POV: What worked last time is the enemy of what works next

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael,” Picasso once said, “but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

I return to that line often, not because I’m nostalgic about youth (heaven forbid, I’ve only just turned 21…), but because it captures something we rarely acknowledge in the creative industries: the longer you do this work, the harder it becomes to stay playful. Not less capable. Not less skilled. Just less willing to take risks that can’t be neatly explained or easily defended.

Creative culture loves the myth of youthful genius – the prodigy, the wunderkind, the person who hasn’t yet learned what doesn’t work. But the real tension isn’t young versus old. It’s play versus safety. And safety, over time, becomes incredibly persuasive...

As agencies, studios and brands mature, the context around creativity shifts. Budgets grow. Reputations harden. Stakeholders multiply. And ultimately decisions carry more weight. Suddenly, in that environment, “what worked last time” doesn’t sound conservative – it sounds responsible. Data-backed design promises certainty. Optimisation replaces exploration. And risk is quietly reframed as recklessness.

Experimentation doesn’t die dramatically, it gets politely edited out.

Somewhere along the way, “evidence-based” began to mean “already validated”. Ideas are expected to arrive with proof attached. Decks become heavier, rationale gets more elaborate. And anything genuinely new – and by that I mean, anything that hasn’t yet had the chance to succeed – struggles to survive the damning weight of the process.

The bittersweet irony is, that the more money there is on the line, the harder it becomes to justify the very experimentation that once created that value in the first place. Point-of-proof becomes a prison. Analysis and data goes towards trying to recreate some of the success of an existing project, rather than pushing work to somewhere untrodden.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: is experimentation still possible when everything has to be justified? I think it is, but only if it’s intentionally designed into a flexible system rather than treated as a luxury that can be trimmed away.

Because the real problem isn’t a lack of brave ideas: it’s the impermeable systems we’ve built around them. Incentives quietly shape behaviour, and most creative systems reward speed over surprise and predictability over possibility. Nine times out of ten, fluency will always trump friction. We say we want bold thinking, but we design processes that punish it.

When timelines are compressed, margins are tight and teams are stretched, experimentation becomes the first casualty – not because it’s unwanted, but because it’s inefficient. And inefficiency is hard to defend in a culture obsessed with optimisation.

Clients aren’t immune to this either. Many genuinely want something new, but are operating inside organisations that reward short-term reassurance over long-term impact. So novelty is expected to arrive pre-sanitised. Disruption, but only the kind that fits neatly into a deck. Risk, but only if someone else has already taken it.

This creates a strange paradox. Everyone agrees the work looks the same. Everyone feels the cultural fatigue. Yet the mechanisms that might produce difference are systematically stripped away. Not through bad intent, but through habit.

That’s why designing for experimentation matters. Not as a mood or a mantra, but as a structural choice. Time carved out for unfinished thinking. Permission to test without narrative gymnastics. Leaders willing to absorb uncertainty on behalf of their teams. Uncomfortable, isn’t it? Because originality doesn’t emerge from confidence – it emerges from conditions. And conditions are a choice.

But what we often describe as “creative ageing” isn’t really about age at all. It’s about psychological drift. Over time, cynicism creeps in. Risk tolerance narrows and play (crushingly) slides quietly down the priority list. Not because people stop caring, but because they start protecting – the work, the business, the reputation, the legacy.

And this is where some studios begin to ossify. They optimise endlessly around a past version of themselves. They repeat what once worked. They refine the formula. Success becomes something to preserve rather than question.

Others take a different path. They treat ageing as a discipline, not a decline. They actively work against their own instincts. They protect ideas that feel strange, sticky or unresolved. They invite new voices, not as decoration, but as disruption. They remain culturally curious rather than culturally comfortable.

In adland, BBH and Mother are a rare example of this kind of longevity. Decades into their existence, they haven’t retreated into their own mythology or relied on their greatest hits to stay relevant. Instead, they’ve continued to evolve culturally, resisting the temptation to turn past success into a safety net. That doesn’t happen by accident. It requires leadership that understands the difference between experience and complacency.

The same tension plays out clearly on the brand side. Heritage brands often feel paralysed by their own history, terrified of breaking what made them successful in the first place. Yet what made them successful was almost always a bold, risky decision at the time.

Pepsi’s recent rebrand (whether you like it or not) is interesting because it didn’t attempt to modernise by stripping away its identity. It leaned into its 125-year visual history, but with intent rather than reverence. The past wasn’t treated as something to be preserved, but as material to be reworked. Adidas Originals operates in a similar way. Its heritage isn’t a constraint, but a platform – something to be continually reinterpreted through culture, not frozen in time. In both cases, curiosity outweighs nostalgia, and experimentation is embedded in the process rather than edited out by research.

Heritage only becomes an anchor when it’s handled defensively.

Inside creative organisations, the most dangerous phrase in the room is often the most unremarkable: “This worked last time.” It sounds pragmatic. Sensible, and so bloody annoyingly hard to argue with! But it’s also the quickest route to diminishing returns. As a result, culture shifts. Audiences evolve, and markets move on. Familiarity doesn’t equal relevance – it just feels safer.

The uncomfortable truth is that staying relevant requires a tolerance for discomfort. And that tolerance doesn’t naturally increase with experience. If anything, it declines unless it’s actively practised. For creatives, this becomes a personal challenge. Staying good isn’t about staying young. It’s about staying porous – open to randomness, willing to learn, prepared to look foolish, and brave enough to try something that might not work. Experience should make us better at taking risks, not more afraid of them. With experience comes judgment, taste, and context – the tools needed to take smarter risks, not fewer.

There should be analysis of what has worked, but from a broader perspective – why it worked, and how something weird and new could tap into the same sentiment, but also excite audiences because it’s something they haven’t seen before. It is risky, and yes it might fail, or it could pay off big time.

Age isn’t the enemy. Stasis is.

We don’t become irrelevant because time passes. We become irrelevant when we stop playing – when we mistake yesterday’s success for tomorrow’s strategy, and safety for progress. And in an industry built on change, that might be the biggest risk of all.