10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment

Notes from the Ten Tips for Managing a Creative Environment presentation at SXSW

Thesis: Looking at how other groups that make creative work effectively can teach us lessons for managing design.

Hard deadlines
Repetition
Trying to do something different with the creative process

Organizations sampled

• Neo-Futurists: Every sunday they have the audience roll dice and that determines what the performance contains. They spend from Sunday to Tuesday writing, editing, and rehearsing. They effectively and effectively create new content on a schedule year-round.
• Aqua Restaurant: Michelin rated restaurant in San Francisco
• Orchestras: Large organizations with long tenure that stay creative
• The Job Factory: screenwriting collective
• Steppenwolf Theater: Select group of actors who have tremendous creative freedom.
• Avenue Q: Broadway musical starring profane puppets.
• Web Techniques/ New Architects: magazine from the first internet boom.

The tips

Cross-train the entire team

Give all members of the team experience with the tasks performed by other members of the team.

In the neo-futurists, they explicitly select for people who can play multiple roles. Each member is a director, actor, tech, critic, etc. All have empathy for the experiences of other members of the team. This helps everyone understand what is possible.

Rotate creative leadership

Leadership depends on where the ideas come from. This changes person-to-person, day-to-day, etc. Each neo-futurists is a writer/performer who has ownership of their performance. This gives a sense of security because everyone knows that they will have a sense of ownership. They also have a voluntary conductor role. This individual facilitates the rehearsal process.

Actively turning the corner

In any organization there is a period of divergence and a period of convergence. The divergent period is the creative period, where new spaces are being explored. This is typified by a sense of possibility and unlocking ways of thinking. The vocabulary for this phase is always different but it is always present.

All groups also moved from this phase to the phase of production where convergence results in editing and making it happen.

Problems occur when people are in one phase but think they are in another. This can go both directions with shutting down brainstorming in divergence and moving targets in convergence.

But how do you know where you actually are? The neo-futurists organize it by having a hard physical break. They rehearse in an open fashion, take a smoke break, and come back to converge.

Orchestras do this by moving from early rehearsals to later rehearsals.

Know your roles

Successful teams know what they are supposed to do, they turn into hierarchical systems when it is time to converge. They trust each-other to make the right decisions.

Restaurant kitchens are the perfect example of this. When a restaurant is in service, every movement is precise and succinct.

Avenue Q is an interesting example because the writer said that once they went into production his job was to shut up.

In orchestras, each section leader is responsible for coordinating with each-other and the director to determine bowing patterns and to communicate that back to each performer. Once they are in rehearsal it is about becoming a unit.

Practice, practice, practice

This is not abut just improving individual skills but also about improving team skills as a unit. You need to have confidence in the people around you.

The neo-futurists do this by repeating their process again and again. When a group of people work together every week for a long time the process is different than in an organization that is always brining in new people. You deal with this by looking for opportunities to practice to gradually bring in new people or to try new methods.

At Adaptive Path they experiment with the idea of a design sprint. You set up a repeated schedule where you decide what you'll work on, start working on it, go into a room with the client and keep sketching and evolving the ideas with the client in the room. The design thus evolves in different ways than when you all go separately and come up with solutions.

Make your mission explicit to the whole team

Avenue Q took over two years to create. This resulted in a massive amount of material. They made a choice to have the lead character find his life purpose. This gave them a rubric by which to evaluate content and helped the team make editing choices.

As designers communication is critical to the success or failure of a project. The tricky part is that in the course of a conversation people can talk past each-other. There is an enormous amount of work out there about this. Having an explicit actionable mission helps to avoid this problem.

The neo-futurists have a clear set of artistic values that define the organization and the individual within the organization. This set up rules sets the boundaries for their creativity.

Clear constraints are essential to effective creative production.

Killing your darlings

You need reliable systemic ways for getting results out that are respectful and responsive. This means saying no to something in a way that treats each individual with respect.

In design we talk about "phase 2" or in the "parking lot."

The neo-futurists do this by starting with 30 plays and then cut down to 12. They used to have longwinded debates about this but realized that this risked creating a hostile environment. They switched to a system where they read out titles and if someone says "keep" to a title it goes in. If nobody says anything it doesn't go in.

Leadership is a service

Leadership is successful when it is seen as the ultimate support position. Avenue Q hired a director to run the show. They started by having each person go through and list everything they did, all of their investment in the project. This made everyone feel listened to and helped later when cuts needed to be made.

In publishing this happens when an editor helps the author make their words better.

By viewing yourself not as a dictator but as a facilitator you can be more effective. The goal is to give people the space to do their best work.

A good conductor bring an orchestra together as a unit and connects to the music in a way that makes for a better performance. A leader looks for people who are unhappy and wants to understand why before making a decision.

See a book called The Art of Possibility.

Generate projects around the groups creative interests

At Steppenwolf the members can propose plays and choose to work together. The same is true at Adaptive Path. When they get new projects they think about what the project contains and connect it to people who are interested in that subject.

If you pick projects for money or to get a client on your portfolio you won't do as well as picking projects because they are what your team wants to do.

Remember your audience

Make sure that you do something that actually is great for your audience. Creative work is for other people and you should never forget that while you are working.

Restaurants segment the audience between regulars and new diners. Regulars must be kept happy because they are the bread and butter of the restaurant. The chef cares about making new people happy and being new and different. This can be adversarial or complimentary but good organization work to represent both well.

The neo-futurists work hard to create a complete audience experience. They open the bar early, create a situation where the audience can interact before the show, and bring people up or involve them in the performance. This keeps the idea that they are both in service of the audience and their own creative vision.

Find ways to celebrate failure

Failure is an essential byproduct of creative activity. It should be ok to fail, to really fail.

At the end of a project take a moment to review what went well. Adaptive Path calls these "after-parties." Look for learning opportunities and learn those lessons. Ask what worked, what didn't, and what you learned. This sets you up to find constructive ways to resolve these issues.

If you don't take risks you'll just do the same thing again and again.

Q&A

Q: What if you all know the disciplines but have to do them all on the same project?

A: That goes to the issue of knowing your role. When it gets bendy. If you do a little of everything it can get fuzzy. Role definition conversation should happen more often. As you get to know them better you don't need to talk as much but you need to know what's happening.

Q: How do people who aren't managers make this happen?

A: Use guerilla techniques. Find like minds at your level and projects that let you make progress. If you're in a creative environment that won't let you try new things you should quit.

Q: How changing leadership mid-project can work?

A: Each project should have someone who clearly leads but everyone can work on different projects in different capacities. Let people step up and take the lead on a phase or for a whole project. Once you have a shared vision you can trust people to lead. This needs a comfortable egoless leader but is very healthy for organizations. You have to have someone who is the decider because that role adds important clarity. This is a fine line and should be treated delicately.

Q: How do you keep a project from becoming stagnant?

A: Avoid always talking about the same unsolvable problems. Having someone strong in the room is important because their role is to say what isn't working and that something needs to change. Pass out stickies and have everyone write their answer to the question without talking and use that to step back, resort, and readdress the approach to the problem. The goal is to fundamentally change the dynamic of the conversation. Go to a second location, bring someone from the outside in, or anything that will work.

Also avoid projects that are defined by moving away and do projects that are about moving toward something.

Q: When you practice music the goal is to do it without thinking. In the design world the equivalent is doing something in photoshop or code automatically. But we don't typically make time to develop this mastery with throw-away tasks.

A: Prototyping is a way to do that. Try to force time into your day to practice. Try to figure out how to build that play time into projects. Sketch, iterate, prototype, whatever. Cyclical iterative approaches can make it easier to take a number of stabs at a problem.