There’s a simple reason most brands only produce bland, derivative work. It has nothing to do with money or talent — it’s that their people are forced to use a fraction of their brain power.

There are three approaches we can take to completing a task:

• Skill-based performance is automatic, like typing.

• Rule-based performance uses heuristics to solve more complex problems: if x happens do y.

• Knowledge-based performance requires conscious attention to solve challenging problems.

That last one is our most powerful mode of cognition. It’s how we crack the case, innovate, and create our most elegant solutions. Unfortunately it’s also the most exhausting form of brain work we can do, and we’d rather avoid it.

Here’s the problem then. When we’re stacked across multiple projects; when our time in the office is filleted into vapor; when we’re crushed by utilization targets and death-march deadlines we literally can’t access this realm of performance.

So we default to the other modes: we do whatever worked last time, or copy whoever we think has solved the problem well. We take shortcuts. It’s not our fault — it’s human nature.

If brands genuinely want to innovate the solution is pretty obvious: give people more time to do less, which usually means starting projects sooner.

See this post on LinkedIn