Herding cats, that’s sometimes how it feels when you deal with a bunch of creative people and try to make them work on one project together. But it’s really not so much about herding than getting a vision and have everybody to contribute. Trying to get people aligned with just money incentives triggered by KPIs (key performance indicators) will probably make you end with a bunch of lazy people doing politics.
In my environment, post production of movies and video, which means arranging together and potentially retouching the pictures and sound, the incentive is usually about being part of the “project”, see your name in the film credits at the end, share stories of suffering with your peers. As Jean-Luc Godard once said : “you don’t finish a movie, you give It up”.
In this business we are really passionate about what we are doing, and that is what drives this business. I know some people who gave up a lot of their life, family and health, to be part of it, it’s much more than a job. Those people, being operators and technicians, are not trained for industrial organizations : their background is much more from art school or self training than science or business. I remember when I was providing training on colour management, a subject full of maths and physics, how much some of it felt like punishment to some people who skipped those courses at school.
The product we build is also very difficult to characterize and measure: when a screw can be 24 mm and have a 0.1% tolerance, how do you measure the quality of a movie? Yes, client happiness can be a measurement, but how much more effort and money should you put to get the client 15% happier? So KPIs are not easy to set because the quality of the product is hard to describe. We use more and more QC tools that ensure that technical specifications are met, like sound loudness or image sharpness, but I don’t expect soon (though machine learning could prove me wrong) anything to describe the artistic part of it, like the efficiency of a sound mix, a movie cut or a visual effect shot. That will be something left to some specialists to judge, based on everything they have done before and their knowledge of the psychology of the client. On the latter, that might end up in showing version 3 renamed as version 18 because you know this one was good and the others were just there for the client rep to justify his presence.
So what does it tell us for other business?
-every business is now creative: as right or wrong as it may sound now, but everything that can be automated will be and associated value will become marginal, so growth will be triggered by innovation and creativity. That means accepting and engaging toward the unknown, while traditional business is much more about reducing the unknown.
-agility: as business moves faster than ever the client requirements are changing all the time, so trying to specify in details a product to be released at a time the market may have flipped itself is senseless.
-KPIs: efficiency is not about speed, it’s about speed to get the right product. You may be very fast at redoing the same thing 22 times, but if only the 23rd is validated, it means you’re not listening to your client (and you’ve probably generated a lot of frustration meanwhile).
-information system: how do you carry, for all the people contributing a project, a lot of information that are almost purely subjective so everyone knows what the project is about? it means a lot of cultural elements and references should be shared so people talk from the same ground. Culture is a central point to manage all the implicit communication that needs to happen on a project.
-recruitment : you may have people great technically, if they don’t share enough cultural base they will be difficult to manage as you will spend more time writing specifications for them than doing anything. This is especially true with younger generations who really want to understand the company culture and project before committing, because they generally get more emotionally involved than previous generations. And that’s a good thing.
-management: how do you manage creativity? With time tracking and spreadsheets ? The time tracking should be mostly used to make sure people don’t overload and spreadsheets as an exercise to find the values that measure success, budget tracking being one, but not the only one.
So it’s probably just stating the obvious, but I see so many failing on that, including myself when I just try to be “rational”, that I thought I would share. Hope you enjoyed it 🙂
Cedric
Originally published on Linkedin, September 2017