A Non-generalist moment: The importance of craft
The people at MAKE Magazine and OReilly love to quote Robert Heinlein’s line that “specialization is for insects.” Being a generalist is very important, even trendy, these days.
However, when IDEO and other companies talk about T-shaped people, there’s a tendency to focus on the thick, generalist bar at the top, while overlooking the specialty represented by the base. While this kind of pendulum swing is natural — one point of the observation was to get us out our waterfall specialty-oriented processes — it’s important not to lose sight of the importance of superbly practiced craft.
Lumiere and Company is a project where prominent directors and cinematographers were given models of the original Lumiere Bros. movie camera and 3 rolls of film. Participants were asked to shoot a film under the following conditions: 1) no editing, 2) no synchronized sound; 3) you have only 3 rolls to get it right. (Most directors did a straight shot of 52 seconds — the length of the roll — but a few turned the camera on and off to tell their stories.))
There are lots of really good ideas and approaches to this: David Lynch tells a small town murder story with cool light effects as transition, one cinematographer shoots water fountains to create a brilliant sepia animation. But my favorite is a very meta film by Francis Girod.
(extra space since a spoiler is below - so now’s a good time to watch it. sound helps)
The short summary: a man and woman approach each other, dance-like and seductive, with the famous Act I aria intro from Carmen (�?L’Amour est un oiseau rebelle�?). The woman swoons/faints/melts at the moment of embrace. The first take is clunky and the actors work out their moves. The second take works out some technical issues, shows improvement, and the third take is spot on.
I just love how meta it is — they had three rolls of film to shoot a scene of three takes, and the progression of the acting looks a bit like the progression of how actors learned to translate their skills from the stage to the big screen. Most important, though, it shows the importance of that last 20% of a craft. There aren’t many obvious differences between takes one and two and three, but the third take is electric. (And how cool is it that these actors could move through three different levels of quality within the one take?)
Creative shops always face the challenge of how much specialty talent they need. It’s not uncommon to see boutiques have the guy with the English accent or the woman who smokes do voice-overs, in the interest of speed or cost. Little to no harm done, it gets you to a good, solid, 80%, B-B+, performance. But at some points, with certain clients or at certain times in a company’s path, you need As and A+s.
Both parts of the T are important . . . and learning how to manage and leverage specialties and generalist approaches is a new management challenge for us all.