Adaptive Path Blog

Once, I only had ONE thing to do…not the onslaught I face in a typical day, but a single, solitary thing to wrap my brain around for an entire week.

I was attending a one-week video art residency at Arts Electronic. I had a cozy place to sleep, a private workspace with equipment, and someone nearby for help when needed. Because all of my basic needs were taken care of, I was able to surmount an unfathomable number of technical tasks in a short period of time. The result was draft one of a documentary. Prior to that week, I had never opened an editing program.

This experience of intense creative productivity is the basis for my project management style today. As an artist myself, I understand firsthand the importance of developing a nurturing environment in which to create. Keeping this in mind, when I start a new project with a team, I do a few simple things to enable the same singular focus and heightened productivity that I experienced at the residency:

Keep it simple
Part of my job is to take care of the team’s basic needs, so they can focus on creating. Practitioners don’t need to be thinking about meetings, finances, client relations, or buying supplies and tools. If they are, the creative process isn’t getting that attention and the work suffers. At Adaptive Path, we also limit practitioners to one project at a time so that their focus is not split in multiple directions.

Make the physical workspace inspirational
The team needs to feel good enough in their physical workspace to spend hours there brainstorming and making. Grey cubicles and blank walls kill creativity. At our company, each team has a dedicated room for their project. I make sure those rooms are filled with the tools needed to create. The walls are then quickly covered with drawings, doodles and illustrations.

Take care of the team
The director of the Arts Electronic residency, Annie Langan, was like my guardian angel. She cared immensely about my experience and took care of my needs before I was even aware of them. My goal as a project manager is to be that guardian angel. I pay close attention to the health, mental wellbeing, and dynamic within my team. Sometimes practitioners get so deeply entrenched in their work, they need to be reminded to take care of themselves. To produce dynamic projects, their brains, bodies and spirits need to be nourished, not exhausted. When team members feel cared about, they also become more deeply invested in the success of the project.

There are, of course, many other aspects like budgeting, scheduling, and client relations that make project managers successful. But when project managers also develop an environment that encourages focused creativity within their team, they set the foundation for exceptional ideas. At the core of projects is the work itself and, most importantly, the people that create it; foster those two things and you have the recipe for a dynamic project worth talking about.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Adaptive Path, Adaptive Path Staff, Collaboration, Creativity, Deliverables, Management, Perspective, Project Management, Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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