What creatives need is pressurized freedom.
The element of pressure comes from the deadline. — The deadline is not merely the point where the activity must end. The deadline charges time with creative urgency. If you puncture the vessel of creative time with interruptions, the creative pressure is lost, and replaced with frustration and fear. Fear and urgency are both uncomfortable, but they differ in that urgency is productive and fear is depressive. To plan a creative process with frequent checkpoints to ensure steady linear progress toward a goal is like making an aerosol can out of wire mesh.
The element of freedom comes from the design brief. — Freedom is acting according to one’s own judgment. But judgment is only as good as one’s knowledge. The design brief empowers creatives to exercise judgment, by providing them all relevant knowledge needed for making good judgments, even (and especially) outside the realm of the precedented, where real innovation occurs. A creative team who has not been authorized to judge the new will forced to fall back on imitation of the old, which is better known by the euphemism “best practices.” Best practices produce at most extremely competent mediocrity.
Just to screw up the tidiness of this line of thought, pressure also comes from the design brief. The best briefs inspire. The inspiration creates positive pressure which presses against the limits of the deadline. (Consider the etymology of inspire. It literally means “breath into”, which suggests pumping air into a tank.) Inspiration comes from vision, and the most reliable source of vision comes from insights into brand and audience — and that comes from qualitative research.
Concerning research, many creatives subscribe to the cult of genius, which holds that inspiration hits like bolts of lightning — and they insist that input of other people can only interfere with their ability to invent. But this conceit is based on the fact that most research is not very good — mainly big heaps of uninspiring, bulleted facts, not meant so much to inspire, as to show progress, or after the fact to justify the expense of the research (most of which, by the way, was expended on the efforts of showing progress and justifying expenses), and also that most input from other people is not supportive of the creative process, because it is not guided by insight into how creativity happens.
Fact is, most managerial types out there — the people who dominate middle-management — think big ideas are constructed piece by piece like bridges or watches, and assume the creation of ideas can be managed by to the same principles and processes. They think this because their intellectual toolset is limited to what is needed for the fabrication of artifacts. And, as we all know, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. Instead of managing the creation of ideas, what is in fact managed is the creation of documentation of ideas. And if they succeed, and they usually do — the creative process degrades into a deliverable production process which positively kills creativity.