Stuck in the middle
The middle is where pitches and ideas really come to life. But what do you do when your best laid plans go awry?
One of the best examples of framing I ever heard was from Swedish garage rockers The Hives. They were on during the middle of the final day at Leeds Festival 2002. A good slot, but not headlining or having the privilege of playing while the sun goes down. But singer Howlin' Pelle Almqvist didn’t see it that way.
“Welcome to your main course!” he announced from the stage. “Everything you saw before us was your appetiser; everything that comes after is just dessert. We are the main event”.
Some bands may have railed at being stuck in the middle of the day - The Hives didn’t see it that way at all (or if they did, they kept it to themselves). As
pointed out in last week’s edition of The New Fatherhood, the middle often has a bad reputation.No one wants the middle seat on a plane or train. Being a mid-table football side smells of dullness. Aside from the Lighthouse Family, musicians don’t set out to make music that is middle of the road. Middle England might have been a helpful short-hand when designing political campaigns in the ‘90s and ‘00s, but I doubt many areas take pride in being described in such a way.
There’s a duality here, directly stemming from how we define the word “middle”. “Middle”, as per Merriam Webster, could be “being at neither extreme”, or it could also be “the central portion”, “the centre of a formation”. The two meanings provide a significantly different framing and feeling around the word. The middle is average and intermediate, but simultaneously absolutely pivotal to any endeavour.
As Howlin’ Pelle and Kevin Maguire identified, it all comes down to how you view the situation. It’s either the point where you’re furthest from the excitement of a beginning/ending, or slap bang in the centre of the action - a position where, as Kevin says, you have “a chance to take stock of where you are on your journey and make necessary changes”.
How you view the middle often comes into sharpest focus when working on a campaign or a pitch. This graphic I saved on Tumblr about the creative process sums up how it often works:
Projects, ideas and pitches start with the best intentions. There’s a killer concept; we can’t wait for it to see the light of day. That last pitch we worked on ended up being a mad panic at the end; it won’t be like that this time around.
But of course, as you work through the middle of a creative process, life comes hard at your best intentions. Ideas don’t come to fruition in a neat, linear fashion. Disagreements, compromises, and collaboration exist to achieve a better end product. Soaring highs and crushing lows (or that might be the pitches I’ve worked on).
But normally, the middle is where the magic happens—when you turn something vague and unformed into something tangible and defined. A campaign ready to launch into the world or a pitch ready to wow the client. And then it’s done, and on to the next thing.
Except, it’s not always that simple. Sometimes, the middle of a process involves quite a bit more soul-searching. And sometimes, the middle requires you to answer some tough questions. For example, do we need to rethink this completely? Should we actually just give up?
Writing in The Marginalian this week, Maria Popova highlights the bravery it takes to make such a drastic decision in the middle of a process. Maria frames her considerations through the lens of life decisions, but the principles apply just as readily to projects and pitches.
Popova quotes the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who says, “We tend to value, and even idealise, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them”. He adds, in words that will ring true to anyone who’s ever had to have a difficult conversation about a project that’s going badly, “giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not”.
We may live in a time that celebrates and embraces failure, where John Schoolcraft, chief creative officer of Oatly, can talk onstage about how he “loves failure”. A time where the concept of a strategic “pivot” makes it acceptable to change your mind.
But these Lean Startup concepts of failure and pivoting come with baked-in momentum - you don’t stop, you switch tack, or you keep going until you crash and burn. Putting the brakes on in the middle of an activity still requires a great deal of strength and self-confidence. It’s a brave move to stand up and say, in a situation with multiple participants, each with their own vested interest in the project, “I don’t think this is working - let’s pause and decide how, and if, we continue”.
Of course, it’s not just about having the confidence to broach the subject of giving up - it’s an impossibly tricky judgement call to make as to whether a project is worth seeing through or if you’re succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy.
Sometimes, a pause, a pivot or a change of personnel is all you need. Once you’ve overcome that hurdle, projects and pitches can improve dramatically. But sometimes, a more drastic change is required.
I once worked on an idea for a client where we planned to recreate Jimmy Kimmel’s “celebrities read mean tweets” feature, but with employees reading out ill-informed posts about the brand. The shoot went well, but we couldn't get the tone right no matter what we tried in the edit. It just felt mean, missing the “slightly mean but also a bit silly and endearing” vibe the celebs captured.
My creative director got cold feet about the whole thing, but the client wanted to push on and present the creative to the new CMO (who was appointed after we’d gone into production). I was somewhere in the middle.
I realised we shouldn't have bothered from the first second of showing the video. The CMO hated it, so the campaign was pulled, and we went with something much safer. We salvaged our relationship with the CMO, but we would have saved ourselves time, effort, and tears (there were actual tears) if we’d stuck to our guns and tried to force a difficult decision about giving up earlier.
When making these tricky decisions, such as whether to plough on through a main course you don’t like to get the dessert, you can obviously look at practical factors. Feedback from clients, colleagues, and partners. The financials of the situation—both costs and the cost of your time. The emotional toll the process has taken.
But ultimately, it comes down to a judgment call - a decision driven by instinct as to whether this is all worth it. Hopefully, you won’t have to make too many of these decisions. Hopefully, the middle phases of your projects fall into the “boring and average” sense of middle, and you can enjoy that main course without having to decide whether or not to jack it in. Hopefully, you can keep on trucking, just like The Hives in 2024.