Maintain Calm Urgency
Creative organizations operate in a permanent tension between exploration and execution. On one side, creativity requires space: room to experiment, to test, to discard ideas, and to refine craft. On the other, delivery requires momentum: deadlines must be met, capital must be deployed responsibly, and market opportunities are time-bound. Effective leadership reconciles these forces through what can best be described as calm urgency:
A disciplined commitment to timely decision-making and goal attainment, sustained without panic or emotional volatility.
Why Urgency Matters
Creative professionals are trained to iterate. Designers refine mechanics, Engineers refactor systems, Artists polish assets, and Writers revise narrative arcs. This iterative mindset is a strength—but without structure, it can easily lead to delay and, in extreme cases, failure.
If a team is told that money is no object and “the game will ship when it’s ready,” they will not become lazy. Game developers are driven by passion and pride in their work. Instead, they will spend excessive time debating ideas, iterating endlessly on features and content, and seeking to perfect every element of the experience.
In the moment, this feels responsible - even virtuous.
But two years can pass with the team is still in exploration mode. Tens of millions of dollars may be spent, and at best there is a strong prototype of a core experience that has yet to mature into a production-ready build. Then the directive arrives: ship in 18 months.
At that point, the team is forced into full production without having established pipelines, tools, workflows, or production discipline. Pre-production has effectively been skipped, friction increases, quality suffers, and stress rises as crunch begins.
Iteration is essential to creativity, but iteration alone is not progress. Progress occurs when, at the conclusion of an iteration cycle, someone with authority says: “It’s good enough. Move on.”
In the example above, the team lacked urgency and explored indefinitely. Until the need for urgency arrived suddenly and violently. In game development, urgency must be present from the beginning. A sustained sense of urgency shortens feedback loops, accelerates learning, increases predictability, and builds trust with stakeholders. However, urgency must be cultivated carefully.
The Cost of Panic
Panic is often mistaken for urgency, they are not the same. Panic is a force that is destructive to creativity because it narrows thinking, reduces divergent ideation, and suppresses experimentation. Teams under sustained anxiety default to safer, more conservative solutions. This is counterproductive in creative industries where differentiation and innovation are core to success. It manifests in recognizable ways:
Escalating emotional tone.
Reactionary decision-making.
Abrupt shifts in priorities.
Visible stress from leadership.
Moreover, panic erodes psychological safety. Team members become less likely to voice dissenting ideas or identify emerging risks, communication shifts from collaborative to defensive. While urgency drives progress. panic degrades performance and quality.
Acheiving Calm Urgency
Calm urgency is the deliberate maintenance of forward progress, communicated and modeled with composure. It is achieved by establishing time-bound goals on a near horizon (think milestones, deliverables, releases) and driving execution to fulfill the spirit of those goals within the allotted time.
While this sounds straightforward, many teams struggle. They either fail to plan effectively, fail to drive execution consistently, or both.
A deeper discussion of planning and execution discipline warrants its own post. What matters here is that calm urgency does not emerge organically. It requires alignment and reinforcement from every leader on a project. It is a collective leadership responsibility.
Emotional Regulation & Pacing
Teams take behavioral cues from leadership. When leaders remain composed under pressure, urgency is interpreted as focus rather than threat. Calm urgency requires leaders to:
Communicate deadlines without dramatization.
Address setbacks with solutions rather than frustration (and without too many meetings).
Maintain consistency in tone and expectations.
This preserves the psychological safety required to foster a creative environment. However, Creative performance cannot operate indefinitely at peak intensity. Calm urgency recognizes the need for a predictable cadence: periods of concentrated effort followed by recovery and reflection. Without this rhythm, urgency degrades into chronic stress, and creative output declines.
Sustainable urgency cycles support long-term excellence.
In Conclusion
Creative work demands both imagination and discipline. Calm urgency ensures that progress is continuous without compromising the cognitive space creativity requires.
It allows teams to move decisively, deliver predictably, and maintain the composure necessary to build something exceptional.
Let’s go make a great game!