Six Years Later: The Future of Creative is still Conscious.

It has been six years since The Conscious Creative was published.

I wrote the book from a period of ethical reckoning.

I was inside the industry. Creative director at a global agency. Major commercial clients. Some recent award wins. It sounded good, but I was struggling. There was a gap between the values tucked away on about pages and the work we actually did. I felt it in my gut that something wasn’t right.

There were the overt issues. The client whose sunscreen that burned people’s skin. The toxic makeup brand. The big box store whose factory collapsed on its workers. Then there were the more insidious things. The homogenous rooms of executives. The extractive selling techniques. The belonging problem for people who didn’t fit dominant culture. And of course, our raison d'être, inventing desire in audiences so people wanted more of what they didn’t need.

The problem was not isolated to one project or one agency or client. It was structural. It was embedded in how the work was made, success was measured, and how little space there was to question any of it once the wheels of the machine started churning out work.

The Conscious Creative came out of that tension. I needed to understand what responsibility looked like in a field designed to persuade. Was ethical work even possible under capitalism?

The premise of the book is uncomplicated. Achieving ethical creative work is an ongoing practice of incremental, positive change.

It’s six years later and we’ve seen massive technological and geopolitical change. I’d argue that the practice of ethics is more important than ever, however challenging this work can be.

Creative work never happens in perfect conditions. It happens within condensed timelines, reduced budgets, and systems that reward speed over care and reflection. It happens in organizations with competing priorities, and in relationships where values are not always aligned.

There is often a gap between what we know the world needs and what we are actually able to achieve. I believe that gap is where the work actually exists.

It is easy to agree with the principles of The Conscious Creative. We should interrogate power, question default narratives, and design with communities rather than for them. The challenge is applying those ideas when there is pressure to move fast, throw nuance in the trash, and resolve tension before it’s been properly understood.

This is where ethical creative practice becomes about confident, ongoing decision making.

There are real constraints to ethical practice. Financial pressure is one of them. The need to sustain the business, pay people fairly, and secure future work all influence what is possible at any given ethical decision point. Like my meditation teacher guiding us, “use it” to the chorus of Toronto traffic outside the window, the pressures and challenges are never separate from the work.

To me, the question has never been about what the most ethical outcome would be in theory. The question is what the most responsible choice is within the conditions that exist.

This requires good judgement.

It can mean advocating for more time or more care in a process that is already constrained. It can mean shifting language or representation in ways that are incremental rather than transformative. It can mean taking on work that is not fully aligned and finding ways to move it in a better direction from the inside. These choices are not always visible. They do not always result in work that feels resolved. But they are part of the practice.

May this be as relieving to you as it was to me: there is no such thing as perfectly ethical work.

So much of work in pursuit of improved futures happens in small moments and micro decisions. A line of copy that is rewritten because it reinforces an assumption that does not hold. A question raised about who is represented and who is missing. A decision to include a perspective that might otherwise have been overlooked. A pause in the process to reconsider something that feels misaligned.

Individually, these actions might appear minor. Over time, they accumulate. And en masse, we can make massive change.

For all of us, there will be projects where the work aligns with the values that guide it. And sometimes, compromises are made and the outcome is not as considered as it could have been. This tension is not something that can be fully resolved. But it is something we can recognize and learn from.

The industry is seeing forward movement, but progress is rarely linear.

There is more awareness about representation, accessibility, and imbalances of power. More clients are asking purposeful questions earlier in the process. There is increased attention to how stories are sourced and whose experiences are centred. These shifts aren’t consistent or even, but they are happening.

What remains true is that these positive shifts are usually the result of consistent effort over time rather than a single moment of transformative change. What feels true is that ethical creative work cannot be separated from the conditions in which it’s made. It requires attention to the work itself and the systems that shape it. Ethical practice is in our daily decisions, the questions we ask, and our willingness to trust ourselves when something feels off and to respond to that discomfort with care.