What I learned about teams
Since we started The Pop Up Agency nine months ago, I have frequently been asked the same questions: How do you keep the group together and how do you manage to face such a big challenge without freaking out?
We are currently in the tenth week of our fifteen-week tour around the world. After five weeks in Europe and one month in Asia, we’ve landed in Los Angeles.
In addition to the many great moments we’ve experienced, we’ve also been in some tense and uncertain situations. Spending so much time together has been trying, but it has also been a key to our success.
Throughout the course of The Pop Up Agency experiment, I have learned some invaluable lessons about working with a team.
Have a goal
It doesn’t matter what kind of people you have on your team; everyone needs a goal. All projects exist for a reason — a vision or some kind of general idea that everyone wants to see realized. In our case, our purpose was clear: We wanted to test our 48-hour working method on a fifteen-week tour across fifteen different countries.
We also knew exactly why we wanted to do this: To build a network, challenge ourselves, and try out something that we considered unique. We’ve had that in mind the whole way through, and it has helped us to move forward in the same direction.
In the past, I’ve encountered the conflicts that arise when there are too many opposing opinions held within one team. Of course, within The Pop Up Agency, we don’t always agree or think similarly but sharing the same goals always makes the path clearer.
Follow a goal, not a strategy
Whenever you’re facing a big challenge, you can expect surprises. You will have to change your mind several times, find different ways to cope, and start again from the beginning. Why, then, would you plan a single strategy and cling to it no matter what?
In October, six months before we would start the tour, we outlined our strategy for getting clients who would bring us to the countries we wanted to visit. We decided to focus on startups, targeting Asia, first, and then the United States.
After a month of trying, we found that, although startups love us, most of them didn’t have enough money to shell out for our services. Plus, it was taking too much time to arrange everything in Asia. If we had stuck to our initial plan, we wouldn’t have gotten anything done.
Instead, we admitted that we’d hit a wall and decided to try some alternative methods; we contacted other kinds of companies and re-planned the tour. We kept our goal in mind and adapted our initial concepts to new, more productive strategies. In the end, we realized we were better off focusing mostly on advertising agencies and starting in Europe.
Try things
Sometimes, you can spend too much time talking about what to do and how to do it. We all agree that talking is important, but we also know that, in excess, it can kill a team. A group needs action or else its members can get frustrated and lose momentum.
Constantly trying new things increases the group’s excitement, inspires further experimenting, and keeps everyone active.
Think about what you try
At The Pop Up Agency, we reflect a lot on what we do. It gives us insight into what worked and what didn’t.
It’s essential that we discuss our process and the outcome of our actions, and that we continue to adapt our approach, depending on what we learn and what we want to achieve. This way, we can use both our failures and successes for future problem-solving and strategizing.
Learn how to live with the uncertain
Not having the whole tour planned from the start left us in some precarious situations. When we finally scored our first client in Asia, we flew to Singapore without a clue as to where we were going next. We were a thousand miles from home, without any savings; we didn’t know how we’d get home, had no network of friends to rely on in Asia or knowledge of the market there.
That didn’t stop us. We knew we’d figure everything out once we were there. And we did. In the end, when the project was complete, we were able to fly to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. It was all, mainly, due to the contacts we made in Singapore.
These moments can be stressful, but we’ve learned how to take risks and stay cool; we have faith in the team’s decisions and resources.
Have fun
This sounds like the most trite thing ever. But it’s true.
We try to maintain a balance between hard work and fun. Going out together, acting like tourists, joking around … it’s all part of our everyday culture, and it helped us stay together without going insane.
