From the Recording Studio to the Boardroom: What Creativity Teaches Us About Strategy

I was recently a guest on the HSG Alumni Podcast (held in German), and the conversation stayed with me longer than I expected. Not because we covered new ground – but because putting years of experience into words in one sitting has a way of making patterns visible that you'd stopped noticing.

What follows is my attempt to distil what we talked about: the research behind my dissertation, what music studios and film sets taught me about strategy, and why I think creative industries have cracked something that most organisations are still struggling with.

Here you find the full episode

The Research: Creativity Is Not Chaos

My dissertation – Artists as Managers and Strategists: A Routine Dynamics Perspective on Creation Routines within Temporary Projects – examines something most people wouldn't think to look for in a recording studio: routines.

The common assumption is that creative work happens spontaneously, through inspiration and talent, in a kind of productive chaos. My research tells a different story. Through fieldwork in music studios and on film sets, I found that creation routines – recurring, shared patterns of action – are precisely what make rapid, high-quality creative collaboration possible.

Consider a film set: 30 people who have never met, arriving at 8am, ready to shoot by 8:50am. The sound engineer and the camera operator have never worked together before, but they immediately know how to coordinate. Not because they planned it, but because both bring internalized professional routines from previous projects. The routine is the shared language – and crucially, it's what allows people to act confidently in situations that are, by nature, uncertain.

The same logic applies in the recording studio. Production software creates loops: the music starts again at bar 1, again and again. Musicians are gently forced to keep trying new things – new chords, new vocal lines – within a stable, repeating structure. The uncertainty of not knowing what will work is still there. But the routine holds the space in which something new can emerge.

The conclusion I kept coming back to:

"Routines don’t suppress creativity – they hold it."

Artists as Strategists – Whether They Like It or Not

One of the more provocative claims in the dissertation is that artists are, in fact, highly strategic. You just can't tell them that. No one in the arts wants to be strategic in their creations, but rather inspiring and unique.

However, when a producer in a pop session says, "I love these chords, but they're too jazzy for what we're making" – that's a strategic decision. It draws on knowledge of the market, of radio formats, of listener expectations. In that moment, the producer is orienting the creative work towards a future context.

Strategy, understood this way, doesn't live in documents or presentations. It lives in the daily doing – in the moment-by-moment decisions that shape which direction the work takes.

Uncertainty Is Not the Problem. Avoiding It Is.

One thing that struck me across both the music studio and the film set: artists don't try to eliminate uncertainty. They work with it. They use it. The not-knowing is part of the process – it's what creates the pressure to try something new, to make a decision, to commit to a direction even without a guaranteed outcome.

Most organisations do the opposite. Uncertainty gets treated as a problem to be managed away – through more analysis, more planning, more process. And yet, as I kept observing in my consulting practice: you can analyse yourself to death, but it will all be different again the next day.

"Uncertainty isn’t something to organise away – inside it, the interesting things emerge."

This is the gap that For Planet Strategy Lab works in. Not by offering more certainty, but by helping organisations build the routines and practices that allow them to move forward confidently without it. The creative industries figured this out a long time ago. Strategy that works with uncertainty instead against it leads to more surprising and new outcomes.

Three Practices for Bringing Strategy to Life

What can organisations – whether young startups or established structures – actually take from this? Three things I keep coming back to:

Involve people early. Strategies designed at the top and handed down rarely take hold. The people who will carry a strategy in their day-to-day work need to encounter it early – not to make the decisions, but to have a voice in the process. Legitimacy and ownership comes from participation.

"Strategy that should land in day-to-day work can’t be delivered by announcement"

Change small things inside existing routines. Rather than launching implementation roadmaps look for existing rhythms – a weekly team meeting, a regular check-in – and introduce a small strategic element into them. Regular ten minutes of reflection at the end of a standing meeting can do more than a two-day offsite.

Keep going. Routines need maintenance. Without consistent attention, teams slide back into established patterns – as anyone who has ever made a New Year's resolution knows well. Just keep trying it for at lest 3 meetings and then evaluate whether you need to adapt.

Listen to the full episode