Here are some more notes from SXSW Interactive.
I attended a session called, “10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment.” Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path interviewed stage managers and conductors on how you keep a group creative and productive. I think both roles are very similar to what web producers and site managers do. We often have to work with prickly creative types, with specialized skills, who we need to be inspired and working in the same direction. Web sites, like orchestras or stage plays, are, by their very nature, collaborative environments.
Several web people I know actually work in the theater or film (like me) or music, as if they’re drawn to creative group activities even when they’re outside of the office. There’s a psychological lesson in there somewhere…
At the SXSW Interactive session, Bryan and Sarah (a former musician) introduced us to ten techniques used by creative management professionals to get great work from a wide range of employees.
1. Cross-train entire team – teaches empathy, possibility. In the avante-garde theater they studied, everyone got to write and act.
2. Rotate creative leadership – provides ownership.
3. Actively turn the corner – there will come a time when you must put the bad ideas away and start on production. The theater did this by taking a smoke break between the brainstormin session and the actual planning of the play.
4. Know your roles – stay in your lane.
5. Practice as a group. This is why it’s vital that orchestras practice together.
6. Make your mission explicit to the whole team.
7. Kill your darlings (the ideas that are good but don’t fit). Avenue Q, the Broadway musical, had lots of songs that didn’t serve the story. They were ditched.
8. Leadership is service.
9. Do projects around group’s ideas.
10. Remember your audience. Avenue Q was written in coffee shops, around the type of people who would be the audience for the musical.
Bonus Tip 11. Celebrate failure… with an afterparty!
