Market7

On Monday at SxSW I watched Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson from Adaptive Path discuss the 10 tips for managing in a creative environment. This post focuses only on two tips. Don’t worry, At the end of this, I will list the other eight tips for those of you who absolutely MUST look under the bandage.

What I love about the adaptive path research was how they took a cross disciplinary slice. They spent time studying diverse, creative groups including restaurants, theater troupes, and professional writers among others.

Tip #1: Actively turn the corner

This diagram is of the creative process:

The first half of creating anything involves a divergence of ideas. You start with a single idea and then everyone starts throwing in different ideas that diverge from the original. No idea is eliminated at this stage and often experiments and mini-models are created. Then you turn the corner. At some explicitly defined point, you stop taking in new ideas and start converging towards a single point by eliminating what is unnecessary. This reduces scope creep, release slippage and the dreaded moving target. Eliminated ideas aren’t trashed, simply put into a “future creation/release” bucket.

Tip #2: Kill your darlings

Eliminate the ideas you LOVE that don’t get you closer to the goal first. Don’t eliminate the low hanging fruit or easy choices first. Choose instead to go after eliminating the tough choices from the beginning. By biting the bullet and eliminating the difficult choices first, the low-hanging fruit (those ideas to which you are not attached) becomes easy.

The eight other tips:
3. Cross-train the entire team
4. Rotate leadership
5. Know your roles
6. Practice, practice practice
7. Make the mission explicit to the entire team
8. Leadership is a service
9. Generate the creative projects around the group’s interests
10. Remember the audience
BONUS: Celebrate Failure (after all, it’s part of the creative process)

An interesting idea come from the “Cooking up accessible video for the web” session at SxSW. The speaker and organizer is ‘Utilikilt’-wearing Pat Ramsey, an accessibility consultant and web designer based in Austin,Texas. Despite Pat’s attire and my desperate hope that a strong, exposing breeze didn’t flow through SxSW ballroom E, he was knowledgeable and engaging.

Pat Ramsay and his Utilikilt

His discussion focused on how to make web video accessible to the hearing impaired. This has implications for M7 in two ways. The most obvious way is to enable the user to turn off the sound and show a close-captioned text feed over the video.

A less obvious but more interesting impact is the ability to show the annotative player comments directly over the video. This would allow a user to watch/listen to the video while reading the comments without having to visit the site (the entire encapsulation could be embedded into email).

This method discussed was using the MAGpie feeware from the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). MAGpie allows a person to create an XML file that can be incorporated into a SWF flash skin (Adobe is currently integrating into Flash 9) that displays the MAGpie captured text as a distinct layer in Section 508 compliant format.

The capture via MAGpie is a bit buggy on Intel Macs but plays nicely with all other hardware/software platforms.

…and for the record, I was a little envious of his ‘freedom of movement’. Do not be surprised if you soon see me in a Utilikilt.