Here are creative design killers that are common in many big corporate offices.
- Constant interruption by phone, walk-ins, or your boss who cannot find that slide deck you created last week. Open plan office layouts are especially difficult to work in. After an interruption it can take some time to get back in the flow. A 10 second call can equal 30 minutes in lost time.
- Meeting schedules that fragment an entire day so you do not have time to start any major piece of design work (manager versus maker schedule).
- Feedback and input from colleagues who have not taken sufficient time to digest what you actually created. Things get read over quickly, not internalized, and people provide some high level comments that do not build on the work you already did.
- People start working on the presentation of the story, when the actual story is still not clear. At the last minute a whole slide deck needs to be re-written to support a different conclusion.
- Long work hours turn employees into robots with little energy for creativity inside them. Work has become a process to try to empty the in-tray, rather than produce beautiful presentations.
- Multiple authors try to write the overall storyline, each with their own structure and style.
- Throughout a project, team members usually develop a common language where one simple concept can depict a very complicated issue. For the insiders, writing the name of the concept on a slide makes it all clear, the outsider, has no idea. The result: pages and pages of hollow inside jargon. (The curse of knowledge)
As a result of all of this, most employees need to do the creative work after hours when they are free of interruption, which results in a poor lifestyle, sleep deprivation which in turn drains more creativity.
If you can, try to avoid these.