Five legendary clowns in a 30 year old theater company developing a retro style show. Nothing good could come of it.
I recommend always collaborating with badasses, but the hangup is badasses can easily bloat your budget and timeline.
Two things about badasses:
- They’re driven by challenge – that’s how they became what they are
- They’re burdened by cognitive biases – they don’t want to lose everything
The clowns are not going to make something good, I promise you. Even clowns – extremely creative, seemingly no ego, socially liberated, progressively motivated – are held back in this scenario.
It’s like getting in the ring with an eight year old kung fu master. You might be curious about what will happen. Unfortunately, if you lose, you get beat up by little a kid. If you win, you beat up a little kid.
The theater company thinks putting these five clowns together is going to make a magic cocktail, but they’re missing the ingredient that matters. “NEW”
Of course they’re seeking new
They’re trying to make a new show, but a little bit of new is dangerous. What they need is “NEW!” They need an opportunity to start from scratch.
These clowns work for three months and make stale nonsense. They are running out of time. The company is over budget.
They have some wrong idea about who they are and how they got there.
They don’t want to take a new approach to work because then, it will prove that they’ve done it wrong.
They don’t want to accept help from the outside because that will prove they’re not badasses.
They don’t want to throw away all the work they’ve done to make new work.
They want personal validation for who they are and not for the work they do.
Candor will be blocked to protect reputation.
Risk will be avoided.
They have ideas about how things work and those ideas might conflict with their collaborators, so they get more intrenched in fighting for their ideas.
This is not how to create.
The solution in this case was a NEW director
Bringing in a NEW collaborator isn’t always the solution, and it would not work without the theater company’s willingness to go all in. If it was just a fresh face, it wouldn’t matter. They needed someone who could start from scratch and really have the authority to burn it down.
This new director
- Respected the individuals, but didn’t respect their status. They were starting from scratch
- Threw away all that they had worked on for three months
- Trashed the idea of being retro. He figured whatever they did, they could dress up in old style clothes and that would serve the retro part.
- Brought in new technology that the clowns hadn’t worked with
- Repeatedly pointed out that this is a new show
- Gave them all characters they had never tried
- Observed how they worked and deliberately changed the entire process
- Removed all the self-imposed burden of the clowns by being a decisive leader
- Brought in non-badass clowns for rehearsal to show that the work matters more than the person and get the competitive juices going.
A NEW Show in a week
It took a week to get this new bit made. All the shittiness got peeled away and these creators were able to bring their value to the table. They didn’t have to prove anything, or conquer anything. All they had to do what create the way they loved, the way they did when they were new.
Don’t start at 100%
Start with the best in the world theater company, best in the world director, best in the world clowns, on an old problem: how to make a better show… You’ve got failure. Everyone’s coming in at 100% quality. In the best case scenario, they will stay 100%. Nothing to fight for, a lot to protect.
We, as entertainment pros, want to work with badasses. We also want to come in on time and on budget with an incredible thing. To do this, we have to establish a culture of NEW in personal projects and group work.
Our messaging is our mission and reiteration that everything is NEW when one part is new.
- A video game has never been made with a character like this. Anything goes.
- We are at the bleeding edge of novel writing for a new generation. We need innovation.
- This movie is being made based on the latest statistics from Hulu viewership and modern collected theory on storytelling. What are we going to do to change the game?
It’s not “How do we build on our past success?” Instead it’s “How do we make something out of nothing?” Badasses love starting from 0%