The philosophy that built TAXI — and why it might be the most important tool in your creative arsenal.
The Uncomfortable Truth About "Good Ideas"
Doubt is a powerful creative asset.
It's the creative philosophy Paul Lavoie built TAXI around. He believed that unless you doubt convention, you'll be looking at problems the same old way. With Doubt, new thinking emerges.
Doubt makes some people uncomfortable. But it's the perfect state of mind to start solving problems.
Your first idea is rarely your best; it is simply the most obvious one. It is safe, recognizable, and designed to avoid discomfort, allowing it to meander through the approval process with minimal resistance. Consequently, it is released into the world much like most advertising: predictable and invisible.
This is where doubt becomes essential. Unless you challenge convention, you will continue to view problems through the same tired lens. Doubt is the catalyst for unconventional thinking, enabling you to create work that captures attention and provides your clients with a genuine competitive edge.
Paul Lavoie built TAXI into one of Canada's most celebrated agencies with doubt as the cornerstone of his philosophy. The agency's mantra remains: Doubt the conventional. Create the exceptional.
The TAXI Mantra: Doubt the Conventional. Create the Exceptional.
Doubt has a clear purpose and is used most often at the beginning of problem solving. It is the first creative act. Questioning everything. It is your creative partner, forcing you not just to think but to always think differently.
That's also why Paul shunned the idea of a creative department at TAXI. He preferred building a creative company — where everyone had permission to think differently in the pursuit of excellence in their respective tasks. Doubt wasn't reserved for the people with "Creative" in their title. It belonged to everyone.
Doubt is the foundation of critical thinking. Critical thinking is the driving force of every innovation we know. And by the way, Doubt doesn't care if you are using AI or a pencil. It only cares about giving you an advantage in any medium you use.
What Doubt Actually Means
Let's be precise about this, because the word "doubt" carries a lot of baggage.
Doubt does carry a lot of negative baggage. Uncertainty. Fear. Paralysis leading to confusion or indecision, making it difficult to take action or make choices.
Paul likes the word doubt precisely because it's a vulnerable one. It suggests feelings of uncertainty, hesitation, a lack of conviction. And that, it turns out, is a perfect state of mind to start solving problems. It makes you ask questions and challenge conventional assumptions.
Doubt is the little voice in your head that says "What if?" — and pushes you toward solutions that are different. Fresh. Engaging. Exceptional.
Key Insight: Doubt is skepticism but never for its own sake. It's skepticism in service of a better, more exceptional creative outcome.
Doubt Means Questioning the Question
Doubt is the operative word in the mantra. When problem-solving, to doubt is to question — even to question the question that was given to you.
Einstein said that if he had 20 days to solve a problem, he would spend the first 19 figuring out what the true question actually was.
Unless you doubt convention, you'll keep looking at problems the same way. And the results will show it.
The conventional answer is almost always the first answer. When a brief lands on your desk, your brain immediately starts pattern-matching. It pulls from everything you've seen before — every ad in that category, every campaign for that type of product, every creative solution that's been rewarded in the past. Within minutes, you have a direction. It feels intuitive. It might even feel inspired.
But what you're actually experiencing is the gravitational pull of convention. Your brain isn't generating something new — it's retrieving something familiar and presenting it as original.
This isn't a character flaw. It's how cognition works. The brain is an efficiency machine. It finds the shortest path between problem and solution, and that path almost always runs through familiar territory.
Great creative work begins by recognizing this pull — and resisting it.
Pro Tip: Next time you're evaluating a creative concept, ask yourself honestly: "Could I have predicted this idea before I saw the brief?" If the answer is yes, you're probably looking at a conventional answer. That's not a reason to kill it — but it is a reason to keep pushing.
Doubt as a Creative Accelerant
There's a common misconception that doubt slows creative work down. That stopping to question your ideas is a luxury you can't afford when you're up against a deadline.
The reality is the opposite.
Doubt, applied constructively, is a creative accelerant. Here's why: most of the time wasted in creative development isn't spent generating ideas — it's spent refining and producing the wrong ideas. Teams spend weeks executing a direction that was fundamentally flawed from the start, only to discover the problem in client review or, worse, in market.
Doubt front-loads the hard questions. It creates a filter at the beginning of the process, not the end. When you discipline yourself to question the obvious early, you eliminate dead ends before you've invested in them. You spend less time going backward.
There's also a deeper creative benefit. When you push past the first answer, you enter less familiar territory. The ideas you find there are harder to reach — which means they're harder for your competitors to reach too. The work that comes from that place tends to be more original, more memorable, and more effective.
The doubt isn't blocking you. It's pointing you toward the work that actually matters.
Pro Tip: Build a "doubt checkpoint" into your creative process — a specific moment, before any idea moves into production, where the team asks three questions: Is this the obvious answer? What assumption are we making that we haven't tested? What would we do if this direction was off the table? You don't need long answers. You just need to ask the questions.
Lavoie's Doubt Exercises — For You and Your New Creative Partner
These are prompts you can use with AI, with a creative partner, or on your own. Feed them into the problem and see where doubt can take you.
1. Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.
What is deemed sacred in the category — and fuck with it. Identify the untouchable assumptions and suspend them. What opens up when you do?
2. Question the assumptions you have about the problem.
What if the opposite were true? Flip your core premise and follow it somewhere.
3. Create a shit show.
Reverse-think the problem. What steps would you take to guarantee failure? Work through it seriously — you may find a nugget along the way.
4. Relate the problem to something completely unrelated.
Draw parallels between your brief and a different domain entirely. Unexpected connections spark unexpected ideas.
5. Doubt the conventional rules of success.
Embrace failure as data. Analyze what went wrong — it provides the most valuable insights for what to do next.
Put It to Work: A Quick Doubt Drill
Pick a brief you're working on right now — or a recent one you remember well. Run it through these three questions. Write your answers down.
- What is the most obvious, expected answer to this brief? Describe it in one sentence.
- What assumption is baked into that answer that you've never questioned? Name it explicitly.
- What would you do if that assumption turned out to be wrong? Follow it for two minutes — don't edit yourself.
You're not trying to solve the brief right now. You're training the habit of pausing before you accept the first answer. Do this enough times and it becomes automatic.
Key Insight: The goal of this drill isn't to throw out your first idea. It's to make sure your first idea has earned its place — by surviving the doubt.
How It Became a Competitive Advantage
What made TAXI remarkable wasn't just that Paul Lavoie applied doubt to his own work. It's that he built it into the agency's culture — so that every person in the building was practicing it, on every brief, every day.
That's a fundamentally different kind of competitive advantage.
Most agencies compete on talent, relationships, or reputation. Those things matter. But they're also relatively easy to replicate. A culture of disciplined critical thinking is much harder to copy. It has to be modeled from the top. It has to be rewarded consistently, even when it's uncomfortable. It has to survive the pressure of deadlines and demanding clients and the very human desire to just ship something and move on.
When you get it right, the output speaks for itself. Work that has been genuinely questioned — that has survived doubt and come out stronger — tends to be work that stands out. Not because it's trying to be different, but because it is different. It came from a place that most work never reaches.
You've done the work. You've doubted the conventional. You've pushed past the first idea. Now you have something new — and you start sharing it.
Here's Paul's advice for what comes next: make 'No' your bitch.
'No' is a silent alarm. If your idea isn't meeting any resistance, start to worry. That's your first hint it's docile and predictable. But when 'No' is sounding off like a five-alarm fire — that's your cue that you're onto something great and worthwhile.
Make 'No' part of the creative process and put it to work.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
We're living through a moment of profound disruption in creative work. AI tools can now produce copy, concepts, and visuals in seconds. The ability to generate output quickly is no longer a differentiator — it's a commodity.
What AI cannot do is apply genuine critical judgment to its own output. It can produce the conventional answer at extraordinary speed. It cannot reliably question whether the conventional answer is good enough.
That's the space where human creative thinking becomes more valuable, not less. Doubt doesn't care if you're using a pencil or AI — it gives you the advantage regardless of the tool. The ability to look at a piece of work and ask is this actually the best we can do? is a skill that will only appreciate in value as production becomes cheaper and faster.
Doubt isn't a relic of a pre-AI creative world. It's the skill that defines what human creative professionals bring to the table in an AI-augmented one.
Key Insight: In a world where anyone can produce content quickly, the competitive advantage belongs to those who can judge content rigorously. Doubt is the foundation of that judgment. It's not about slowing down — it's about knowing when fast is good enough and when it isn't.
The Foundation of Everything That Follows
This lesson is the first in the course for a reason. Everything else — how to interrogate a brief, how to challenge a client's assumptions, how to build a creative culture, how to think about originality — builds on this foundation.
Doubt is the lens through which Paul Lavoie approached every problem at TAXI. It's the reason the agency produced work that surprised people, work that lasted, work that became part of the culture rather than fading into the background noise of advertising.
You don't need to co-found an agency to apply this principle. You need to develop the habit of pausing before you accept the first answer — and asking, with genuine curiosity rather than cynicism, whether something better is possible.
Most of the time, it is.
We wrote a book on Doubt. This course is where you put it to work.
