Experience can be valuable, but it can also become a trap if all it does is remind you how things used to be done.

I’ve spent more than 30 years working where business, creativity and culture meet, as a creative director, agency owner, academic leader and professor.

My years at OCAD were an important counterweight to decades spent in the advertising business. I spent years surrounded by artists, designers, filmmakers and successive generations of young creative people, all bringing different influences and ways of seeing the world.

It kept me learning and deepened my understanding of design as a way of thinking, not simply a way of making things. It also kept me close to what was changing.

I learned to look beyond what someone is asking for. What is the problem really? What matters and what doesn’t? Has the first answer been accepted a little too quickly?

I can usually see what’s missing.

Sometimes the thinking is too narrow. Sometimes something technically works but lacks style, taste or a real sense of design. And sometimes the most useful perspective comes from somewhere unexpected. A Vogue layout can influence a cookbook. An idea from one world can unlock something in another.

That comes down to judgment: knowing what matters, what doesn’t, and when something needs another look.

I’m not interested in making more work simply because we can.

These days, the projects and clients that interest me most are the ones willing to look again. To question the problem, challenge an answer that may have come too easily and be open to a perspective from somewhere unexpected.

What keeps me curious is looking at something familiar from a different angle and seeing a connection that wasn’t obvious before.

Sometimes the answer is strategy, sometimes creative, sometimes pushing an idea further.

And sometimes the right answer is not to do it at all.