Culture
After many years of leading studios and creative teams around the world, ranging in scale from boutique agencies and startups to global corporations, I have come to learn the differences between a disproportionately successful studio and a merely effective one. Put simply, any studio relies on hiring, integrating, and evolving the right capabilities to ensure optimum creative output. However, hiring the right people is not enough. In an ever-changing and highly-competitive business landscape, what allow companies to truly capitalise on their investment in talent is the culture that surrounds that talent. Creating the conditions for those people to coalesce and produce their very best work.
Be Optimistic
Creativity and optimism are inherently linked. Many of us enter the industry because we believe that everything can be made better through the application of design. If being creative is an optimistic act then, by extrapolation, an optimistic team will also be a more creative one. I always ensure that optimism—whether from ‘play’, laughter, or just blind conviction—is central to the culture of my teams. It makes us and our work better.
Embrace Failure
The concept of embracing failure is a well-trodden path and is implicitly understood within creative organisations. But it holds true. A team culture that not only recognises failure, but sees it as an innate and inevitable part of reaching success, will always deliver outstanding work. The teams and cultures I build lean into failure and use it to fuel creativity, rather than something to be feared.
Discuss Openly
Whilst the modern screen-based studio is an efficient and productive place, it often lacks something that is fundamental to generating the very best work: creative discourse. Pinning work to a wall, talking freely (and out in the open), asking the opinion of peers—all encourage group ownership, spontaneous conversation, happenstance connections, and essential iteration. Studios that leverage the experience and wisdom of the collective will make bigger, braver leaps towards creative success.
Encourage Competition
I believe that competition, handled in the correct way, can be a very healthy dimension of studio culture. Competition focuses attention, forces teams to analyse briefs more surgically, and generates more diversity in creative output as designers strive to create work that is more distinctive. Competition also ensures that a team knows its individual strengths, encourages more organic skills development, and is a universal motivator.
Everyone Leads
Designers want to be leaders as much as anyone else. In the corporate context, this often means line management and, in my experience, is rarely suited to designers. I believe the best studio cultures are ones that create organic opportunity for people to demonstrate their creative leadership, and to safely navigate the attendant responsibilities and accountabilities.
Explore The Fringe
Designers are capable of going to places and conceiving ideas that other won’t. They are willing to explore the limits of a subject or a brief and entertain the seemingly absurd ideas. Within my teams, I encourage this kind of stretch thinking and, most importantly, I invest in it—both the originators and the idea. Ideas, however crazy or ill-formed, are fragile and beautiful things that need tending and nurturing. With the right encouragement, those ideas have a chance to flourish and fulfil their promise.