Another post on the size of a design team and its effect on creativity. In this post on his blog Subtraction, Khoi Vinh, Design Director for NYTimes.com speaks largely from personal experience and makes several excellent points. I’ll summarize by mashing his words:
— Design doesn’t scale well. This craft rests on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish, maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout. Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical - it almost always has to scale. The smaller the scale, however, the more efficient the practice of design —
Plenty to think about here. So how can we keep our staff/departments lean and agile enough to provide the best possible work for our clients? You could pay the slackers to quit…
Signal vs. Noise had a very interesting post last month on the size of groups, giving a number of examples of how things simply break down once the size of a group grows beyond ten or twelve people.
At the heart of the post is an interesting essay by George Walford, which comments on a book, The Corporation Man, by Antony Jay and published in 1975.
Quoting the essay, “A committee works best with about ten members; if it grows much beyond that size the extra people do not take a fully active part. Nearly all team games use a group of about ten on each side. Juries have 12 members… In an army, organization often decides life and death, and under this pressure armies, too, adopt a basic unit of about ten… in fact every long-standing successful army, has built up its larger formations from squads or sections of about this size.”
In this concept, called a “ten-group”, the group is “small enough for the contribution of each member to make a noticeable contribution”.
“This (ten-) group is bound together by a common objective, and that the bond of trust and loyalty thus formed can become an extremely powerful uniting force; that the group needs to decide on (or at least take part in deciding on) its own objective, and to work out for itself how that objective shall be achieved.”
“In order to function it needs mutual dependence, a common objective and a single criterion of success for them all; as the hunting band fed or went hungry together so members of the modern ten-group must receive praise, blame and material rewards collectively for the unit to function at its best.”
There are numerous applications of this; committee size, group size, meeting size, company size, team size… Any others? Leave a comment!
Urgency is Poisonous
17 April 2008
Wow. Another thought-provoking post over at Signal vs. Noise. And quite a bit of discussion as well. The essence of it is this - most urgency is self-inflicted, negatively impacting both morale and the “product”. The comments are also very insightful. 37Signals certainly challenges the notion that putting in tons of hours is the path to success.
This ties in neatly with a previous post from last June, entitled (Too Much) Time Pressure Affects Creativity.
Ground Zero Joins Ranks of Stakeholders With Equity in Pinky Vodka
19 February 2008
I love this story! I’ve long held the opinion that the agency/client relationship should be a long-term commitment based on trust, not unlike a marriage. Staking your livelihood on how well you help a client be successful is bold, as well as allowing an agency to own a piece of your company, and rewarding its work based on performance. Story on Adweek. A number of other groundbreaking examples of agencies owning their ideas (aka IP, aka Intellectual Property) are detailed.
In-House Training is Pixar’s Secret Weapon
17 May 2007
I’ve had this bookmarked for quite some time and it’s a story I return to again and again. This NYT article, which came out ahead of a book by the same authors, chronicles Pixar’s unprecedented success. It’s a shame that it seems to have been published to ride the coattails of the big news story that Disney was to acquire Pixar; because it detracts from the main point. Pixar’s success is built upon a creative, even nurturing environment, collaboration, and long-term relationships. And at the center of it all - Pixar University - where everyone, “whether an animator, technician, production assistant, accountant, marketer or security guard is encouraged to devote up to four hours a week, every week, to his or her education”. It’s no wonder Pixar employees talk of working at Pixar for the next twenty-five years. Every creative business should aspire to this!