
That means flexibility. People on my team are grown adults with dentist appointments and kids and spontaneous Tuesdays where they decide to get a tattoo. Cool. I don’t care if you work at 10am or 10pm—as long as you’re showing up for your team when it counts, and the work gets done.
I tell them: go heads-down for 90 minutes. No Slack. No email. Just focus. And then come up for air, take a walk, get yourself a snack that requires a spoon. We are not factory workers. We are creative professionals. Brains need to wander.
And we never, ever shame people in meetings. Once I gave someone feedback in front of others, and she told me afterward how much it bothered her. I took that to heart. I never did it again—not to her, not to anyone. Taking feedback from your team is just as important as giving it.