I spent Friday evening and Saturday at goodfornothing. It was a creative hackathon where we worked on briefs for three great social enterprises organised by my friends at Pipeline. A mixture of ad agency types and geeks got together on their own dime met the clients and got on with it.
Rather as in open space, there was a very simple overall structure, so we self-organised. It was fun to watch the group dynamics as a participant. I think we collectively decided to let go of managing each other and mostly just went where our personal enthusiasm took us. Not a great of effort spent on peacock status displays.
The final presentations were full of ideas and energy. Each involved lots of people doing small pieces, with no-one pretending to be in charge. But it all made sense; it didn’t need to be more structured. A good example of messy coherence.
Which leaves me (again) wondering: is a lot of management a sort of OCD tidying up?
Quote of the day from Tom Farrand of Pipeline (roughly): these aren’t normal clients – they want to get things done. In fact, I think we’re all normal people, but our conventional working structures often stifle that.
And inthecompanyof wonders how this energy could be used to shake up conventional agency work.
