percent of all creative breakthroughs occur in the gaps between formal meetings and the casual exchange of secrets.
This number is a ghost and it haunts every office that puts a ranking on the wall. I saw this ghost . A creator named Sarah found a way to use a specific neon edge on a thumbnail and her click-through rate jumped by four points.
The neon edge was a bright orange and it cut through the white background of the feed and the viewers clicked. A Sarah would have posted the PSD file in the Slack channel and the whole team would have won.
Everyone drinks from the well and everyone must dig the well deeper. But a leaderboard turns the water into a prize and the villagers start to build fences. The fences are invisible but they are strong. They are made of silence and they are made of missed opportunities.
When you rank creators against each other you tell them that their neighbor is a rival and the neighbor becomes a threat. The group intelligence stops growing and the individual tricks stay in the dark.
Case Study: Turbine Craft
Jordan K. is a wind turbine technician and he knows about the danger of the dark. He works in the air and the wind is a constant weight. He told me that there are on a flange and each bolt must be tight.
“In the wind business you share the trick or you lose a finger but in the creator business you keep the trick and you keep your rank.”
– Jordan K., Wind Turbine Technician
If a technician finds a better way to use a wrench but he does not tell the crew the tower will shake. The tower might even fall. Jordan said the leaderboard would be a death sentence for his team and I believe him. He spoke with a flat voice and his hands were scarred.
#00 The Failure of Human Nuance
I once got the hiccups during a presentation to the board and it was a disaster. I was explaining the value of collective growth and my body betrayed me. Each hiccup was a sharp sound in a small room and the directors waited for the next one.
It was a moment of human failure and it made the room feel small. But the board wanted numbers and they wanted ranks. They did not care about the hiccups and they did not care about the shared secrets. They wanted a winner and they wanted a loser. They got exactly what they asked for and the team stopped talking that afternoon.
1. The Transition from Mentor to Rival
A senior creator used to look at a junior’s work and offer a hand. He would show the junior how to balance the saturation or how to crop a face for maximum impact. But the leaderboard makes that junior a competitor for the monthly bonus.
The senior looks at the work and he sees a threat to his own check. He stays at his desk and he keeps his mouth shut. The junior struggles and the senior wins but the company loses the growth of the whole roster.
2. The Death of the Half-Baked Idea
Great tricks start as bad ideas and they need the friction of other minds to become good. A creator might have a thought about using a blurred background but he is not sure. In a collaborative room he says the idea out loud and the team helps him build it.
In a ranked room he keeps the idea hidden because he does not want to look foolish. He also does not want to give away a seed that might grow into a tree for someone else. The idea stays half-baked and it eventually rots.
But when the creators are in a war for the top spot the support staff gets caught in the middle. They are told to keep the secrets of one creator away from the others. They become keepers of silos and the cross-pollination of the office dies. The editors want to speak but the rules of the leaderboard tell them to be quiet.
4. The Optimization of the Safe Bet
When you are ranked you do not take risks. You do the thing that worked last week and you do it again. A trick like the neon edge is a risk until it works. If you are in first place you do not want to fall to fifth and so you play the game of the average.
The leaderboard rewards the steady hand but it kills the wild heart.
The whole team starts to look the same and the audience gets bored. The click-through rates begin to sag and the leaderboard does not tell you why.
5. The Loss of the “We” Narrative
A team is a story that people tell themselves so they can work together. The story says that we are all in this boat and we all want to reach the shore. The leaderboard changes the story.
The story becomes about the one man who reached the shore and the nine men who drowned. People do not work hard for a story where they might drown.
They work for themselves and they stop caring about the boat. The boat starts to leak and nobody picks up a bucket.
6. The Stagnation of the Aggregate
A team that shares tricks grows at an exponential rate. One person finds a trick and ten people use it and then ten people find ten more tricks. It is a fire that feeds itself. A leaderboard is a bucket of water on that fire.
LINEAR
EXPONENTIAL
The leaderboard turns the exponential growth into a linear crawl.
You might have one star who performs well but the other nine creators are stuck in the mud. The star is happy but the channel is dying.
If you take a hundred creators and put them in a race eighty-two of them will hide their best shoes to win the sprint but the whole group will walk slower over the mountain. This is the tragedy of the creative commons. We think that competition makes us better and it does make us faster for a moment. But it makes us dumber in the long run.
Creators often feel the weight of the cold start and they look for any way to get momentum. When the internal team stops sharing the creator must look outside for the social proof that the algorithm demands. They need the numbers to show that the video is worth a click and they need the views to build the trust of a new audience.
Many creators choose to acheter des vues youtube because the leaderboard has made their own team a desert of information. They need the initial lift to survive the silence of their peers.
The Silence of the Hallway
I watched Sarah for a week and she never told anyone about the neon edge. I saw three other creators try different things and fail. One used a large font that was hard to read and another used a dark image that disappeared in the dark mode.
Sarah could have saved them but she didn’t. She stayed in second place and the other two dropped to the bottom of the list. The team meeting was short and the manager praised Sarah for her numbers. He did not know that the numbers were a wall between her and the rest of the room.
Sarah eventually lost her second-place spot. Someone else found a different trick and they kept it secret too. The neon edge became old news and the click-through rates fell for everyone.
The manager looked at the leaderboard and he saw that the whole team was down. He did not understand. He thought the ranking would make them work harder. He did not see that it made them work alone.
And in the world of the screen and the click working alone is the fastest way to disappear.
The silence was the only thing that grew.