Marketing transformation has a framework. Most experienced leaders know how to audit, sequence, and prioritize. What the framework can’t account for is everything else. This article explores why transformation is, underneath the structure, a fundamentally creative process and what it requires of a marketing leader to stay present to what’s unfolding rather than the version they planned for.
Elizabeth Gilbert said something on a podcast that stopped me mid-sentence.
Untether yourself from the results.
She was talking about creativity and why we can balk at getting started.
And the act of making something, separate from what it becomes.
I’ve spent 20+ years building a framework for marketing transformation. There’s an audit. There’s a sequence. There are predictable places to look, in a predictable order, for a reason…because the logic holds, every time.
And yet.
No two transformations have ever looked the same.
Different starting points. Various personalities in the room, with their own relationships to what marketing even is. Unique company cultures underneath it all. Greater or smaller scope for what the marketing leader is allowed to change, and how fast.
The framework is binary. The transformation is not.
What the framework gives you is the building blocks. What you do with them — how you read the room, sequence the conversations, and decide what to name and what to leave alone for now — that part is closer to improvisation than instruction manual.
Which is a strange thing to admit after decades of developing structured approaches to this.
But transformation is a creative process.
You feel something shift before you can measure it.
It’s kind of like the difference between holding a map and reading the terrain.
Because everyone goes in with a set of assumptions about where the resistance will be.
And then the company culture is stranger than the org chart suggested.
Or the CEO you were counting on leaves in month two.
Or the audit surfaces something so foundational that the sequence you’d planned has to fold back on itself.
You’re making decisions in motion, with incomplete information, about terrain that keeps changing under you. Navigating is about orientation, knowing where you are, relative to where you’re trying to go, and adjusting constantly without losing the thread.
Gilbert’s phrase keeps coming back to me because it reframes the whole thing. Not ignore the outcomes. As a marketing leader, you don’t have the luxury of ignoring outcomes, and neither do I. But untether from them enough to stay present to what the process is asking of you in this moment.
Because the transformation has its own creative intelligence.
And if you’re too attached to how you thought it would go, you’ll miss what it’s becoming.
