the Varoom Varoom lounge

"Ed Catmull, president of Pixar (a company that knows a thing or two about building long-term value through creativity), describes the fallacy of an individual creative genius with a singular idea.
The complexity of product development involves so many ideas that what is required is an ideas-from-anywhere approach, a large multi-disciplinary group, behaving creatively, marshalled around a vision, working together as a team to solve a large number of problems.
Constant effort to avoid error is counter-productive, meaning it’s better to fix problems than to solve them, and the creative leader’s role is to facilitate the group, to mix things up, but keep the vision clear: “When we say we are director led…the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say they are not following."

Pixar

I agree. Good creative facilitation is key to driving decent collaboration between specialists and input from across the board, whilst helps avoid the ‘death by committee’ trap. Also, having a basic idea development process to guide the group helps too. It allows specialists and generalists each to play their role along the pipeline, strengthening the output versus diluting it.

Ann