Saying no to your best idea
I think all creative people slightly struggle with focus. One of the facets of a brain which is continually combining things, darting off, and thinking up harebrained schemes is that staying 'on task' takes genuine effort.
Combine this with the curse of recency bias and without a degree of discipline, you can end up chasing your tail and never getting anything done.
It is why I find Steve Jobs' definition of focus - as told by Jonny Ive - so intimidatingly brilliant.
"Focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea, you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you are focusing on something else."
It is an unbelievably high bar - and one which is extremely hard to live up to. Particularly when dealing with not just yourself but a team.
For as long as I have been doing it, one of the most important skills for anyone working in film for the enterprise world has been the ability to navigate teams of stakeholders in every process. There are power dynamics, different understandings of what is to be achieved, different departments who all want something subtly different.
Drawing those disparate factions together and trying to find a throughline can be the most satisfying and frustrating thing about the job.
The scent problem
As a seasoned director told me years ago - in every creative process everyone on the project wants to mark the project with their own scent (he used a slightly crasser term). In order to justify their presence, they have to have some input which makes it into the final output.
The camel as the horse designed by a committee beckons.
Or maybe not…
As it turns out, the most valuable outcome of implementing StoryPulse has been something we didn't necessarily envision at the start.
Radical alignment
Radical alignment is one of the most exciting developments we are seeing as a result of implementing our StoryPulse process. This methodology takes the latest understanding of behaviour science and narrative psychology to build projects from the ground up focused on the specific goal to be achieved.
Because the process starts with understanding the most resonant touchpoints to change the thought processes and actions of the audience, it creates an incredible alignment of everyone working on the project around what needs to be achieved.
The closest thing to an objective answer
One of the challenges in any creative process is that even the most experienced or gifted participants are only ever offering their subjective opinion.
I have very little involvement in the actual projects that we work on now (alas), but back when I was involved there were several times that I respectfully pushed back hard on clients who I believed were at risk of spoiling the central thesis of what made a piece of work work.
As a commissioned partner, of course we should be willing to change almost anything on a creative project. But as Scott Belsky, the founder of Behance, once told me:
"Never give on the central tenet of the work - or it is not what the client agreed to and bought."
It is our professional duty to the client to safeguard that.
Now, with our clear methodology, we have the closest thing you can get to an objective focus for the projects we deliver. It aligns everyone to the desired outcome and significantly speeds up and streamlines the process.
That is a fantastic thing, and not something we would have expected when we first started to implement it.
A defensible reason to say no
Every corporate filmmaker will have experienced delivering a strong cut to a film, and then having a senior stakeholder say something along the lines of: "wow, this is really good, we should add these other 12 messaging points that we need to get across in there."
Now we have a defensible, empirical reason that that might not be the best idea. That brings a level of focus to projects which even Steve Jobs would have approved of.
Have a great week,
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