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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