Friday, November 1, 2013

Team Alchemy: What Happens in the Spaces Between People



Rotman Management Magazine - Fall 2013

Great things often occur when four distinct types of people interact.
by Chelsea Vandiver

Several years ago we had an especially prolific creative director at Ziba,
the design consultancy where I serve as director. Her uncanny ability to
generate concepts that no one else could see made her extremely
valuable, and won us client after client through the sheer abundance
and frequency of her ideas.

She also had trouble completing projects. Those same clients
she bowled over with creativity and insight grew increasingly
frustrated by missed deadlines and blown budgets — not just
occasionally, but on nearly every single project under her control.
Around that time, a smart young intern at the studio was
promoted to full-time project manager, and paired on a new client
project with that brilliant-but-challenging creative director.
Almost immediately, things went differently. Together, they hit
deadlines, stayed within budget, and ended up with a solution
that delighted both the client and the project team. Ziba has
enjoyed a productive, creative relationship with that client ever
since, working with them on more than a dozen projects.

This was no fluke, either: every time these two paired up,
the work was spot on. Yet independently, this gifted CD struggled
to deliver. We soon realized that the crucial element wasn’t
the competence of either person, but the specific way the two
of them worked when they were together — something we call
Team Alchemy.

It’s a vague term, I’ll admit, but it describes an approach
that’s proven itself repeatedly and stood up under rigorous scrutiny.
Not long after we discovered the link between that manager
and creative director, Ziba’s head of IT performed a statistical
analysis on some of our recent projects, as part of his MBA studies.
Together, we compared dozens of projects from the previous
few years, scrutinizing their on-time performance, budget
adherence and rates of client return.

One thing we didn’t find was a correlation between specific
team members and project success: a great designer might hit it
out of the park on one project while wallowing in indecision on
another. What we did find were strong, recurring patterns of certain
combinations of people: neither Designer A, Director B nor
Manager C possessed the key to a winning project, but A+B would
always produce better results than A+C. In a field that loves to enthuse
about rockstar designers and maverick creatives, we were
surprised to realize that in many cases, the individual mattered
less than the team.

Individual skills and talent are crucial, of course, and this
realization doesn’t make that any less true. When we hire designers,
researchers, strategists, or anyone else at Ziba, we scrutinize
their portfolios and subject them to round after round of interviews
to ensure a high level of competence across the board. But
what we’ve realized since then is that the teams these talented
people work on require just as much scrutiny as the people themselves.
The pattern was so powerful and potentially valuable that
we started to codify it, and over the course of several years, a reliable,
repeatable system emerged that we now apply to a range of
project teams. It begins with four key roles that show up in any
creative group: Generators, Editors, Makers and Collaborators.

Rule #1: Generators need Editors.
The CD in the example above is a classic example of a Generator,
and the project manager who paired with her so effectively is one
of our finest Editors. Their relationship is pretty straightforward:
the Generator develops concepts and pushes her team to explore
further; the Editor identifies the most useful ones, offers feedback
and focuses effort.

Given how productive their relationship was, it might seem
strange that it took so long to establish. In our experience, Generators
don’t often seek out Editors, preferring the company of other
Generators. They thrive on the energy of constant creation and
would rather throw ideas back and forth all day than pick one and
move forward. Editors, for their part, are rarely drawn to highly
generative people, viewing their massive output as chaos in need
of order. It’s possible for good teams to assemble naturally, out of
mutual affinity, but in my experience, it’s rare. A steady, productive
tension is what more often produces great work.

Rule #2: Generators and Editors need Makers.
Real estate developer Gerding Edlen is known up and down
the West Coast of the U.S. as an innovator in sustainable urban
housing, and a client with whom we’ve collaborated repeatedly
to great effect. Their developments tend to attract defiantly
non-traditional buyers, who demand a unique sales experience
customized to the project and its specific story. Designing that
experience is how Ziba has helped several of Gerding’s projects
succeed — in one case, a high-rise in downtown Portland called
The Civic managed to sell out its entire stock of apartments in
the midst of the 2008 housing crash. That was later in our relationship,
though.

Our earliest projects with Gerding Edlen faced serious difficulties
delivering on concept. Asked to work on a collection of
luxury buildings on Portland’s South Waterfront, Ziba assembled
a team of Generators and Editors who rapidly converged on a
promising solution: a casual, interactive sales space that focused
visitors on the benefits of the neighbourhood rapidly growing
around it. The client loved it and asked us to proceed. We came
back with another presentation that delighted them even more,
and they asked us to proceed. Then came another presentation.
And another. Eventually we received a very direct question from
the client: “When can we open?” Despite everyone’s agreement
on the beauty of the solution, the project was nearly out of time
and money, and no one had built anything.

The problem was, the team on this project was perfectly
tuned to develop and refine the solution, but not to execute it:
Generators and Editors are fine if a presentation is the final goal
(as in some strategy projects), but their allegiance is to the idea,
not the implementation. What’s needed is a third creative role,
the Maker.

Makers are in love with the act of creation. Nothing brings
them professional satisfaction like seeing the abstract become
real. To someone in the Maker role, plans and blueprints are
magical things, because they form the starting point for a creative
process. In the sculptor’s studio, they wield the chisels; in
the electronics firm, they’re soldering boards. “Tell me what it
needs to be,” a Maker tells the rest of the team, “and I’ll make it
happen.” We assigned two new members to play Maker roles on
the team, and the project was completed in three weeks. A month
after that, the sales office for the South Waterfront’s flagship development
opened to glowing reviews and robust sales.

Rule #3: Large teams need Collaborators.
Li-Ning is often called ‘the Nike of China’, and the challenge
they brought Ziba was the most complex we’d faced to date.
Here was a Chinese company with more than 25 years of legacy,
in a country full of newly affluent consumers eager to embrace
homegrown brands, even while they looked outward for new
ideas and influences.

What Li-Ning lacked was a coherent design and retail strategy
on par with foreign competitors like Adidas and Nike. Defining
one was a massive undertaking, demanding a project team
that grew to involve nearly a third of Ziba’s entire studio—over
30 researchers, strategists and designers in all. In contrast, we’d
tackled even the most complex Gerding Edlen projects with
teams of four or five.

The creative director who led this mammoth team was an
outstanding Editor, with a team of highly-generative designers
and researchers, plus a highly competent production staff to fill
the Maker role. But the size of the team and the size of the project
led to problems in collaboration that earlier projects hadn’t encountered.
The research teams had come up with plenty of valuable
insights, the creative teams back in the U.S. had developed
brand and retail strategies that everyone agreed were right on
target, and the client was happy with our progress. But none of it
connected. The architects, fixture designers and graphic designers
we’d contracted in China still didn’t have a coherent package
to implement.

Enter a new creative director, with a dramatically different
style than the Editor she came in to support. A quiet, thoughtful
woman with a keen eye for connections, she preferred casual
small-group discussions to formal meetings, where she spent
most of her time listening and offering occasional gentle nudges:
you two should get together and compare notes; this insight reminds
me of what the Hong Kong team was doing last month; these signage
systems aren’t aligned yet, but they’re close—can you work on that?
She’s what we call a Collaborator, and her impact on the project
was rapid and dramatic. Within two weeks, teams that had been
spinning for months started shipping final deliverables.

Collaborators can be great team leaders, but they don’t have
to lead to be effective. What’s more important is that they be
genuinely fascinated by the capabilities and needs of the people
around them, and find it nearly impossible to ignore opportunities
for connection. Regardless of where they come from, Collaborators
can be a large team’s greatest asset. They’re rarely necessary
on small teams, though. Business magazines have written a
lot in recent years about the Startup Model: the idea that larger
firms should emulate smaller ones, move more quickly and with
less formality, and encourage experimentation and risk-taking.
The advice aimed at Fortune 500 executives seems to have taken
hold, as major corporations hold ‘startup days’, or attempt to create
internal incubators modeled on the startup image.

The intent is good, but its execution shows that most companies
don’t realize that startups can behave like startups because
they’re small. A young firm with 20 employees enjoys a commonality
of purpose that’s hard to maintain with greater age and size.
There’s a huge difference between a group of people who know
each other’s first names and a corporate structure that takes an
online directory to navigate. The task of sharing information and
insight is second nature in a small, focused group. In larger ones,
it demands a dedicated specialist. That’s where Collaborators are
at their best, instinctively building the connections that keep the
rest of the team working efficiently, so they can concentrate on
their own jobs.

Different Forms of Competence
What ultimately makes Team Alchemy such a useful concept is
that it recognizes that there are different ways to be competent.
Moreover, this presents a strength to be harnessed, rather than a
flaw to be corrected.

Forming effective teams, though, is more involved than just
finding a pair of people who collaborate well. Just as every project
requires a different mix of skills, every team size works best with
a different mix of roles. There are plenty of combinations that
work, and many more that don’t, but following are a few combinations
that we’ve repeatedly found to be effective:

·       A two-person team where one (but not both) of the
members acts as a Generator. Generators pair well with
Editors, as in the first example, but they can also flourish
in the company of Makers, who tend to provide feedback
through prototyping rather than a formal editing process.
In either case, the project gains much-needed focus, and
avoids the pitfall of constantly shifting goals that can
plague a two-Generator team.

·       A three-person team consisting of one Generator, one
Editor and one Maker. As long as roles and responsibilities
are well-defined, this can be incredibly productive.

·       A four-person team with one member in each role. This
is similar to the Generator-Editor-Maker combination,
but more fluid. With a Collaborator on hand, the other
three are able to work rapidly in parallel, without having
to pause as often to re-group.

As you might guess, the prominence of the different roles will
vary as a project progresses. Most design and business projects
can be broken down into three functionally distinct but overlapping
phases: Define, Design and Develop.

As a general rule, an Editor leads the Define phase, works
closely with a Generator in the Design phase, then steps back
to give primary responsibility to a Generator and Maker in the
Develop Phase. More complex projects can involve several Generators
and Makers, though rarely more than one Editor unless
they’re assigned thoroughly separate tasks — conflicting editorial
input can be worse than no Editor at all. The larger the team,
the more valuable a Collaborator becomes, to orchestrate tasks,
synthesize work, and ensure that the various Generators and
Makers are communicating enough to align their useful efforts
and avoid redundant ones.

No matter how a team is composed, if you want to get the
best alchemy, you have to embrace the possibility of team members
filling different roles at different times. A Collaborator, like
the CD who brought the Li-Ning project together, might act as
an Editor in the project’s early planning stages; her collaborative
tendency might not show up until the Design phase, when additional
Generators and Makers come on board.

Makers can also serve as effective Editors in the Define
stage. Since they’re the ones responsible for implementing what
gets designed, Makers bring a keen eye for practicality to early
discussions, helping to weed out unworkable concepts before
they attract too much effort. More generally, nearly anyone can
serve as a Generator, regardless of their other talents, provided
they’re given the right environment and direction. Effective
brainstorming is based on this capability, in fact, and it’s not uncommon
for CDs in our studio to recruit engineers, project managers
and writers as well as designers in the Define phase, asking
them all to act as Generators for an hour or two.

The key is to recognize that the Team Alchemy approach is
not a method of categorizing people, but roles. Like so much in
the creative world, the roles people take depend heavily on context.
Some of the finest Editors I’ve seen, for example, need three
or four prolific Generators around them to really get going, and
many Makers won’t start making unless they’re being fed clearly
articulated ideas by an Editor. It’s up to the conscientious team
manager to pay attention to these behaviours and the settings in
which they arise.

Skeptical readers might wonder if we’re simply using the idea
of a ‘bad team’ to excuse unqualified workers, and they’d have a
point. All of the examples and frameworks described herein are
based on an assumption of competency: that everyone is fundamentally
good at his or her job, and wants the project to succeed
no matter what the obstacles may be. But there has to be more. If
there weren’t, the U.S. Men’s Basketball ‘Dream Team’ would win
Gold at every Olympics (instead of settling for Bronze, as they did
in 2004) and Ishtar would’ve been one of the great films of the
1980s. Team Alchemy doesn’t replace individual skill or talent.
It doesn’t even replace personality or good communication skills.
But it does allow each of those qualities to reach its full potential.

In a simple world, all designers are Generators, all creative
directors are Editors, all project managers are Collaborators and
all engineers are Makers. The real world is considerably more
complex. The reality of design work, as in business, is that you
rarely have the right people for the project at hand. We’re told
that you go to war with the army you have, not the one you want,
which might be why modern militaries prefer flexible, modular
units over the monolithic armies of antiquity.

A similar strategy suggests that smart business leaders look
for diversity as well as competence when they seek out new talent,
and that they learn how that talent is affected by different
groupings and situations. This means avoiding certain team pairings
in favor of others, but it also means looking for the unexpected.
We regularly put employees in new situations to see how they
react: the challenge keeps them engaged, and often reveals aptitudes
that make the whole company more flexible. If you’ve hired
good people, they will astonish you with their range of capability.

In closing
We can be tempted to think of a project team as a kit of parts—the
sum of the abilities of its members; but experience shows that it’s
simply not true, regardless of the kind of work being done. Creative
insight is crucial to the success of nearly any business, and
it’s rarely the product of a single mind, no matter how brilliant.
No matter the project, good Team Alchemy expects you to
see every professional around you as a whole person, not just a
title, resume or portfolio. It depends on your willingness to accept
that individual competence depends on task, team and resources.
It demands that you separate the person from the role.
All of this is complicated, and a lot more work than simply
assigning the people with the right titles to a project. But understanding
the alchemy of the team can make a small company infinitely
more nimble, and a large one more creative.

Chelsea Vandiver is Executive Managing Director of Creative
at Ziba Design, where she founded the Communication Design
and Brand Insight groups, and today leads multi-disciplinary
teams of product, interaction, service, retail and communication
designers. She has contributed to numerous award-winning
projects at the Portland-based consultancy for 15 years.




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