Trust and love the process
From the design of well-known magazine’s covers, to the victory of National Basketball Championship, the reason why it is fundamental to trust the process and be blindly trustful towards your team-mates.
I do really love basketball. That’s a fact. I played it during high-school years and I truly believe basketball left a profound mark in the way I think and approach my life and work. Team-work, commitment towards a common goal, respect for the rules and teachings of the coach and the opponents. Definitely, Basketball and its amazing stories made of players, last, winning shots and glorious anecdotes helped to form my approach to life and work. Period.
In my professional routine I see similarities with the learnings I acquired years ago as a basketball player.
As every professional working in consultancy, design, PR and marketing should know, our work is uppermost a team-work. No matter how clever, professional and knowledgeable you are or you believe you are, results only come throughout a process of team-work: A series of passes where different people, we can call them players, put their efforts. Sometimes one player does a mistake and sometimes she makes a very good move. For each mistake, someone within the team has to sweat two times more to recover someone else’s drop. But that’s the spirit of any team who wants to succeed.
Why I am saying this? Because I have just read the latest issue of one of my favourite newsletters, The Economist:
“An exclusive look at how we decide on our cover.”
The latest cover, “Bunged up,” deals with a very interesting topic related to new green deal hurdles. In the long article, the editorial staff deeps-dive into the many obstacles governments and political institutions will find, and in some cases already found, in the process of moving towards a cleaner and more sustainable future.
As depicted in the newsletter, the eye-catchy and standout covers of The Economist are the result of team effort and an on-going critical discourse between the members of the staff.
Here you can see the many steps that make the process work:
“One problem with the early versions of the wind turbine was that it looked too calm and serene — not the message of our leader, which is that the green-investment boom faces serious stresses and strains. Many turbines also suggested abundance, whereas we needed to convey scarcity. Making the landscape somewhat stormier certainly helped, as did cutting back to a single turbine. The result was clever and striking. But there were other worries: was the buffering symbol recognisable enough, and was the focus on wind power alone too narrow?”
“The bottle was a truer reflection of the theme of, literally, a great green bottleneck. What might be done to get it just right? Giving the bottle a knot in its neck seemed a twist too far.”
Some tests to the final version:
And at last, the right one:
“But other small tweaks made a big difference: tilting the bottle at an angle, enlarging it so that it looks more like one for hard-to-pour ketchup than wine, allowing some extra space inside it, removing the car. Making sure the turbines inside could be seen more clearly helped, too.”
For each of the above, the internal staff asked itself some questions about clarity of the message, imagery, titles and ratio between iconic elements and spaces.
This is what creativity process should look like: a working team, headed together towards a shared vision, towards a common goal.
In the end, it is quite similar to what happens on a basketball court during long-lasting tournaments. It is also exactly what happened now in Bologna where Virtus just won the championship, sweeping off Armani Milano’s team with 4 to 0. (Not bad, Saša!)
A note.
As a fierce supporter of the Fortitudo Bologna team, I cannot consider myself exactly “happy for this victory” but, in the end, for me it is quite satisfying that Bologna is, once again, The Basket City of Italy.
As it was around 20 years ago, or so.
Soundtrack: Alan Parson — Chicago Bull Introduction, 1997 NBA Finals
