When to turn off auto-pilot
Every creative process has its limitations, you just need to find them.
In Run Studio Run I talk a lot about process, and for good reason. Process is the best way to get support from your team, grow their responsibilities, and operate an efficient studio. While anyone who works with me will tell you that I’m a huge proponent of process, there are definitely situations where I’ve learned you need to take the controls off auto-pilot and use some good judgment to move a project forward. Let’s take a look at a few situations at A Hundred Monkeys where we’ve decided that our established process wasn’t the best way forward.
1. That same email
Because our naming process is dialed in, we send a lot of very similar emails when we reach project milestones — setting up interviews, sharing project objectives, scheduling presentations. On first glance, this looks like a great opportunity for standardization and process. Why write the same email hundreds of times when you can write it perfectly, once, and ship it to everyone? The biggest reason is that every communication has context. Maybe you just had a phone call and learned your client is about to get married. Maybe you heard that your client’s leadership team is sensitive to trademark concerns. Email is a great opportunity to show you’re listening and you can’t demonstrate that if you’re using a form email. At our offsite in December we decided to do away with form emails in favor of short checklists that have everything we’re looking to cover in a given communication. Once you’ve been at it for a few years you can take the training wheels off.
2. Big client teams
At A Hundred Monkeys we strongly believe that good creative decisions require strong leadership. Group decision making leads to lowest common denominator thinking which we call the Ice Cream Principle — if you send 10 people to get ice cream and tell them they have to agree on a flavor, it will be chocolate or vanilla every time. So while we’re insistent on small creative teams we also know that big companies are often organized such that excluding people can cause more harm than good. When these situations arise, we need to listen carefully and work with our main point of contact to figure out the best way forward. Sometimes this means using a questionnaire to get input from a broader team, or bringing board members into the process once there’s buy-in from the project team. This is really about managing personalities and making people feel included without compromising the work. If people feel good about how you’re communicating with them, they will be more likely to trust your team and your process.
3. Big time URLs
At A Hundred Monkeys our default stance is “great name first, good URL second.” We set it up this way for a lot of reasons:
- Finding names via URL search is a painstakingly slow and non-creative process.
- The “magic” toolbar means people get a lot of help searching for the site they’re looking for.
- URLs can change if a better one becomes available.
- Negotiating URLs is a total crap shoot where you can part with many thousands of dollars.
I could go on for paragraphs about this nonsense. With that said, sometimes we have big companies knocking on our door with the lawyers, financial resources, and desire to nail down the URL for their chosen name. If they understand the risks, drawbacks, timing, and costs, who are we to say no?
The big caveat with these workarounds is that you need to first establish clear a clear that your team understands and believes in. If every project requires a deviation, you don’t really have a process, you have some rough guidelines. New situations will challenge your process and present you with opportunities to stick or twist. This is where the learning happens. Do you build more evidence for why your process is the way it is, or do you find a nuance that requires specific attention? You won’t always guess right but if you’re paying any attention, your average will improve over time.
