2003: 48 Hours Or Else
PS: When Trying Harder Doesn't Work. But is a Step in the Right Direction.
“It takes time to think up a character, draw it, and color it in - I just can’t do it faster” my artist said with sincerity.
I shut my eyes.
There must be an answer.
The facts disagreed.
We had been falling behind week after week and this was a consistent output.
My company had been contracted by an ad agency and we were committed to the creation of dozens of character drawings and colored illustrations for an upcoming card game for kids learning the elements of the periodic table.
The agency was responsible for the card design, tabletop game mat, packaging and all that went with a new book being launched. We were the critical art they needed.
If we fell short, it would cascade down through several other non-negotiable deadlines.
This was going to hurt.
Happy Sunday Friends,
This is a PS. A personal story linked to GSD.
I tell these personal stories in hopes it encourages you to push through the challenges and get stuff done!
It was late 2003, the year Jack Black’s movie School of Rock hit the big screen and that Will Ferrell Christmas movie, Elf.
Even though we were a web development shop building an ecommerce platform, I also took on broad marketing and media projects. It made sense at the time, sort of.
I had people on the team capable of 2d and 3d modeling as well as character design. This is how we got the character design and illustration job through a local Ad Agency for their client Adventures of the Elements by Richard E James III.
The problem we had was simple.
The process of character concept to sketching, then illustrating, then coloring was a critical sequence we had to go through, and we were bottlenecking around the artist and his ability to get the work done fast enough.
Now the contract was at risk.
But also, our reputation was at risk.
Not to mention the bigger picture of a card game and book launch required many stakeholders to be coordinated for a Christmas season launch.
With all this, we had a lot of understanding of the vision and intention, but we had a critical means problem.
As you know, I talk about vision, intention, and means as the critical patter of success. VIM. Where there is no VIM, you have no GSD. Cant get stuff done with just two out of the three and we were demonstrating it perfectly.
As our deadline got closer, I did like many poor managers would do.
I squeezed my team harder.
I “helped” by being difficult and asking for more meetings. But instead of the meetings being productive, problem solving, and removing blockers, they were largely unfocused ego-management and posturing conversation about what would happen if we failed and how we could mitigate the situation.
Certainly, during this time, I was not the leader I am now.
But through a series of meetings I became invested in the shift from me to we.
The creative process became clear to me because I finally paid enough attention to the sequence of operations and how the inputs drove the outputs.
We didn’t have an inputs problem. We had an outputs problem. It was the means.
With only a few weeks left and way to much still to do, we made a few changes.
Instead of doing one character from sketch to final colored illustration, we batched all character concepts and sketches. This was a clear process that was easy to contain. That created efficiency.
The actual digital illustration and color part was an entirely different animal.
This is where all our time went and why we were so far behind.
With one week to deadline, we had gained some ground with this new process, but still very much behind.
At this point I was very clear on the entire process and the tools and software being used to do this work.
I had an idea.
It wasn’t great but it was something.
Are you familiar with a hackathon?
In software development a hackathon is where a number of people come together to do collaborative programming typically in a 24 to 48 hour period with the intent to have something to show at the end of the hackathon that works.
Well, we did the equivalent of a hackathon over a 48 hour period.
Me on one workstation and him on the other.
I did all the base coloring and outlining from his sketches. I used the color palettes he specified and I acted like a kid with a digital crayon and colored on screen for two very long days.
Like an assembly line, I took the final sketch and “white” canvas step and put all the base layer colors down. Like Bob Ross when he starts a painting and blocks in his landscape with some sky area, some grass area, and a water area.
With that done, the artist would put in the top layers and finalized look and feel.
It wasn’t the best we could do. But it moved us through the critical steps required - fast.
In this way, we closed the gap on all of our outstanding characters in that 48-hour window and that resulted in the finished artwork being sent to the Ad Agency on time.
There we so many things we could have done better.
Our internal view was that while the job was technically done, we felt like a failure and disappointment and frustration was high.
The good news is that the client absolutely loved the final product and was excited by all the characters and seeing his vision come to life. Because in his mind, all of us working together was his means in action on his intention and vision.
So, may I ask….
Is it time for you to consider some version of a hackathon on your project? Or maybe consider better understanding the sequence of operations and batching some part of the process?
Run a filter on vision, intention, and means to see the opportunity to improve.
#GSD.
I appreciate you,
Justin
This was a really compelling story. I think part of the why was the fact that I remember the periodic table in Chemistry, 10th grade, like it was yesterday. But also this particular concept with the heroes was ahead of its time if you consider how many hero movies have just launched the last 3 years (compared to early 2000).
But also the decision to "batch" part of the front end process immediately resonated. It affirmed an idea I had this past week about a new set of landing pages for a specific kind of template. The process to build the first page took way longer than it should have, based on all the reviews and approvals baked in. So, like you, I was considering batching part of the process we can control on the front end, and then send a couple dozen pages to get approvals, rather than having each one come through the same, arduous process.
Lastly, I love the visuals of the sketches and finished work.
Great job doing this the GSD way and walking through it!
Bryan R.