Being a holistic practitioner is a state of mind. It’s a way of thinking, behaving and reacting. It is the innate ability to wear many different hats and feel equally comfortable in them all.
For those of you that have not been born with the ability to think holistically, worry not. It can be learned. All that is needed is the courage to be part of something bigger than a specific discipline and the comfort level to step outside an area of expertise.
The question remains: How do you realistically create an environment for energized holistic thinking and collaboration with the constant pressure to generate incremental revenue for your particular discipline — the typical battle for control?
Structure a team where rewards are equally shared based on the final product, not the respective scope of work. Removing the profit and loss issue better enables a team to come out of their silos, focus on the business problem and deliver big ideas that ideally cross disciplines.
Building the right team at the right time is equally important. Too often in our industry, advertising leads the thought process and only engages other disciplines in the mix after the idea has been born. The result in an old-school, linear approach, void of the shared wisdom that collaboration can bring. It is imperative that all disciplines be engaged at the onset of a project in order to develop trust, respect and partnership.
Once you figure out the financial rewards and the team dynamics, you are well on your way. It is the union of multiple disciplines working together that make each stronger and more impactful. Like a Picasso, the combination of different colors and brush strokes make it a masterpiece.
Holistic marketing allows each discipline to achieve higher levels of creativity, efficiency and effectiveness than would have been possible on its own. The best holistic ideas are born when multidisciplinary teams are worried more about the final destination than the path they take to get there. Let the team reign, the voices unite, the idea rule and the right disciplines will follow. You will never want to fly “silo” again.
