In the early , a railway signalman named James Wide, known as “Jumper” because he had lost both his legs in a work accident, was struggling to manage the heavy levers at the Uitenhage station in South Africa. He didn’t hire a traditional assistant. Instead, he hired a baboon named Jack.
For , Jack pulled the levers, recognized the distinct whistle signals of arriving trains, and even handled the keys to the coal shed with a precision that baffled the inspectors. When the railway authorities eventually found out, they didn’t fire him for being a primate; they put him through a rigorous test, saw that he was more efficient than the humans, and gave him an official employment number. Jack was a success because he didn’t know the “rules” of being a signalman; he only knew the rhythm of the rails.
We often go looking for our own versions of Jack. We scour portfolios for the person who sees the world through a tilted lens, the one whose work feels like a sudden electric shock in a room full of static. We hire them specifically because they possess a “weirdness” that we cannot manufacture internally.
We want that raw, jagged edge to cut through the noise of a saturated market. Then, the moment they sign the contract, we panic. We hand them a leather-bound binder or a 400-page Notion document titled “Brand Guidelines” and spend the next systematically sanding down every edge we paid for.
The Successful Processing of Souls
Last week, I googled a creator I had just met at a small coffee shop in East London. When we spoke, she was vibrating with strange, erratic energy, talking about the way lighting in Polish cinema could be applied to modern YouTube thumbnails. Her eyes were bright.
But when I found her current work for a major agency, the brightness was gone. The videos were polished, the colors were “on-brand” pastels, and the pacing followed the exact three-second-hook rule that every other agency uses. She had been successfully processed. She was a ghost in a very expensive suit.
The tragedy of the modern creative hire is that the “first ninety days” is rarely about integration and almost always about erasure. We tell the new hire that we want their “fresh perspective,” but our actions say something else entirely.
We show them the templates. We explain the “approved” font hierarchy. We walk them through the Slack channels where “edgy” ideas go to die under the weight of fifteen different middle-managers’ comments. By the time the creator is “up to speed,” they have learned that the quickest path to a paycheck is to stop being themselves and start being a slightly better version of the person who just left.
Individual Spark
Corporate Uniformity
The standardization safety net often becomes a noose that chokes out original perspective.
Standardization as a Safety Net
Standardization is a safety net that eventually becomes a noose. It is born from a legitimate fear: the fear of inconsistency. A company needs to know that if its lead designer gets hit by a bus, the brand won’t suddenly start using Comic Sans. But in the quest for “brand safety,” we create a vacuum of personality. We treat creativity like a manufacturing line, where every unit must be identical to the last. This works for spark plugs. It does not work for stories.
“He wasn’t writing anymore; he was just rearranging magnetic poetry on a corporate refrigerator. The wit was gone. The subversion had been laundered.”
– Observation on the laundered writer
I watched this happen to a writer friend who was hired by a massive tech firm for his “subversive wit.” On day one, he was given a list of “prohibited words.” On day ten, he was told his metaphors were “too specific.” By month three, he was writing sentences like “leveraging our core competencies to drive value-added solutions.”
The problem is that most onboarding processes are designed to eliminate risk, and creativity is, by its very definition, a risky endeavor. To create something new is to risk being misunderstood. To hire a creator is to invite that risk into your building.
The Comply-or-Die Mechanism
When you force them through a rigid onboarding, you are telling them that their primary job is not to create, but to comply. You are teaching them that “the way we do things here” is more important than “the reason you are here.”
This flattening effect is particularly visible in the world of digital content. Look at the thumbnails on your YouTube homepage. Notice how they all seem to use the same high-contrast outlines, the same exaggerated facial expressions, and the same neon text. This isn’t because this is the only way to get views; it’s because the “standardized process” has won.
When a new creator joins a team, they are told this is the “proven format.” They are trained out of their instinct to try something quiet, or something dark, or something genuinely artistic.
It tells us that if we don’t follow the “standard,” we will be punished with low reach and zero engagement. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem where creators are afraid to be original because they have no social proof, but they can’t get social proof because they aren’t allowed to be original.
Breaking out of this stall requires a different kind of leverage. Sometimes, the only way to protect a fresh instinct is to give it the “view count” it needs to be taken seriously by the internal gatekeepers. If a “weird” video gets views, the managers call it “genius.” If it doesn’t, they call it “off-brand.”
Survival Tactic
In this environment, many creators have to find ways to seed their own success just to keep the corporate vultures at bay. They look for ways to buy views on youtube or engineer artificial momentum simply to buy themselves the time to stay “weird.”
98.2k Views
It is a survival tactic. If the numbers are high enough, the “Standardization Committee” assumes the creator is following the rules, even if they are actually breaking every single one of them. It is a sad irony that in order to be yourself, you sometimes have to trick the system into thinking you’re already a success.
We forget that the most valuable things in an organization are the things that cannot be written down in a manual. You can document a workflow. You can document a color palette. You can document a naming convention for files.
Leaving Souls at the Front Desk
You cannot document the “vibe” that makes a piece of content go viral. You cannot document the specific, haunting quality of a voice that makes a listener stop scrolling and start feeling. Those are emergent properties of an individual’s soul. When you onboard a person by forcing them into a mold, you are essentially asking them to leave their soul at the front desk.
I remember a conversation with a subtitle timing specialist. Her job was technically “standardized.” There are rules for how many characters can fit on a screen and how long they should stay there. But she told me that the real art was in the “breath.”
She timed the subtitles not to the audio, but to the emotional beat of the actor’s eyes. A machine could do the timing, but it wouldn’t understand the silence. If she were “onboarded” by a typical tech company, they would tell her to follow the millisecond rule and ignore the eyes. The work would be “consistent,” and it would be dead.
Integration is a two-way street. It means the company changes a little bit to accommodate the new person, just as the new person changes to accommodate the company. It means looking at the new hire’s “weird” instincts and asking, “How can we make this our new standard?” instead of “How can we make this fit our old standard?”
If you find yourself in a position where you’ve just hired someone brilliant, try a different approach. Give them the passwords to the accounts, show them where the coffee is, and then leave them alone for . Don’t show them the “how-to” guides. Don’t give them the templates.
Let them break things. Let them produce something that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable. That discomfort is the sound of a new idea being born. If you kill it in the first month, you’ll never know what it could have become.
Most onboarding is just a slow-motion funeral for the person you thought you were hiring. We spend thousands of pounds on recruiters and headhunters to find “the one,” and then we spend the next making sure they are “just like everyone else.”
The Shroud of Sameness
We want the spark, but we are terrified of the fire. So we pour water on the wood before the match is even struck.
The next time you’re about to hand a new hire a “Style Guide,” consider the railway baboon. Jack didn’t read a manual. He didn’t have a mentor who told him how the levers “ought” to be pulled. He just listened for the whistle and reacted with his gut. He was consistent, yes, but his consistency came from a place of raw, unmediated connection to the task. He didn’t have to be “processed” to be perfect.
The template became a shroud for the very thumbnail that was meant to catch the light.
We are currently living through a period of extreme “sameness.” Our movies look the same, our apps look the same, and our marketing sounds the same. This isn’t because we lack talent. It’s because our systems for “integrating” talent have become too efficient at their job.
We are so good at training people that we are training the value right out of them. We have optimized for the average, and in doing so, we have made excellence impossible.
True growth doesn’t come from following the path that has already been paved. It comes from the person who wanders off into the weeds and finds a shorter way home. If your onboarding process doesn’t allow for wandering, then you aren’t hiring creators; you’re just hiring very expensive ghosts.
Stop the unlearning. Let the “weird” stay weird.
The rails will still be there tomorrow, but the spark might not.