No more bad projects
Please and thank you.
Each December at A Hundred Monkeys, we look back at our year’s worth of projects. We try to remember what the hell just happened, and then create a dedicated time and space to reflect on it all, good and bad. Every year is unique, bringing its own roster of clients and plenty of different problems to solve. It’s not an exaggeration to say we learn from each and every client and project.
We’re lucky. We get to do projects with people we genuinely enjoy working with and the process we undergo together is collaborative, informative, generative…and other morphologically derived¹ qualities. This isn’t a happy accident, it’s hard won.
Deciding which projects to take on as a studio is one of the most important things we do as a team. Our work is intrinsically relational. First, we need to have solid relationships as a team within A Hundred Monkeys. Then, we need to develop the relationships we have with our clients. Like all practices, the better you get the more becomes possible.
But there are other layers of relating that are also at play in a client project. Our work requires understanding the relationship dynamics of their team. How do they communicate and make decisions together? And how do they involve outsiders like us in a way that sets everyone up for success (or not)?
Here’s what we’ve seen work well:
- A dedicated project lead on the client side. This person is our ally and sees their role as getting us what we need to be successful.
- A clear understanding of who will be making the final decision. Ideally, the decision maker(s) will directly participate in our project. If that’s not possible, then we need a dedicated team with the wherewithal and agency to work behind the scenes with said decision maker(s) and move projects forward.
- Real talk. The best clients understand that the work we’re doing together is challenging. Not only are they open to being challenged, they are excited to be.
The outcome of our work is ultimately in service of strengthening relationships, too—between organizations and their customers, partners, donors, new hires, peers, policy makers, influencers, and/or the rest of humankind. It’s relationships all the way down.
In a way, our work as professional namers is inextricable from the process of establishing and nurturing the kind of collaboration that’s conducive to getting creative work across the finish line.
The best relationships are built on mutual admiration and respect, the ability to communicate well with one other, and a sense of shared purpose. It should come as no surprise that this is the kind of relationship we’re looking for in our work. Over the years it’s become non-negotiable.
I started writing this as a way to think through the difference between a challenging project and a just plain bad one. I ended up waxing on about relationships. Because as long as you can work well together, even the most difficult projects are achievable. And what’s more, what makes a project “bad” to our studio might be different than what makes it “bad” to yours. We all need different things in our relationships. With the right chemistry, any project becomes simply a series of problems to solve creatively. Which is why we’re here, and why we got into this work in the first place.
¹“Morphological derivation is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix (e.g. ‘-ive’).”
