“Grit in the Oyster” Chris Moody, Executive Creative Director at Landor, on the Design Next podcast

Chris Moody has spent almost three decades at the sharpest end of the creative industry; where design is recognised for its strategic weight. Eighteen years at Wolff Olins, rising to Chief Design Officer, followed by a stretch at McKinsey building their brand practice from the ground up, and now leading creative output across 1,300 people and 30 studios at Landor.

Sitting down with Chris to discuss our season topic of Creative Excellence, he made it clear how much joy he still brings to it all. For someone operating at this level, he’s very unguarded, and his thinking on what makes work excellent is as sharp as you’d hope.

What does creative excellence mean? Like all great strategic thinkers, Chris has a framework in response to this big question. Three Ts:

• Team: the best creative directors in the world are useless without the right people around them. We couldn’t agree more.
• Time: because great work needs both the wandering thinking time and the deadline that forces a decision
• Tension: “Every piece of work, if it’s going to be really great, needs a little bit of grit in the oyster.” The thing that’s slightly off. The weirdness that makes it right.

Central to Chris’s personal philosophy is, in his own words, to break things. He described a current brief (from a financial services CEO) who asked for the most extreme before and after Landor had ever done. Permission granted to go full tilt on difference.

“Can we break it and do it slightly differently and find a different way?”

Sounds chaotic, and maybe the process is – but if Landor case studies are anything to go by, it’s worth it.

The biggest mistake any agency can make? Chis’s answer is treating client work as a job. Jobs have an end point; relationships don’t.

His concern is that the industry is becoming more transactional, more delivery-focused, and by doing so is losing the human contact that produces business-defining work.

Chris is an enthusiastic optimist about AI. His take? AI has mediocrity sewn up. It does mediocre work brilliantly, which means nobody needs to worry about mediocre work anymore.

What that creates, he believes, is the conditions for a new creative wave… A new AI-native generation will come in and rewrite the rules. “If you look at artistic movements over the years, it’s always happened. A new wave of new thinkers.” It’ll be rocky for a bit. Then it’ll be super cool.