Creative Process

Everyone in their place, and a place for everyone…

So one of the things we’re struggling with right now in the organization I lead is role and responsibility.

We’ve discovered that we’re expecting people to be who they aren’t. What a great way to cause stress and dissonance, huh?

Are you letting your artists be artists, your strategists be strategists, your execution people be execution people? What does your creative workflow look like? Do the artists have the information they need to MAKE, or are they constantly in “feel out my boundaries” mode?

A river with banks runs deep. A river without banks dries on the plain. Boundaries are critical to effective organizations.

Reality is that people will have to fill more than one role. However, we can make choiceful decisions about what we are requiring of people in terms of their time. A few of us on the team have been struggling with how to allocate time. Time is the key determinant of productivity - where we spend our time determines how productive we will be as an organization. If we can get a good handle on who needs to be doing what, when and how well, then productivity will soar.

Be vicious about meetings. Slash and burn. Make people FIGHT to keep them. Then rebuild them being very cautious about who is invited to what. Make sure that artists are not sitting in a meeting when they could be making. Make sure that the right people are engaged in strategy early enough to get buy-in so that direction is not shifting too far down the pipeline.

This is a dissonance eliminator.

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