Blog Posts About: commoncraft

What is the point where many projects get off track? We think it's when decision making becomes a burden.  Indecision, lack of ownership and unclear reasoning often means stasis and frustration.  Over the past year, and likely through traveling together, Sachi and I have evolved a system that helps us be productive without wasting time.  It's a system of ownership - of being personally accountable for the small decisions that contribute to the overall goal.
 
Early in the process, we talk a lot about the goal - the big ideas, the vision.  Then, we can see how our independent roles will contribute. For example,  Sachi (among other things) is our editor. From cutting the audio to stop-action to color correction, she owns it.  Once she starts the process, all the decisions are hers.  She can always ask for my thoughts, but my input is not required.  By the time I see something, it's mostly done and we can iterate from a big picture perspective.

The same is true for me with the art work. I own the process of storyboarding and creating the artwork. I conceive the scenes and how they all fit together. Only after the bulk of the creative work is done do we come back together to make decisions before production.  This way, I have a chance to own the vision of the video - a vision that may not be clear until all the pieces come together. I don't bother Sachi with the details - I own them.

We expect the same from our clients.  The best projects, the projects that stay on schedule and produce the best outcomes are the ones where the project leader on the client side owns the project. They have the ability to make decisions and be accountable for their outcomes.

The lesson here?  Ownership = efficiency, for us at least.  Ownership mean understanding the goal and having the confidence to make independent decisions that contribute to it.  It means not wasting time discussing every step along the way. It means getting work done quickly so that it can be evaluated as a whole. It means being accountable and ready to stand up for why we made the decisions we did.

Of course, this isn't to say we don't collaborate.  When I wrote about being a video making team, iteration was a big theme. When we do come together to review, and especially to shoot a video, everything is subject to change.  What we own are the chunks that make up the whole.

Looking back at my education, I wasn't a great student.  I made decent grades and went to a good university and grad school, but school was never my thing.  Looking back, I can pin-point a couple of points at which I lost faith.

It was sixth grade and I was in a math class with Mrs. Paine (it's true - Paine).  The subject was least common denominators.  I didn't get it.  My worksheets came back with red marks, but I didn't really understand what I was supposed to be doing.  The class moved on while I was caught up in trying to memorize the details. Instead, what I needed was an understanding of the reasoning - not how, but why. It was at this point that I fell behind and began to dread math, as I do today.

Another example was college and grad school - I went to business school and took a few accounting classes.  Again, the light bulb just didn't go on. I passed, but not because I fully understood the reasoning of Accounting as I do now.  I remember the first day of my first accounting class.  The instructor went directly into T accounts, debits and credits, revenue and expenses.  I felt blind-sided.  My first reaction was to try to memorize all the debits vs. credits instead of looking at it from a broad perspective of how money flows. I had no context to build an understanding.

Looking back, context is what I have always missed in education.  If someone could put a new idea in the context of the real world or show me how it enables other things, I would get it.  It's just my learning style - I need the big picture before the details make any sense.  By diving directly into T accounts and least common denominators, I got caught up in trying to memorize instead of understand.  What I needed to know was why - why this works the way it does - and why it matters to me.

So, I think the connection to our style of videos is obvious.  They are based on all the things that don't work for me in education. When I see explanations on the Web, the remind me of school - they assume too much.  They sometimes dive directly into how something works and spend little time on context. 

For me, it's a big problem - a problem that I believe others feel too.  When it comes time for me to try to explain something,  it just feels right to look at the world from the perspective that would have made sense to me that first day of accounting class - build meaning with context first, then explore details.

It's been almost a year since we published our first paperworks video - RSS in Plain English in April of 2007.  Since that time, we've been watching every comment, every blog post and every email.  We are lucky to have fans like you that have shared our videos and helped us learn so much.

It's through watching these conversations that we've been able to see new ways for Common Craft to have a bigger impact in the next year.  We'll be more specific soon, but for now, I'd like to share some big picture perspectives on how we see you and ourselves. These perspectives will drive the changes you'll see in 2008.

Who You Are:

You're smart and ahead of the curve.  You want to help your co-workers, peers and students understand and get involved in the trends that are shaping business and society.  You need better tools for turning on those light bulbs. 

You aren't always the end user of Common Craft videos, instead you use them to inform and educate people around you.  They help you increase your influence and create change by introducing others to new trends and ideas.

Who Common Craft Is:

We want to help you be more influential. We believe that for change to happen, a growing number of people have to be aware and educated about the trends that are shaping our world.  Our goal is to provide you tools that will increase your ability to have a positive influence on others.  This is why our current focus is Social Media - it's a trend that is having an impact and creating change - yet remains misunderstood by many.

How?

Our goal for the next year is to grow our library of videos we produce via The Common Craft Show. By growing this library, we can offer more resources on more subjects to more influencers and educators.  Of course, this requires more of our time - time that is often spent working on custom videos for organizations. We'll continue to do custom video work, but we also have plans that will allow us to spend more time on videos for you.

In preparation for this renewed focus, we hope you'll think about the subjects that would be most helpful for you.  Please contact us or leave comments with your ideas - we are always listening.

Since starting Common Craft, I've been thinking about using trademarks and copyrights as a way to protect my intellectual property. To this end, I've found some good resources that folks in my position may find interesting:

10 Big Myths about copyright explained

Trademark FAQs (.gov)

I wasn't aware of this...

Q: When can I use the trademark symbols TM, SM and ®?

 

A: Any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO. However, you may use the federal registration symbol "®" only after the USPTO actually registers a mark, and not while an application is pending. Also, you may use the registration symbol with the mark only on or in connection with the goods and/or services listed in the federal trademark registration.