Last week I went to a meetup about strategy and content in New York. The theme was 'Show and Tell' and each attendee was supposed to bring a piece they had worked on to discuss the thought behind its content and design.
Only four of us braved the surprise sub-zero November weather to turn up to a meeting room at EMC's office and we were probably all a little disappointed to begin with. But soon we realised that with so few of us there we didn't have to restrict ourselves to three to four minute time limit. Just as well. The things we brought with us demanded more attention and investigation.
A content strategist brought her hybrid strategy/publication schedule template, designed to teach her large accounting firms marketing team that there was more responsibility to creating material than just releasing white papers into the wild.
A self-starting web-designer shared his vanity project to produce online documentaries to capture all sides of a story.
A strategy designer shared an intranet created for one of the world's largest banks to help employees get all the information they needed about their own employment (payslip records, accrued holiday leave, promotion and training opportunities), and how it was being used by the bank to improve employee retention.
I shared a recent Shareholder Review we created for one of our clients to discuss the narrative concept and how the content was able to exist in different formats online and in print.
We left amazed at the work we were all doing and I realised something really important: as an industry we don't share enough.
Sure, there are some who share. There are those who stand up at conferences and talk about what they've learnt. We see them all the time and too often it's the same faces over and over again.
Unfortunately, those of us at the coal-face rarely talk about or show off the work we're doing unless we're pitching to new clients.
That's not enough.
What I saw that night is that there are people who, like us, are trying to solve difficult problems every day. When we work in isolation these seem like really unusual or even unique problems. If we shared these problems more often we might find that we’re not alone. We might even find someone else’s problem is congruent with ours. Their solutions might have value for our projects.
We can learn from the experiences of other people even when (and perhaps especially when) we work in different fields. Some challenges are universal.
Designers need to learn the value of talking to one another about our work and why it excites us. We should also share our disappointments to show that it's unreasonable to expect every project to be 100% success.
The luminaries who publish books and tour the talking circuit do some important work, but if they're the only people we listen to we are going to end up with a homogenised set of solutions. But evolution's strength is in variety.
Let’s resolve to regularly share our experiences and talk to each other about the problems we face in creating our work. It takes a bit of guts and it can be a daunting task, but we will never improve if the only thing we share is exasperation at tight or mercurial deadlines. The power we have to improve our work is in sharing our problems, methods and results.
This post was originally published in the Floate Design Partners blog
This is great Josh. What do you think we can do as a firm to make this concrete?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, Ross. It takes organising and encouraging. I really enjoyed the small group and I would suggest that anybody who organises some kind of sharing get-together doesn’t limit the size but breaks attendees up into random smaller groups.
Without anything officially organised, I can suggest speaking to people at any conferences you visit and trying the Merlin Mann trick of asking “What’s exciting you right now?”
That’s absolutely my go-to conversation-starter at the moment. I have to tell you it works a treat.