Here’s something that happens in almost every team, eventually: shared jokes and humor.
It’s great when there’s a shared reference, an in-joke, a moment where the room cracks up and the energy lifts and suddenly the idea feels sharp: edgy in exactly the right way, just provocative enough to get attention, clever enough to reward people who get it.
The problem is that the room is not the audience.
How bubbles form
Creative teams develop shared culture fast. It’s one of the things that makes them work well; common language, shorthand, a collective sense of what’s good and what isn’t. But that same closeness creates a perceptual filter that’s very hard to notice from the inside.
The longer a team works together without outside input, the more their sense of “how this will land” drifts away from how it will actually land. Ideas get pressure-tested against each other, not against the world. The question shifts, imperceptibly, from “will our audience get this?” to “did we get this?”
And once that shift happens, a team can produce something that genuinely feels bold and clever and fun in the room, and reads as tone-deaf, offensive, or baffling the moment it hits anyone outside it.
The funny thing about “edgy”
Edgy humour is particularly vulnerable to this because edge is entirely relative to who’s in the room.
What reads as a sharp, knowing wink inside a team can read as cruelty, carelessness, or contempt to anyone who doesn’t share that team’s context. The irony that felt obvious internally becomes invisible externally, and what’s left is just the surface reading, which may be the exact opposite of what was intended.
This is especially true when the subject matter touches on things that are genuinely painful to some people. The team isn’t feeling that pain. They’re feeling the cleverness of the concept. Those are very different emotional registers, and the gap between them is where disasters happen.
The fix isn’t to stop being creative
None of this is an argument for making everything safe and bland. Edge, wit, provocation, and humour are genuinely valuable in creative work. The goal shouldn’t be to sand them off.
The goal is to make sure that when you think something is landing a particular way, you have some actual evidence from outside the room that it isn’t landing in an unintentional way.
That means building in moments of genuine outside perspective, not as a box to tick, but as a real question: does this read the way we think it reads?
It, at its core, means having people in the review process who aren’t already in on the joke, who bring different cultural contexts, who are empowered to say “actually, I read this differently.” Feedback is information.
The best creative work tends to be the kind that can survive contact with its own audience. The bubble, at its worst, produces work that only survives contact with the people who made it.
Getting outside the bubble isn’t a creative concession or making everything bland. It’s what keeps the work from becoming a 1.4 million dollar lesson.